Thread: Planing redgum

I agree that proper sawing isn't a solve all. It should eliminate any twist and cupping issues, but wood that is prone to cracking still cracks whether it's twisting or cupping.

Also, I have literally only ever found one sawyer who will saw pith on center and dead quartered, and that's horizon in the US. And every time I talk to them, they mention the incredible amount of waste and loss that it creates.

Most logs that I've seen that are urban or pasture logs have enough twist in them that you couldn't even saw them like that, anyway. If you sawed them directly down their length, the diagonally growing rain would just cancel your efforts (even if it didn't, window sills with cracks would still be problematic).

We don't have redgum here, but it looks pretty when it's freshly sawn from what I can see on youtube.

Originally Posted by D.W.

.....We don't have redgum here, but it looks pretty when it's freshly sawn from what I can see on youtube.

But you do, DW. I quote from Wikipedia: It is one of the most widely planted eucalypts in the world (ca 5,000 km2 (1,900 sq mi) planted) (NAS, 1980a). Plantations occur in Argentina, Arizona, Brazil, Burkina Faso, California, Egypt, Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria, Pakistan, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Tanzania, Uruguay, and Zimbabwe.

Must be some somewhere where you can gt your hands on it. I recommend you get a bit and use it as the acid test for all your planes....
Cheers,

There's definitely quite a bit of it in California. I recently visited the GF's family in the SF Bay Area and was amazed by all of the Eucalypts there. Not sure how many were E. camaldulensis, but I'd guess a fair few.

I wonder how many are actually being milled into timber though. They're considered ornamental from what I could tell from talking to people. Odd, given that they're a devastating invasive...

I know I'll be keeping an eye out for some when I get to Washington though... I've only got enough on my boat to last me one or two small projects.

Cheers,
Luke

Very interesting thoughts here. I have a big slab of RRG in the garage, waiting for an upcoming project. Fortunately, there's not much joinery planned for the RRG, as it will just be used for the sides and top of a hall table. I'll be using something more tool-friendly for the drawers and runners.

Working with RRG for a table-top in the past, we gave up trying planing it smooth. The figured grain was just tearing out, so we ditched the beautifully sharp jointer plane and the scraper, and hit it with a Makita belt sander instead. Much better option.

Originally Posted by surfdabbler

Working with RRG for a table-top in the past, we gave up trying planing it smooth. The figured grain was just tearing out, so we ditched the beautifully sharp jointer plane and the scraper, and hit it with a Makita belt sander instead. Much better option.

I think that this, when compared with my experience, highlights that for all its workability shortcomings, it has yet ANOTHER one in that it's highly variable! Although my RRG was very reluctant to be still, I was able to plane/scrape it to a finish fairly easily when going with (and I use the term "with" loosely...) the grain.

Oh, the joys of working with wood...

Cheers,
Luke

Originally Posted by IanW

But you do, DW. I quote from Wikipedia: It is one of the most widely planted eucalypts in the world (ca 5,000 km2 (1,900 sq mi) planted) (NAS, 1980a). Plantations occur in Argentina, Arizona, Brazil, Burkina Faso, California, Egypt, Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria, Pakistan, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Tanzania, Uruguay, and Zimbabwe.

Must be some somewhere where you can gt your hands on it. I recommend you get a bit and use it as the acid test for all your planes....
Cheers,

I would've never known! We don't see much of anything that grows in the southwest, or even the west (cherry, maple, oak and pine are plentiful here and generally cheap because they are harvested and milled locally). I guess Australia might be similar, that stuff on one coast generally doesn't get trucked to the other.

If I can find a turning billet of it around here, I'll save it and make a plane out of it - then the two cocobolo planes that I've made will have something else to crack and check with.

Slightly off topic, What is the hardest wood in the US?

Originally Posted by justonething

Slightly off topic, What is the hardest wood in the US?

Of the things that grow here, probably leadwood (3700 hardness), and there are other ironwoods and some true ebonies, but I'm not aware of any real market for them. You see them once in a while turning up in classifieds as chunks of wood on a pallet.

Hickory/Pecan is the hardest wood that is widely distributed and used commercially. 1900 janka, but does not have good properties for hand tool woodworking, otherwise (and it's ugly).

Osage and locust may be harder, and both are easy to get a hold of, but they're ugly stringy woods, and locust often has deposits in it that cause chainsaws to to spark, and it's really undesirable when it's completely dry and hard. (a quick lookup of osage orange says it's 2700 janka and locust is 1700 - there's something about locust once it's dry that makes it seem a lot worse than that, though - we use it for fence posts and that's about it. Even the bugs and microbes don't like it - it'll last 100 years in the ground as a fence post).

We have too many nice-to-work woods to mess around with those. If it's really really hard, we turn it or burn it.

Originally Posted by D.W.

....If I can find a turning billet of it around here, I'll save it and make a plane out of it - then the two cocobolo planes that I've made will have something else to crack and check with.

Dunno that I'd use RG for plane-making, DW, unless you just want the challenge. It's not as bad as its cousin E. tereticornis in this regard, but it can be a 'gummy' wood, so not likely to slip & slide across your work the way Beech does. However (he quickly adds!) I haven't tried it in that role, and it may well polish with use and be fine. I don't want to be around to hear the bad language when you are chopping out the throat & buttresses, though. I've also read that for reasons not fully understood, the Eucalypts that grow in Californy grow particularly twisted and the sawn wood splits to blazes, so you might struggle to find a billet big enough for anything more than a thumb plane.

Speaking of planes made from hard wood - if you really want to test yourself, try building one from some Bull Oak (Allocasaurina leuhmanii), which is reputedly the hardest wood on earth, though some people have doubts about that. It's possibly just the hardest that has made it into the books. Nevertheless, it's definitely a challenge for any edge tool to manage. I did make a plane from it, just for fun, but I wimped out & used the lamination method. Also, I was 'reviewing' the LV small plane kit, so I needed to get the job done in a reasonably short time: Kit plane.jpg

You can see why it gets called 'oak' even though it's not even distantly related to the true oaks. It's a hefty little brute, and the contact surface is nicely 'slippery'. However, I don't like the 'Norris' style adjuster because of the way it tends to slew the blade if the pivot point for the lateral adjustment is even slightly off centre. For reasons I haven't yet firmly established, but suspect it's to do with where the lever cap thumbscrew bears on the blade assembly, that effect is particularly evident in this plane....

Cheers,

Originally Posted by IanW

Dunno that I'd use RG for plane-making, DW, unless you just want the challenge. It's not as bad as its cousin E. tereticornis in this regard, but it can be a 'gummy' wood, so not likely to slip & slide across your work the way Beech does. However (he quickly adds!) I haven't tried it in that role, and it may well polish with use and be fine. I don't want to be around to hear the bad language when you are chopping out the throat & buttresses, though. I've also read that for reasons not fully understood, the Eucalypts that grow in Californy grow particularly twisted and the sawn wood splits to blazes, so you might struggle to find a billet big enough for anything more than a thumb plane.

Speaking of planes made from hard wood - if you really want to test yourself, try building one from some Bull Oak (Allocasaurina leuhmanii), which is reputedly the hardest wood on earth, though some people have doubts about that. It's possibly just the hardest that has made it into the books. Nevertheless, it's definitely a challenge for any edge tool to manage. I did make a plane from it, just for fun, but I wimped out & used the lamination method. Also, I was 'reviewing' the LV small plane kit, so I needed to get the job done in a reasonably short time: Kit plane.jpg

You can see why it gets called 'oak' even though it's not even distantly related to the true oaks. It's a hefty little brute, and the contact surface is nicely 'slippery'. However, I don't like the 'Norris' style adjuster because of the way it tends to slew the blade if the pivot point for the lateral adjustment is even slightly off centre. For reasons I haven't yet firmly established, but suspect it's to do with where the lever cap thumbscrew bears on the blade assembly, that effect is particularly evident in this plane....

Cheers,

So, I see that stuff is listed as over 5000 janka hardness (no clue how much variance there is there). I could probably work it, but finish work on the bed of the plane would be scraping and not paring. However, all of the things that I particularly like - such as carving eyes into a plane and working a nice transition on a handle - those might be a bit difficult on wood of that hardness. Especially carving eyes - that's problematic even on cocobolo.

I've never worked anything harder than kingwood and verawood, those two are plenty hard, and I've never made a mortised plane in anything harder than cocobolo.

Originally Posted by D.W.

So, I see that stuff is listed as over 5000 janka hardness (no clue how much variance there is there)....

A reasonable amount of variation. But perhaps the difference between 'hard" and 'ridiculously hard' is moot!

As I said, there are a couple of dry-country woods I've struck that are either harder or just harder to work.

Originally Posted by D.W.

.... However, all of the things that I particularly like - such as carving eyes into a plane and working a nice transition on a handle - those might be a bit difficult on wood of that hardness. Especially carving eyes - that's problematic even on cocobolo....

Yeah, well, you understand why I didn't get too carried away with the little plane above!

Actually it's not all doom & gloom. Carving may be a bit challenging, but perhaps not impossible. You can work the stuff pretty easily with rasps. I've made quite a few saw handles from Bull oak. It's one of those woods that finishes easily, you can skip though the grades of paper pretty quickly and soon have a mirror finish on it. And it doesn't gum up paper the way all the Cocobolo I've used does! Here is a group photo of handles of different species of Allocasaurina. From L to R they are Rock oak (A. huegeliana ) Bull oak (A. leuhmanii), Forest She-oak (A. torulosa) and Hairy or flame oak (A. inophloia): 4 spp Allocasaurina.jpg

They are all hard, but not hard to work for this particular application, if that makes sense?

Cheers,

Oddly enough I had a fairly well known and certainly vastly experienced wood carver come over the other night to buy some timber. I had a pile of offcuts from some shop-scale milling I did recently, and I offered her the pick of the lot.

There were four species. Gidgee (Acacia cambagei), Inland Rosewood (A. rhodoxylon), Buloke (mentioned above), and Hairy Oak (Allocasuarina inophloia).

Gidgee and Rosewood are, for all intents and purposes, much the same. Super heavy, dark, drylands acacias with hardnesses in the ~4200 - 4400 range. She wouldn't take them, because she said they don't carve well. Ok, well, full disclosure, she took a piece of the Rosewood because she'd not seen it before and it was green, but based on her experience with Gidgee, she was hesitant to put any kind of valuable chisel to it.

She was happy to take the Hairy Oak. It's relatively "soft" (we're still talking Janka 3000's) on the Allocasuarina spectrum. What really surprised me, however, was her willingness to take the Buloke. She balked at the Gidgee and Rosewood, which have Janka ratings roughly 6-800 lbs less, but gladly took the Buloke with the intention of carving it WITHOUT the use of a mallet (I specifically asked if she planned to use one).

So I guess the point I'm making is - and I'm basing this on someone else's experience, which is probably worth noting - when you get into the super hard woods, it becomes a lot about the nature of the grain. Yes, it's harder to push a 1" steel ball into Buloke, but apparently it's harder to push a gouge through Gidgee. Go figure.

That's all I've got...

Cheers,
Luke

Originally Posted by Luke Maddux

... So I guess the point I'm making is - and I'm basing this on someone else's experience, which is probably worth noting - when you get into the super hard woods, it becomes a lot about the nature of the grain. Yes, it's harder to push a 1" steel ball into Buloke, but apparently it's harder to push a gouge through Gidgee.....

Well, I would have put Gidgee and Bull oak in the same league when it comes to carving but my experience of 'carving' these woods is pretty much restricted to forming the lamb's tongue on saw handles. However, I can vouch that Janka hardness is not the absolute arbiter of how a wood cuts or carves. Acacia pendula, or weeping Myall is a bit less hard than Bull oak (4,400 vs. 5,060), but it's substantially more difficult to cut with any tool I've applied to it! Lovely stuff, but I think I'd rather avoid it, in future.....

Cheers,

Originally Posted by IanW

A reasonable amount of variation. But perhaps the difference between 'hard" and 'ridiculously hard' is moot!

As I said, there are a couple of dry-country woods I've struck that are either harder or just harder to work.



Yeah, well, you understand why I didn't get too carried away with the little plane above!

Actually it's not all doom & gloom. Carving may be a bit challenging, but perhaps not impossible. You can work the stuff pretty easily with rasps. I've made quite a few saw handles from Bull oak. It's one of those woods that finishes easily, you can skip though the grades of paper pretty quickly and soon have a mirror finish on it. And it doesn't gum up paper the way all the Cocobolo I've used does! Here is a group photo of handles of different species of Allocasaurina. From L to R they are Rock oak (A. huegeliana ) Bull oak (A. leuhmanii), Forest She-oak (A. torulosa) and Hairy or flame oak (A. inophloia): 4 spp Allocasaurina.jpg

They are all hard, but not hard to work for this particular application, if that makes sense?

Cheers,

Makes perfect sense to me. On a much lower scale of hardness, it's like beech and hard maple. they're very close in hardness. If I set up a plane well and allowed someone to plane, chisel and carve them, most people would be surprised they're close.

Same with locust. It's half as hard as the face grain on cocobolo, but I'd much rather work cocobolo, and cocobolo's not always a pearl, either, when it comes to carving nicely.