Hi Cgcc - Struth! these old threads keep coming back to haunt us, don't they? We should probably move to the "Timber" section to start a discussion on "Black wattle", but yes, your experience matches mine very closely!

As I said, there are several species around my place lumped under "Black wattle" and many more up & down the coast, and it's usually difficult to impossible to know which precise species you have. I stand by what I said 8 years ago, that there is a lot of variation within species (& even within a tree, as you describe), but there is one species, that I still haven't identified for certain (never was any good using these botanical keys - you need to be a trained botanist to get anything like the right answer!), which seems to be fairly consistent in having very dark wood that is quite good to work with. It can have fine fiddleback figure on occasion, but is more likely than the others to have good areas of relatively straight grain, with prominent darker lines. Unfortunately, the larger sections of trunk near the base, which often have the best figure, are also often full of rot. But like you say, some parts of some trees are so hard & gnarly, they are just not workable.

Internal splitting has been a problem for me too, mainly because I only harvest dead trees, and some of them take an agonising time to finally give up the ghost. Just as I'm about to fire up the chainsaw, the tree I've been watching die leaf by leaf will suddenly come back to life & produce a crop of leaves & flowers. So I forget about it & a year or two later realise it has definitely croaked & already splitting. But if the tree hasn't been dead too long & I cut it up into usable sizes & seal the ends straight away, splitting & checking is usually minimal.

As you say, it can be frustrating stuff, but also very rewarding when you get really nice pieces. The trees round here never grow in any one direction for much more than 300mm at a time, so I only ever try for smallish bits. I think the longest 'planks' I've ever managed were a bit over 600mm and the vast majority have been a good deal less than that. But small can be beautiful:

Black wattle b.jpg

11 Black wattle carcase.jpg

Done b.jpg

There's always just the right application for every bit of wood, I reckon....

Cheers,
Ian