Hand tools and figured woods

The last load of firewood came, astonishingly, with quite a large amount of flame birch, a kind of curly grained, shimmery yellow birch wood. I’ve been saving whatever pieces I see, either big ones for a woodturner friend or smaller ones for my own purposes. Something tricky about figured woods seems to be that they can’t be carved with ordinary knives, planes, and so on, as far as I can tell—do this and the grain starts to split. I have had success with files and saws so far, but maybe there’s something I don’t know.

How do you work with these difficult but beautiful woods?

Wow, just today I was cutting firewood when I noticed one of the logs had a heart-shaped cross section. So I made some coasters.
No tools needed besides a bow saw. These can be used for a lot of things.

Daphne Rose wrote:Wow, just today I was cutting firewood when I noticed one of the logs had a heart-shaped cross section. So I made some coasters.
No tools needed besides a bow saw. These can be used for a lot of things.

That’s lovely! I should have said woods with curly or unusual grains—there are a lot of kinds of figures, like spalting, that aren’t as difficult. Although different places I look have different definitions of what constitutes a wood’s figure so I’m not sure. I think the heart may be spalting?

On a similar vein there is a piece of eastern redcedar/tree juniper that has this lovely lavendery color, and also has spalting. Strangely, it was the perfect shape for a banjo neck when split. According to one of the definitions this is also the wood’s figure. Unfortunately it seems to fade to red after a month or two but I’m not sure if there is some way to preserve or seal the color in. But I think the red is nice too.

Hello, the Type D No. 62 plane created by Stanley is a tool designed for working on end grain and knotty wood.

I found this on facebook, who would believe that hackberry be so beautiful:



source

I am building my wife a jewelry box out of flame birch. It was going well then I hit a few snags and so I put it aside for now but need to get back to building it again.

Steve Zoma wrote:I am building my wife a jewelry box out of flame birch. It was going well then I hit a few snags and so I put it aside for now but need to get back to building it again.

Here is a picture of that flame birch jewelry box

Snaggy is right, but that is a beautiful box!!

I found today that while flame birch is wavy back-and-forth up the tree, it doesn’t appear to be as wavy in-and-out (radially?), which makes sense, as the tree doesn’t look wavy from the outside (unless there are lots of knots). So I am working on trying to cut it up somewhat along the growth rings with an old-mower-blade-turned-froe. It is a very hard wood, though!

Well, they are very cracked, but aside from that it went well.

That’s fine—these were practice pieces anyway.

To prevent future cracking I’ll probably split it over wood, not stone.

I might get some usable pieces anyway, however.

I didn’t think it would work, but when the coping saw blade broke, I tried using my antique block plane for smoothing out the sides. And it is working!

When splitting, it seems that swifter, more decisive blows cause less cracking. I will have to experiment.

M Ljin wrote:The last load of firewood came, astonishingly, with quite a large amount of flame birch, a kind of curly grained, shimmery yellow birch wood. I’ve been saving whatever pieces I see, either big ones for a woodturner friend or smaller ones for my own purposes. Something tricky about figured woods seems to be that they can’t be carved with ordinary knives, planes, and so on, as far as I can tell—do this and the grain starts to split. I have had success with files and saws so far, but maybe there’s something I don’t know.

How do you work with these difficult but beautiful woods?

Figured wood like that is tricky. Use very sharp tools, take light cuts, and cut “with the grain” constantly changing direction, or switch to scrapers/sanding to avoid tear-out.

All that to discover that flame birch does not appear to be a good tonewood and as a fingerboard would reduce the resonance of a string instrument. So much for that idea. When tapped, it makes a “thud” sound, which should have told me this from the beginning.  It appears that cherry is a better option…

I’m sure there are other wonderful uses they can go to.