Rob Wallace
.....and not a grass. Perhaps you have confused this with bamboo, which IS a grass!

Palms do not produce "normal" wood in the hardwood or softwood sense. There are no annual rings or earlywood/latewood made of dead secondary xylem cells. Therefore it wil behave differently when cutting and turning it.

Palm "wood" isn't really normal wood, per se, but is a dense collection of vascular bundles (you could call them "veins" in the stem, or trunk, of the palm) that grow together and provide structural support as the tree grows. You see these as the dark, dense, stringy material running through the piece. In some cases these vascular bundles are interlocked and fused into a tightly-branched matrix, which can be quite rigid and strong.

The reason that palm is so prone to chip out when turning (hence can be described as "splintery", as has been noted!) is that the bundles are not particularly well bonded together, unlike the cells of normal wood which are quite literally glued together with lignin. Thus, the soaking with thin CA that has been recommended provides a greater amount of bonding between the fibrous vascular bundles. The resulting "stabilized" fibers should behave more like a "normal" wood, although the dense vascular bundles are usually quite a bit harder than typical hardwood is.

It is correct that very sharp tools will help shear the bundles more easily with less energy while turning, and thus reduce the chances of fragmenting the bundles from their relatively "loose" arrangement, even when bonded with CA.

Note also that it is quite typical for palm "wood" to contain a fairly high amount of silica which has a significant (and sometimes rapid) dulling effect on turning (and other cutting) tools. This might result in having to sharpen your turning tools a bit more frequently.

Good luck!

Rob Wallace