Louro Preto - prior wood identification

chisel handles

Bill Tindall, E.Tn.

chuck a dogwood limb in lathe and turn one. You can beat the crap out of this handle, like when it seizes when driving on the handle, and it will not split.

Re: chisel handles

David Weaver

dogwood and hickory would both make good handle, but I'm not a fan of the aesthetics. I've got a fair amount of persimmon, too, which probably would survive well in a handle if it tolerates hitting golf balls.

With a ferrule, louro prieto, beech and others are fine. I use a urethane mallet and generally don't hoop handles.

The trouble that my original handle had was that I used it with a very thin octagonal handle and split it when I put it on the tang (just pushed it too far) and then later attempted to bend the tang a little straighter than my application. It probably had about 1/8th inch of wood in some spots and it broke.

(we had a lot of dogwood and I could still snag some next time I head to my parents' house - my mother was a fan. Plenty in the neighborhood here, too. My mother would find saplings of dogwood and I guess redbud or some kind of tree of that type and plant them all over the property (and disallow us touching any of them). Hickory was a little less well appreciated - fought the squirrels for the nuts, it always attracted borers and then it was a *bear* to split and made a lot of ash when burned.

Re:Dogwood for all the wrong things

Bruce McCrory

But it works, and I wasn't accurate enough to trust my 16 oz Stanley...

This was a smallish limb that split from our ornamental Cornus florida after an ice-snow storm I found in the firewood pile that looked about right for waling away on the chisel. There's about 2-1/2 inches depth of wear showing on the tool.

Re:Dogwood for all the wrong things

Bill White

I used dogwood for chisel handles as well as for mallets and mauls. That darned stuff is some kinda tough. Best of all, it seems to last forever in its application. Turns and finishes well too.

Re:Dogwood for all the wrong things

William Duffield

People use it for gluts/wedges for splitting logs. If you want to use it for a maul/mallet, find a relatively small one, dig it out, and use the root ball for the head. The random grain pattern (or mostly lack of a pattern) makes it even more difficult to split or splinter.

I have a pile of dogwood logs on the floor of my shop that I've been debarking and splitting for file handles, and another dogwood trunk down in a neighbor's yard down the street that I need to go cut up and process.

BTW, the Louro Preto is not what I found in my packing material. What you have sure is pretty wood, especially quarter sawn surfaces. Since I almost always use a ferrule when I make tool handles, splitting is not a concern for me. I love working with the closely related bocote.

The spicy scent of it, too

David Weaver

...I was playing with the belt grinder earlier - it can remove material from a handle blank faster than I could plane it off, but it turns the shop into an unliveable space pretty quickly unless the garage door is open and something pushing air out at the same time.....when I first read the description, it said that it has a pleasant scent.

It smells like rosewood to me, and further in the description, it says that it can cause a reaction in people sensitized to other woods. All of those were types that smell like rosewood. But I noticed with such a large amount made aromatic (only for a short period, then I opened the garage door and ran out of the shop) that it has a perfumey smell on top of the rosewood spice.

This is the only blank of it I've ever seen, and I suppose it'll be like bois de rose was to me. Someone sold me an old dry bois de rose blank years ago for $75. It was about a foot long, 9" high and 4" thick. At the time, we both though it was cocobolo, but it had the same rosewood smell, was super old and dry and a beautiful color ( deep reddish tint) that was far more attractive than any cocobolo that I have. It turned dark brown not long after that.

I've never seen a nice blank of bois de rose since at any reasonable price. I've never seen this wood since, either, and as I mentioned in the prior posts, I pondered throwing it out as it's not quite as heavy as cocobolo and the yellow sections and grain color made me think that it was junk wood. While it's not heavy compared to cocobolo, it's a lot heavier than beech.

(I haven't seen bocote cheaper, either - right now, there's a guitar supplier bringing in a lot of plantation grown indian rosewood with good density but an unbelievable amount of silica. The rosewood is big enough to make jack planes in the table leg type blanks, and in the neck blanks, it's dead quartersawn up to 5/4 or 6/4 and probably only about $5 of stock each to make sublime handles). lots of options.

First parer - more louro preto

David Weaver

Unbelievably dusty wood to turn, just filthy.

Top chisel is a buck parer - I sort of copied it.

Bottom two are more like beveled firmer in about 6 tenths of an inch and 3/16ths.

I did a poor job getting the wood pictured - forgot that the phone flash was on and it washed out the front part of the picture and made the handles look dark.

Still experimenting with ways to glaze the chisels (finer follow up finish without rounding things over). I haven't figured it out yet. a contact wheel with a trizact belt works, but the trizact is too aggressive and then wears out quickly. The deburring wheel used on this parer after hand sanding with a drum on a cordless drill just rounds off a little too much (you can see on the facets that the crispness is gone).

Still shrinking on the bolsters, but with a ferrule, it's less of a big deal.

Forge welding will have to happen on the raw stock (I think) and not on individual chisels - it's fiddly to try to get the bolster down the chisel tang without it oxidizing, but I may still try.

better pictures of the wood...

David Weaver

...with a small amount of amber shellac over a "Sanding wax" and burnishing.

The front handle in the one picture is flat on the top, I wasn't thinking at the time when I parted it off (until afterwards), but it's for me and I use a round urethane mallet, so it probably won't matter.

It looks like rosewood on the flatsawn side, but has the nice texture on the quartered edge.

Re: better pictures of the wood...

Wiley Horne

David,

That’s just killer wood.! This workup says it’s heavy (57lb/ft3) and durable:

https://www.wood-database.com/louro-preto/

Same genus (Cordia) as bocote and ziricote—all Central/So. American.

Wiley

Thanks, Wiley...

David Weaver

...I figured it would be mexico or central america (always my first guess).

haven't bought bocote, but haven't bought any exotic wood locally in a while as there are two guitar wood dealers on ebay who sell anything and everything as cheap as I can get it locally and they understand the value of wood sawn straight in both directions.

I had one other picture that didn't turn out (the one above - I guess that's an antiquated term - "it didn't turn out", as If I took it out of a mailed package of developed pictures).

At any rate, the wood color is smart against brass, a nice contrast.

It's splintery for a wood that looks like this (but by no means as easy splitting as something like red oak), but has real directional zing in the direction of the chisel - rigid.

if I didn't need to have a day job, I'd enjoy getting this stuff solved to a point that it's saleable (chisels, etc).

Pretty wood...

John in NM

Those are really nice!

I used a lot of ziricote wood in the shop I worked for in the late 90's - we used it as accent wood because desert ironwood had gotten tough to source. It is very dusty and quite brittle and splintery, so it does sound like your chunk could be a cousin to it... Your stuff is prettier than ziricote though, in my opinion.