A friend wanted a new carving mallet, so I offered to make one. I have an old 4"x4"x6' piece of 'barn wood' gifted many years ago by an old boss in exchange for this pepper mill. He got it out of a pile of walnut in his 90 year old dad's barn, just outside of Williamsburg, VA.
(https://forestryforum.com/gallery/albums/userpics/33949/Pepper-2-s.jpg?easyrotate_cache=1575149430)
The wood has a piece of bark on it that looks a bit like walnut, but the color of the wood throws me off. It seems rock hard and is very heavy.
(https://forestryforum.com/gallery/albums/userpics/33949/2016_016.JPG?easyrotate_cache=1575149571)
Is it possible this is walnut sap wood, or maybe something else? Seems to be semi-ring/diffuse porous and I can't see any tyloses.
(https://forestryforum.com/gallery/albums/userpics/33949/2016_005-CC.jpg?easyrotate_cache=1575153142)
Here's the resulting mallet, which weighs almost two pounds. Looks good, but will it tough enough?
(https://forestryforum.com/gallery/albums/userpics/33949/2016_011-C.jpg?easyrotate_cache=1575153811)
Beautiful work. The finished grain says red oak to me.
I keep coming back to this thread, and I want to say oak, but the end grain doesn't look like it to me. Does oak retain it's scent over decades? That would be definitive if you could smell it while turning.
No distinctive smell. I blew up one of the pictures and am beginning to think it might be a hickory because of the parechymal banding. That might explain the hardness and weight.
(https://forestryforum.com/gallery/albums/userpics/33949/2016_015-C_-C.jpg?easyrotate_cache=1575164491)
It is hickory.
Quote from: WDH on November 30, 2019, 08:48:15 PM
It is hickory.
Hickory times ten! Not oak at all.
I'll share this story: An old KY FT chairmaker in Jackson Co, KY I spent a vacation with years ago to see what i could learn, I asked him if there were any other chairmakers around. He said he trained a guy once who still made chairs and asked if I wanted to meet him. I say sure and we drive maybe 10 miles to the guys house. He turns out to be even older than the guy I am staying with who's late 80's and I ask him his age and he's still turning chairs at 96! He's turning as we talk on a long bed home made lathe and I don't get what the wood is on the lathe. It's "cherry hickory" he says and the only wood I use. It looks color wise like cherry but much harder but not hard like most hickories. I asked Oscar my mentor where they are found,etc. and he says they're hard to find but in the woods on the ridges like most hickories here. I own land with most all varieties of hickory and use the bark for chair bottoms so I know the species really well and I have never seen one yet growing or me cutting it down. I have never seen reference to one in any of the multiple tree books I own.
It is softer and not brash like most hickory plus the nice reddish color as well.
I don't see any red tint in the mallet above though. Looks like a common hickory heartwood to me.
I carve some too and made a similar mallet from some Jamaican wood I got there when I visited a back woods sawmill. I had in mind lignum vitae which is super hard and makes great mallets for carving. They had none as the local carvers there scarf it up fast. They said they had some wood that was also very hard and fetched a cant of ~ 6x6" short piece which I got them to cut down so I could carry it on the plane home-this was before they stopped allowing such stuff to go with you. The mill guys called it "Bullet Wood" and I have not a clue what it really is as Jamaicans have their own names for most stuff anyway. It is reddish brown and extremely heavy but no harder IMO than hickory. Many tropical woods have a different name in each country they grow in and I don't know them well anyway.
There is a hickory that I learned in Forestry School as red hickory. Carya ovalis. The bark is a tad bit scaly, like a cherry, but not shaggy like a shagbark. It has since been re-classified as a variant of pignut hickory, carya glabra.
When I ran into the old guy making chairs from "cherry hickory" I quizzed both men, trying to learn if it was actually something else but got nowhere.
So it is a genetic variation of pignut?
Any number of trees here have hillbilly names that have been around a long time.
Similar, name wise, my two vanities are made from a wood called "Cherry birch" locally but the book name is River Birch. It has a cherry like appearance heartwood but far harder & heavier. The grain pattern looks like birch.
Pignut in general is really common here in E KY, I'm wondering how they knew one in the woods when hunting chair wood? They had little use for hickory otherwise as not well suited for chairs or much other woodwork for that matter.
In my searches for slick bark hickories to make chair bark, I've been disappointed once by a tree a man had already cut. It was a recently cut log and he had no objection to my peeling it as it was going to be rived into tobacco sticks anyway. I peeled it, rolled the near perfect bark and next chair the stuff broke easily and all thrown away as not pliable. Other than species alone it should have been good, pliable bark based on season, etc..
The red hickory version of pignut has the cherry-like scaly bark. Regular pignut has tight bark.