Page 72 - Wood Review Dec 202 Full issue

4
8
9
5
6
7
TIMBER
72
Australian Wood Review
4. 5.
6.
7. 8.
Rose sheoak left to dry in the round.
Radial surface of bull oak showing large medullary rays.
Tangential surface of bull oak showing the ends of medullary rays.
Bull oak saw handle.
Radial surface of rose sheoak.
9.
10.
11.
12. 13. 14.
Tangential surface of rose sheoak.
Rose sheoak showing a herringbone figure.
Chisel handles made from rose sheoak.
Spalted river oak.
Radial surface of river oak
Tangential surface of river oak.
of that group, but mostly restricted to the edges of water- courses where harvesting is not permitted. West Australia has a sheoak (A. fraseriana), which is similar to eastern
rose sheoak (A. torulosa), and is about the only one of the casuarinas regularly harvested commercially for timber. On the East coast, most casuarina wood can only be obtained sporadically from boutique suppliers.
I grew up on a farm in North Queensland, and the hub of the household was a wood-burning stove that kept a large kettle perpetually ready for tea making, cooked our meals, provided copious hot water, and warmed our butts on cold nights (when mum didn’t chase us out of her way). The stove was fed almost exclusively with rose sheoak, which grew abundantly on the property. For 40 years, ‘sheoak’ and ‘firewood’ were synonymous in my mind. The way the green firewood billets split in the sun within days of being cut, it seemed to me it was created especially for the purpose (photo 4).
Casuarinas generally have a high tangential to radial shrinkage ratio, making them very difficult to dry, but once dry many are stable, tough, and durable woods with spectacular grain patterns.
First encounters: bull oak
It was a chance encounter with a couple of billets of
bull oak (A. leuhmanii) that first changed my view of the casuarinas. The wood I got was from a standing dead tree and had a lot of very deep splits, but I did my best with axe and bandsaw to recover as much sound wood as I could. I tried planing a piece and quickly learnt why A. leuhmanii is sometimes claimed to be the hardest wood in the world. It isn’t (another casuarina may be, see later), but it’s still very hard. It dulls plane irons after a few swipes, but if you can smooth a radial surface, it is spectacular stuff.
The rays on the radial surface are huge, some more than 30mm wide and extending 80mm or more towards the