Mishap with Bloodwood - Help

[Will Vance]

I was making a knife handle for a knife my Dad is making for me, and decided Bloodwood would make a nice, good looking handle.

I bought a 3/8" thick, 3" wide, 24" long piece of Bloodwood - very nice, thinking that if I screwed up a side I would have extra in the length.

Well, I dulled my bandsaw blade cutting out the (2) sides, had to put it on the bench sander to sand it.

Then it came to drilling the holes to mount it, I used a brand new HSS drill bit - knowing it was a dense wood and hard to work with.

I placed the handle on the DP Table, clamped the back with (2) clamps, thinking I should be good to go. WRONG.

I started to drill and the drill press "whined" - a very sharp, quick sound. The Bloodwood handle snapped (more like exploded) in to (2) large pieces, a few smaller ones and quite a few spinters - which were mostly in my fingertips. I had my left hand holding the front of the knife handle down.

I shut the press down and looked at the splinters in my fingers which were starting to swell alittle and stung like the dickens.

I then thought about the noise from the drill press and pulled out the bit - it looked like someone had started to thread the end of it.

What happen? What did I do wrong? :confused:

Any and all advice would be helpful - including if I should try again or use another wood for a knife handle.

Thanks,

Will

[Clifford Mescher]

It sounds like the super sharpness of your bit grabbed the wood on initial contact. You will get the same results when
drilling brass. It is actually recommended to use a dull bit when drilling brass. What was the speed of your drill bit? Also, the method of feeding the bit initially should be slow. Actually, a pecking motion is sometimes the best to get the hole started. Hope I helped. Clifford.

[David Keller NC]

Will - As you found out, bloodwood is very hard and fairly brittle. If you used a brad-point bit, that was the start of your troubles. Certain brad-points are very aggressive, and will "catch" in the end grain portion of the hole. If you're drilling mahogany, no big deal, as the wood's soft enough to just break out where it catches.

With a brittle, hard wood like the rosewood family or bloodwood, ziricote, and others, it's a crap shoot as to whether the catch will explode a small piece, or just tear out the end-grain side of the hole. Looks like you came up on the wrong end of that crap shoot with this piece.

You might try drilling the wood with a twist-point drill bit intended for metal. It'll be slower, but there's less risk of a catch. If you've a very small forstner bit that's sharp (and I mean that you sharpened it yourself - they're pretty dull from the factory), that would be ideal for the wood you're trying to work. Just go slowly (very slowly), and you must clamp the wood very firmly to the DP table so that you don't have to hold onto it.

By the way - bloodwood has a lot of extractable chemicals in it that some people are highly allergic to. Once you get the splinters out, you may need to go to the doctor to get an antihistamine shot if the swelling progresses past the local injury (and it wouldn't be a bad idea to get a doctor to look at it anyway in case you missed a fragment, which could cause an infection).

[Joe Chritz]

Hard to say for sure. Hard wood, to fast spindle speed and/or feed speed. Weird tip angle can cause a catch but that is unlikely with a new bit. It is best to drill in stages if possible, especially if the wood is dense and the hole large.

Bloodwood is a fine choice for a knife handle, I have several still cut into slab blanks outside from when I built knives.

The drill tip could be broken causing it to look like that.

Joe

[Dewey Torres]

I read an article in WOOD that recommended an acrylic impregnated wood called Dymondwood:

http://www.jantzsupply.com/cartease/search-products.cfm?field=categories.primary&string=Dymondwood&string2=Handle%20Material

Article was July 2008 pg 92:

http://www.woodstore.net/is18ju20.html

They did also say that you could use strait grained hard woods. I have used blood wood before but not for something this small.