Jatoba gloat

[Michael Titus]

A local cabinet shop was cleaning out their inventory of 4/4 jatoba shorts -- apparently consumer demand (here) is shifting from tropical hardwoods to domestic hardwoods like oak and cherry. I bought all of their jatoba, 75 board feet, for $75 ($1 per board foot). I have no idea what I'm going to do with it all, but it should be fun to try to use up the pile.
179883

[mreza Salav]

That's a very good deal. I like Jatoba, the only problem is that it's heavy and hard as rock. Very hard on blades and bits.

[Brett Robson]

Nice score! With all that money you saved, you'll have plenty to spend with your local sharpening service!!

[Larry Fox]

Nice score, I agree with Brett and Mreza on the sharpening comments - stuff is hard on tooling. I recently did a project in Jatoba and it is a really pretty wood. Based on my very limited experience with it, I would recommend that when you get around to making something out of it that you cut your pieces very oversized and let them sit for a while before you mill to final dimensions. I was cutting 4" wide x ~3' long strips out of pretty wide boards for my project and most of the pieces would warp and go into a bit of wind as they were coming off the saw. Seemed fairly stable when milling to final dimension a few weeks later though.

[Mike Cutler]

Nice!!

I'm a big fan of Jatoba. It may be a little more wearing on blades and such, and a little finicky, but the results are worth it.

I had an 8/4 piece about 4' long kicking around for a coup[le years. I used it to support the car jack on our gravel driveway. Rested the tractor plow blade on for a few winters. Set the mower deck on it to adjust the height.
Grabbed it one day, ran it through the jointer, put it through the planer, Milled it and it's the transom piece over a doorway in the house way now. Love that wood.

[Steve Griffin]

Yes, extra care with it's stability is important. Cut to width and allow a day or two before jointing and going to final width/thickness.

My last kitchen I did out of Jatoba had 3 or 4 doors which I had to rebuild as they warped.

-Steve

[Michael Titus]

Thanks for the warnings about stability. I will definitely cut oversize and let sit a few days before final cutting and thicknessing.

[greg a bender]

I really like the wood too! It turns nicely as well.

A few years ago, I stumbled upon a wholesale wood flooring importer while looking for some retail hardwood. Turned out, all the flooring they imported from Brazil was shipped in crates made from jatoba. He had a HUGE pile of it out back in the trash. :eek:

Since he had no use for it, and had to pay to cart it off, I offered to take it off his hands:)
I must have hauled off 200 BdFt of it. All about 9" wide and 4' and 8' long. Each piece did have 4 ring shank nails in it, but, for the price (free), I did not complain.

Greg A

[Larry Edgerton]

I hate Jatoba! Hope to never get another job with it. I explain to customers that want it that it comes from an endangered area in the rain forest. That usually does the trick.

I got a deal on several thousand feet of it years ago, and so had to use it up. Not hard to sell, just hard to work with. I didn't find it all that hard on tooling, but if a tool was dull it raised hell with the machine itself. Shattered a bearing in my Powermatic planer trying to get just a little bit more out of that sharpening.

You do have to sneak up on the size, every time you send it through the machine it does something else. I am having the same kinds of trouble with the Makore I am working with now, but that stuff "is" hard on tooling, almost as bad as teak.

Don't run your door openings too tight. I ran the same small gap I always do with native woods on a job with inset doors, and I had to fix every one of them. Embarrasing

Give a lot of extra time for sanding. I made four desks for an office and the tops were Jatoba as well. Each top took eight hours of sanding, and that was with air auto body tools starting with a inline sander that was aggressive. Scrapers were next to useless.

There is a lot of inconsistancy in the boards hardness/characteristics from different parts of the tree trunk. I bought the whole tree, sawn at the place I bought it, in order. as I got to the center it became harder and less predictable. And I don't think it is a waiting thing with the wood going crazy. I think it is just so full of internal stresses in every direction that even the smallest cut can make it do something crazy. Many tropicals behave this way so it may be something to do with the growing season, don't know. Just putting a profile on a piece can throw a curve into it, taking a light pass on the planer does something to it, but flip it over and it will do something else all together. I know, someone will say it was casehardened, blah, blah, blah. Could be but in thousands of Bd Ft of tropicals, I guess I just got all bad drying jobs....

It was popular for flooring for a bit, but sly dog that I am I always subcontracted that part of the job. Each and every one of them misbehaved, and had to be worked on again. I warned them......

I still have some 40ish" planks of jatoba collecting dust, should make a bench top out of it......

Tropicals are fun to play with but I have to make money.........

[J.R. Rutter]

Ha ha! Hey Mike, I didn't know you were on here. I hope you get some great projects out of that wood. If you have flat stuff that you want to run through my sander, just let me know. I actually found it pretty easy to finish sand starting from a wide belt finish.