A fun thing (red elm cribbage board)

[Tate Harmann]

I just finished up this cribbage board and saved one of those gossamer shavings to come out of the Stanley Bedrock #3 smoother.

Not the easiest wood to work despite it's relatively low janka hardness. Worth the trouble though as it's some beautiful stuff!
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[Steve Beadle]

Nice! BTW, what do you do for pegs?

[Tate Harmann]

I bought the cheap wooden ones from Rockler - gulp haha.

[Tate Harmann]

Here's what I ended up doing for peg storage. It will be interesting to see how this thin reds elm rip holds up over time. I hear that it's not exactly known for being stable. I cut the piece more or less on the quarter, though, and if it warps too bad to hold the pegs in I can just make a new one :)
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[Noah Magnuson]

Nice! BTW, what do you do for pegs?
We always used wooden matches at two different heights. If you want something fancy, a cut and polished finish nail is always nice.

[James Waldron]

I just finished up this cribbage board and saved one of those gossamer shavings to come out of the Stanley Bedrock #3 smoother.

Not the easiest wood to work despite it's relatively low janka hardness. Worth the trouble though as it's some beautiful stuff!
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Difficult planing isn't necessarily related to hardness. If think in Red Elm it's mostly because of the contrariness of the grain. Your piece may show a bit of twisting grain, although it's not easy to be sure from the pic.

[Tate Harmann]

For sure - it definitely has a lot of multi-directional grain. Cheers!

[Bruce Haugen]

That is really nice! I made a small table top from red elm, and it is spectacular. The grain and figure are everything, but the grain is so interlocked it makes planing kinda tricky. Very thin cuts with the plane cutting at a skewed angle will help.

[Tate Harmann]

Yes for sure...and a sharp iron!

Sharp solves everything haha.

[Andrew Seemann]

I haven't used red elm before, but I have used a fair amount of American elm courtesy of dutch elm disease. It is a nightmare to work with hand tools, and not much better with power tools. It isn't particularly stable, and it stinks too. That said, it is kind of pretty, quite a different look and rather unique compared to most standard cabinet woods. Turned pieces can be quite striking.

[Tate Harmann]

Hi Andrew - this particular lumber didn't smell bad at all...it actually smelled kind of nice. I was reading that all elms can vary on their odor from tree to tred and they all smell worse when green. Was yours all kiln dried?

[Andrew Seemann]

Hi Andrew - this particular lumber didn't smell bad at all...it actually smelled kind of nice. I was reading that all elms can vary on their odor from tree to tred and they all smell worse when green. Was yours all kiln dried?

Hi,
All the elm I've worked with was salvaged from trees in the yard. We have had well over a dozen trees taken down over the years yielding some lumber and lots of firewood. All was air dried. The variation tree to tree doesn't surprise me. Oak can be that way too; some smells nice, some neutral, and some burns the eyes and nose. The stuff I am working with now has a particularly "green" smell to it when working, even though it has been dry for years. Stuff that came down from my parents when I was a teenager (which I still have some of) was never quite that pronounced.

[Tate Harmann]

Right on - air dried is sometimes better :) Can be more stable given it stays in a similar climate it's whole life.

Where in MN are you? I just noticed that in your "location".

[Andrew Seemann]

North of Mound, west of Lake Minnetonka. Not quite rural, but not quite suburbia:)

[Tate Harmann]

Oh yea nice! Beautiful area :) we have some friends out in Mound. Greetings from St Paul!