Jatoba; this is some hard wood

[Phil Mueller]

Working on the tapered legs of my Demilune table. I decided to use Jatoba because I think it’s a good color match with the Rosewood top and found a nice 8/4 slab. The hand saw work seemed to go reasonably well, but when it comes to planing, man is this stuff hard. I’m just cleaning up saw marks and finding I need to refresh the plane blade about every two sides of a leg.

Using a LN 62 with a 50 degree bevel on the iron I’m getting nice 1.5-3 thou shavings with zero tear out, but it ain’t coming easy.

For yuks, I looked up the Janka hardness...2690. No wonder.

Just thought I’d shout this out while taking a break from the first two legs.

446490

[Frederick Skelly]

Yeah, I have some of that. It's tough stuff for sure.

[Mark Rainey]

Tapering a leg with a handplane is one of the joys of woodworking. Takes a lot of courage to use hand tools on something that hard. Onward Neanderthal!

[Laurent Marshall]

It sure is hard. It also has an interesting interlocking grain structure. I got some to use for tool handles, and I've found that carving it with my sloyd knife is basically doable with effort, but chiseling or planing the end grain dulls tools very, very quickly. I feel like it's not only very hard, but also full of some sort of mineral grit.