Do you have a favorite hardwood for joinery?

[Scott Winners]

I am making my first table with haunched tenons at each end of all four aprons, and I am getting clobbered by stacked errors.

I am fine with this table ending up in a bbq pit, American beech has a pretty mild smoke flavor that goes well with fin fish, esp cod and halibut.

Is there a North American hardwood you particularly enjoy cutting joints in? I am kind of wondering about hard maple. I have worked a little maple, know I need sharp tools, but it seems like... Maybe maple holds it corners and edges better than beech? Would prefer suggestions at the lighter end of the scale, my eyesight isn’t helping any here either.

Thanks. I know I need to practice no matter what wood I choose.

[Jim Koepke]

Poplar is easy to work. It is one of the softer hardwoods.

Alder seems a bit softer, maybe too soft for a lot of projects.

Cherry is nice but most of the cherry in my experience has been the wild variety growing around here. It is nice for mallets and tool handles.

Black walnut looks nice.

jtk

[Mel Fulks]

Hard maple is harder than “soft maple” , but in most cases it’s not a concern. Hard maple is whiter and more even grained than soft
maple. Hard maple costs more. It’s easy to take traditional wood assigned purposes too seriously. When I made my bench I decided it
had to be beech….all the books say it’s the traditional bench wood. Turns out there was a lot of beech and not a lot of demand ,so it was
inexpensive, thus “traditional “.

[Kevin Jenness]

Favorites? Cherry, walnut and hard maple. For practice- poplar, alder, soft maple- something you can afford to mess up. I imagine lumber brought in from outside is pricey - what can you get locally? White birch might be a good option.

[Luke Dupont]

Whatever I can get my hands on.

Good hardwood has always been quite difficult for me to find locally.

[roger wiegand]

I think of maple, cherry, and walnut as the "American trinity". Each is beautiful separately, they work well together in any combination. Each is pleasant to work with. Their properties are similar enough that one doesn't need to have much concern about mixing them. Finally they are, at this point, abundant and reasonably sustainable. I seldom feel the need to venture far beyond them.

I suppose though, that in Alaska, all might be considered exotic. I don't actually know what hardwoods grow there.

[chris carter]

I love cherry mainly because it's beautiful. But also because it's hard enough to hold up to some abuse, yet soft enough to be easy to work.


Maybe maple holds it corners and edges better than beech? Would prefer suggestions at the lighter end of the scale, my eyesight isn’t helping any here either.

This part has me a bit curious though. Beech is fairly hard stuff (at least for handtool woodworkers) so it begs the question: what exactly is happening that the corners and edges are getting dinged up?? Because if the corners/edges of beech are getting dinged up, whatever is causing it will probably also ding up hard maple because there's not THAT much of a difference in hardness. So I think that's the key: to figure out what is causing the damage.

[steven c newman]

usually?...Ash....

[Scott Winners]

Beech is fairly hard stuff (at least for handtool woodworkers) so it begs the question: what exactly is happening that the corners and edges are getting dinged up?? Because if the corners/edges of beech are getting dinged up, whatever is causing it will probably also ding up hard maple because there's not THAT much of a difference in hardness. So I think that's the key: to figure out what is causing the damage.

I am making all the mistakes on this one. I am sure I will make others on the future, but these are my first M/T joints this small, I have never haunched tenons before, blah blah. I have been working on this table I think three years now. One of the mistakes I remember was having a beautiful knife line on an apron, got it chisel deepened without screwing up, and then my vintage back saw that I had spent hours restoring was able to screw up that line in one pass with a few poorly set teeth. So table parts back into the house, order up the 3 joinery saws from Lee Valley, wait for those to come in, make a new mistake.... I remember waiting for a mortise chisel to come in from L-N a couple years ago. I am reasonably happy with my fourth layout knife, etc.

One thing about beech, I can see the knife lines in freshly planed surfaces pretty good, but after a few months of sunlight or oxygen or whatever it is, the wood darkens and I can't see the lines as well.

The actual table is the "Chairside Table" in one of the Paul Sellers books. I had all the tools listed in chapter one when I started the table, I think it is chapter eleven for the table, but I have been tooling up step by step instead of doing it Paul's minimalist way.

I am going to look at shop lighting again critically, and maybe try a magnifier hat. I think once this beech one is out the door I will try it in maple in three weeks instead of beech in three years. If I make really stumpy legs for the maple one, maybe an 8x11 inch top, I could invert it onto my dresser and use it as a gentleman's organizer. It would look vaguely like a castle with a short tower at each corner.

[Kevin Jenness]

One thing about beech, I can see the knife lines in freshly planed surfaces pretty good, but after a few months of sunlight or oxygen or whatever it is, the wood darkens and I can't see the lines as well.

You might try accenting the knife lines with chalk.

[Stan Calow]

Seconding the Ash recommendation.

[Jim Koepke]

The biggest problem with ash is a lot of it has been cut to stop the ash borer beetle.

Not sure if there is much available on the market. It hasn't been around here for a while.

It is one of the reasons MLB's bats are now made of maple.

jtk

[Mark Hennebury]

Your problem has nothing to do with the wood.

[Scott Winners]

Your problem has nothing to do with the wood.

I do see that, esp thinking about how long this project has gone on. I started with beech knowing I was going to make mistakes and probably need some tools along the way. And I got the beech fairly cheaply.

But now that I am tooled up, I am going to make the second one out of maple. Hopefully in three days instead of three years. I like maple pretty OK, it has made several appearances as a favorite of others, and now I have the tooling.

[Andrew Seemann]

Given the option, I tend to prefer cherry or walnut for hand tool work. Not too hard, not too soft, cut and plane clean, they really are the Goldilocks of woods. Soft maple is nice too, although it can be a little fuzzy to saw; it planes really nice though. Red oak is OK. Poplar (both true and tulip/yellow), aspen, cottonwood, linden, basswood, etc are great for secondary wood.

Hard maple can be really hard sometimes; it isn't called rock maple for nothing. It cuts nice, but the density can make it not the most enjoyable wood to work by hand. Same with beech and birch, which also have the honor of being even more unstable in use than hard maple. White oak can be similarly hard; the heartwood can sometimes be unbelievably dense, but it has the virtue of being much more stable (usually).

I used to use a lot of walnut, back when it was fairly cheap and cherry was ridiculously expensive. Now it has reversed, and cherry is much more inexpensive than walnut, at least around here.

For hand tool joinery practice, I'd go with one of the softer hardwoods, like cherry, poplar, aspen, walnut, soft maple, whatever you can get your hands on that is readily available and not too expensive. No need to learn figure out what you are doing on something that is frustrating to work with even with good skills. There is a reason carvers use basswood and not maple, beech, etc. That is unless they are making woodcut prints and want durability:)

[Rob Luter]

I work mostly in QSWO, which is unfriendly stuff in a lot of ways. From an "ease of work" perspective, I prefer Cherry or Alder. They mark well and I have an easier time making crisp joinery. I like Walnut too, but the darkness of the wood makes it tough to see your layout marks.

[Richard Coers]

Are you blaming the wood? Beech has been used for decades on hand plane bodies. Hard to imagine it can't work for a haunched mortise and tenon. Hard maple is like working with steel. It is not one bit forgiving, especially if you try to coax in a snug fit.

[Derek Cohen]

I am making my first table with haunched tenons at each end of all four aprons, and I am getting clobbered by stacked errors.

I am fine with this table ending up in a bbq pit, American beech has a pretty mild smoke flavor that goes well with fin fish, esp cod and halibut.

Is there a North American hardwood you particularly enjoy cutting joints in? I am kind of wondering about hard maple. I have worked a little maple, know I need sharp tools, but it seems like... Maybe maple holds it corners and edges better than beech? Would prefer suggestions at the lighter end of the scale, my eyesight isn’t helping any here either.

Thanks. I know I need to practice no matter what wood I choose.

Hi Scott, although I am in Oz, I have done quite a good bit of work with US Hard Maple, Cherry, Black Walnut and a few others. In general, fruit woods are wonderful because they are closed grain and generally not interlocked. This translates into keeping a crisp shape, not tearing out (although Hard Maple can do so dramatically when it does), and take a wonderful finish. Because Maple is harder, Cherry and Black Walnut would get my vote for the best woods to work. By contrast, oaks are open grained, which does not finish as well, and Oz woods (like Jarrah) are this and interlocked and hard like Hard Maple

Regards from Perth

Derek

[James Pallas]

I chose wood for a project and not for the wood. I find that some are much easier to work than others. My favorites to work are walnut and cherry. However figured walnuts and curly cherry can be challenging. Maple is wonderous, very durable, a little hard to work but beautiful for joinery, sharp crisp joints, easy to get great finished surfaces. All that said most of my work has been in oak. My wife loves the stuff. Hard enough to work, splinters galore. QSWO is the best of the lot. If maple was a little more showy my life would have been a little easier. I did try birdseye but she said it’s got spots and no grain. End of story. Oak it is.
Jim