Can I do anything with this Eucalyptus?

[Matt Lentzner]

I'm a rookie woodworker so bear with me...

A rather large Eucalyptus tree was cut down in my neighborhood and I ended up with the bulk of the wood. Some pieces were just too heavy for me to get into my truck by myself.

Initially I collected it to burn as firewood, but it looks, to my untrained eye, really nice. The wood is dense with a tight grain. The biggest problem is that it was cut into fairly short pieces - typically 18". I have some longer straight branches that are 32" or so, but only about 4" in diameter.

Is it worth it to use this for anything other than firewood?

Thanks,

Matt

[Jason Beam]

Unless you're gonna turn it, I wouldn't use the limb wood off any tree for any kind of flat work.

Eucalyptus makes incredible turnings. I haven't seen much flat work with it, but your smaller pieces would make decent boxes if you can slab 'em up and dry 'em nice. I'd be eyeing the larger blocks as bowl blanks, myself :)

[Noah Katz]

I believe Eucalyptus was originall brought to N. America for furniture making, but turned out to be too unstable.

[Ian Abraham]

Eucalyptus is about 200 or more different species of tree. They have different timber characteristics, some better than others.

Generally the wood is very hard but prone to shrinking, warping and cracking as it dries. If you can get it dry it is great timber though.

If you can break some of the bigger pieces down with a chainsaw and bandsaw you might get some interesting / usefull pieces of wood. Stay away from the smaller limbs and the pith of the bigger logs, that stuff will warp and crack like crazy. Make sure you seal the ends of the pieces with sealer, paint or parrafin wax. With short 'boards' like that you dont want to loose 6" off each end to end checking. Then stack the boards up on stickers to dry for a year or so. A few big lumps of concrete on the stack might help keep it straight. No gaurantees on this though. :rolleyes:

This is a baby cot I made from a local bluegum eucalyptus. Got a lot of degrade as it dried and had to do a lot of trimming and machining to get good boards from it. But it's very hard and strong timber and finishes beautifully. The cot is a LOT heavier than it looks.

Cheers

Ian