Lyptus and the router

Jan 07, 2007 2 Replies

The stuff's pretty, but it's some of the most miserable wood to work with that I've ever seen.



Latest is trying to route some shoulders, using a table mounted router. Even taking a 1/32" cut huge splinters come off it, and it doesn't matter if I do a climb or a chip cut. Trying to take more than that off at a pass huge chunks come off it.



Oh, well, I've got mountains of Lyptus dust in the vacuum and the dust collector and the jointer and the corner and my hair and everywhere else I can see. Should be easy to make up some matched patching as long as I don't want to stain it.



Next time I'm going to try a dado blade and see if it does any better.



And before anybody says "shoulder plane", the stuff is not quite in the concrete with leaves category, but it's close.



If the developers of this stuff set out deliberately to turn me off of plantation-grown hybrid lumber they couldn't have done a much better job. Getting a decent result out of the stuff is enough of a challenge to be rewarding but it's not something of which I'd want a steady diet.


Just had to find out for yourself didn't you? :). My wife wanted a new end table out of Lyptus. She loved the look. I got it done but not without a lot of words that I won't use here. Routing's fun, isn't it?

Seems I mentioned about that. Now you know why I said moving the router bit backwards on the stuff especially when climbing upgrain. And taking tiny cuts and moving slowly.

Pete

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