zebrawood

ROTFLMAO

Paint.

Leon responds:

Maybe so. Zebrawood is harder than oak, but a slurry of whatever finish is chosen, thinned a lot, and sanding dust (wear a mask! This stuff is nasty), is probably the simplest to do. Wipe with and cross grain and then wipe off quickly.

Charlie Self

"Republicans understand the importance of bondage between a mother and child." Dan Quayle

According the Hardwood Association handbook on hardwoods ($10, very well spent), virtually all the properties of zebrawood are nearly identical to white oak. However, the coloring isn't a easy to deal with...I'd bite the bullet and build up the finish with many coats and much rubbing out between coats.

or fill with clear epoxy, like MirroCote(sp)?

-if it's OK to look like it was dipped in plastic!

James snipped-for-privacy@rochester.rr.com http:// snipped-for-privacy@breck.org

I am responding very late to this message, but I thought that my answer could be useful to some, so here goes. I built a zebrawood bar for a client who was raised in South Africa and who had his heart set on it. I was ignorant of some of zebrawood's difficulties at the time I started, which was probably a good thing. I did learn that zebrawood's reputation is somewhat worse than its actual working qualities. However, don't try to shape with either a router table or a shaper. It has an interlocking grain that literally explodes when a cutter gets into it. I ended up simply dimensioning on the jointer and planer, taking very shallow cuts, and then sufacing at the drum sander. This wood behaves very well in a drum sander. I surfaced by working up through 220 grit and then using the random orbit sander on corners and edges.

A side note: I was also able to turn it quite succesfully, although it did burn some of my tools a bit. You can see the turnings in bar rails and in the wine bottle opener handle at the link below.

For finishing, we just applied 4 or 5 coats of waterlox, with only minimal rubbing between coats. The resulting finish turned out to be a beautiful satin, and we did not see any need for filling of grain. The results, which can be seen at

I hope this is useful to someone, if not the original poster.

Bob Meppelink

Wow. There must have been a fortune of lumber in that bar.