Re: Sapele twisting after processing
|
Hey Darrell,
I made a few morris chairs out of 'African?Mahogany' years ago, so maybe 100+/- bdft? I experienced an abnormal of movement post-processing like you describe. Now, 'sapele' from my lumber yard is a different animal. Ive made many a project from sapele and love the stuff. Exterior door, large 15' dining table, plenty of island tops, smaller coffee table, smattering of cutting boards, and a maloof lowback. Overall, i have?3-4,000bdft of experience with it. The only real downside is it can sometimes have microchecks/fractures in the middle of a board that are impossible to spot in the rough. I dont know if its a drying defect specific to sapele or something inherent to the growth, but it can suck to discover right before finishing. Post a photo of your boards, but from my experience sapele is a darker red tone and denser than the african mahogany. I have never seen sapele/african mahogany marketed as the same set of species. The African Mahogany i used was lighter in color similar to freshly planed Honduran Mahogany, if you have ever built with the stuff.?
Patrick
On Wed, Feb 19, 2025 at 3:16?PM DARRELL MILLER via <dmiller823a= [email protected]> wrote: Hi all,
I'm sure there are folks here that have processed plain sawn Sapele (sometimes called African Mahogany). Has anyone experienced stability issues with plain sawn Sapele?
I came across 100 bdft of the wood (5/4) 6 months ago and it's been in the shop acclimating (shop has HVAC). I would have rather had quarter sawn but they were out. This morning I planed down a board, taking equal number of passes on each side for cabinet face frames, they also started moving after dimensioning them. This movement is 0.25" or more and some boards are moving in the face and edge directions.? The face frame grain looks uniform and the end grain doesn't appear to directional changes. At this point I'm not sure if the lack of stability is characteristic of plain sawn Sapele or just the board I picked. I generally don't experience this with White Oak, Cherry or Walnut. I'm doing another test where I process this material more slowly to see if the woods behavior changes, but this will take weeks. I experienced this issue before when processing Zebra wood for a project.
?
Thanks in advance,
Darrell Miller
Chico, Tx
|
