Working Ebony

[D_W]

I am reminded today how different different woods are. I'm used to making planes out of beech, though I guess if we're counting, I've made four out of cocobolo and one out of purpleheart, and a couple of maple.

I found a 3x3 ebony stick that's dry and quartersawn for $100 earlier this year. It's 20 inches long, enough for two planes, almost enough for two planes and wedges but it would make terrible wedge material.

I almost forgot in the "you have to be sitting" thread, at least initially, that I have three high end tools. No knives, but three kiyotada chisels. They are sort of hard to come by, but two different people did me a favor and all three chisels didn't cost that much. One of the chisels is a mortise chisel, 15 millimeters. Good for this kind of stuff - just a bit wider would be nicer 18 or 21, but it's not like there's a store with an array of these things.

I have turned ebony before, but never made a plane out of it. It works very easily, and then at the same time, dulls the plane irons very fast. It's brittle with silica - only makes a nice shaving when dry with smoother planes or try planes, the rest of the shavings fracture. You get about 15 fine shavings and then you have to step up thickness until the iron stops cutting. With the jack plane, you get a lot more, but the initial bite of the iron is gone right away.

Could be a while before I finish this plane, it's the holiday season and I have time. I can't think it'll take more than 8 hours to finish the plane, but I might not have that for a while, and I'll bet that I can't get by the mouth in this plane freehanding everything without chipping something out. If I do, I'm not afraid of fitting a slug in in front of the mouth, it's my plane, anyway.

(the very high end chisel mortises the ebony without any issue, of course, but it does stain the soft steel). Some random pictures with a comment after each:

https://s27.postimg.org/8uzjtsi2b/20161225_170547_1.jpg (the blank, half of it at least - don't get excited about the sandpaper, my wife chipped a glass base and I had to sand it and buff it out yesterday)

https://s30.postimg.org/inry48d7l/20161225_153211_1.jpg (the shavings from squaring and sizing the blank)

https://s24.postimg.org/4iagofq5h/20161225_170635_1.jpg (hard to make out, but you can just see the small specs of silica in these pictures - the camera doesn't know what I'm doing, so they're at the top of the picture far away).

https://s24.postimg.org/el10anlt1/20161225_172049_1.jpg (aforementioned mortise chisel - you can see scuffs on it. If you're keen eyed, you can see a tiny chip in the right edge of the chisel from the last time I mortised with it. I wanted to see how hard you could drive it before it fails, and the answer is, pretty hard, but I did get it to chip a tiny bit wailing on it).

https://s29.postimg.org/wt5u2y81j/20161225_172333_1.jpg (same chisel after a short time on an old turkish oilstone - it's what I have out and the fact that it's friable makes it work well for this. Bevel rounded just a little bit because I am hitting the chisel very hard in beech planes - and it'll help prevent chip in ebony, anyway. I thought the old small chips in the edge would get worse in the ebony, but they didn't)


For the couple of folks who have used japanese tools, you'll notice that the finish left by the turkish oilstone is kind of funny. I think it looks less fine than it is because there's a bit of oil on it and the flash of the camera picks that up. This chisel is so hard that it doesn't raise a wire edge when sharpening it.

 

[Steve1066]

I don't no about the Ebony I have never worked it, even though I have a couple of pieces that i picked up over the years not found a uses for them yet.
I do own a couple of old Japanese chisel and planes all second hand brought from Japan, one that spring to mined is a slick 34mm wide, l have never come a cross steal so hard in my life. It had a couple of little chips that needed grinding out, my grinder just made lots of finer smaller chip my old oil stone was a little better, so on to the Diamond 1000git was ok, but slow going. In the end I took it to a friend who has a wet wheel grinder which done the job, then I finished it on my slate and strop.
As you say no wire edge or bur. I just keep polishing it to a finer point. A completely different experience to sharpening a western style chisel.

 

[BHolcombe]

Looking good David! Ebony is interesting in that the surface will still look nice and smooth after the ugliest fracturing shaving.

 

[D_W]

I don't no about the Ebony I have never worked it, even though I have a couple of pieces that i picked up over the years not found a uses for them yet.
I do own a couple of old Japanese chisel and planes all second hand brought from Japan, one that spring to mined is a slick 34mm wide, l have never come a cross steal so hard in my life. It had a couple of little chips that needed grinding out, my grinder just made lots of finer smaller chip my old oil stone was a little better, so on to the Diamond 1000git was ok, but slow going. In the end I took it to a friend who has a wet wheel grinder which done the job, then I finished it on my slate and strop.
As you say no wire edge or bur. I just keep polishing it to a finer point. A completely different experience to sharpening a western style chisel.

Yeah, different animal. Brian and I have had discussions (I think it was Brian) that the hardest of the chisels take more skill to sharpen, but once you get the routine down, they don't take much total time to sharpen and you get to work with a sharper chisel if that's your thing.

They require someone who knows how to avoid damaging them, too.

I've had a lot of japanese tools in the past and not all of them are that hard. Some of the more pedestrian chisels are very nice to sharpen, just like a slightly harder western tool, and they sharpen OK on oilstones.

 

[D_W]

Looking good David! Ebony is interesting in that the surface will still look nice and smooth after the ugliest fracturing shaving.

Thanks, Brian. That part you mention (the fracturing) makes me think it won't make a very good plane (especially in regard to mouth chipping and abutment durability), but we'll see. It was surprisingly easy to saw the billet in half. No part of the wood seems very firmly attached to any other part. If it wasn't so abrasive, it would be nice to carve.

 

[Corneel]

Looking forward to see how the plane(s) turn out.

 

[BHolcombe]

Looking good David! Ebony is interesting in that the surface will still look nice and smooth after the ugliest fracturing shaving.

Thanks, Brian. That part you mention (the fracturing) makes me think it won't make a very good plane (especially in regard to mouth chipping and abutment durability), but we'll see. It was surprisingly easy to saw the billet in half. No part of the wood seems very firmly attached to any other part. If it wasn't so abrasive, it would be nice to carve.

I'm curious to see how that goes, I always find ebony to be a PITA to work for that reason. I'd assume it very similar to cocobolo, but maybe easier to plane.

Seal up the ends well, the stuff likes to crack. My local yard bought two logs of ebony about 10" diameter and you wouldn't be able to cut your billet out of them, they were so checked.

 

[custard]

Really black Ebony is getting harder and harder to find. Recently someone posted a video from a guitar manufacturer showing that in the past any felled tree that wasn't jet black was just left to rot, which has led to the tree becoming endangered. That and the fact that Ebony is time consuming and awkward to work means I'm exploring alternatives. Here are some timbers from my wood store,

On the left is approximately 5,000 year old Bog Oak, it comes in a range of colours from dark brown to jet black. In the past Bog Oak used to come from the bogs of West Ireland, but because no one knew how to dry it properly even huge trees would break up into tiny fragments that only yielded small pieces for pipe or jewellery making! More recently a guy in England starting taking Bog Oak dug up by farmers in East Anglia and he's now figured out a way of drying it so that it yields long, wide, stable boards. Bog Oak seems to be from an extinct species of Oak, because it's much denser than any current Oak wth a sky high ring count.

Next to that is some regular White Oak that I've iron stained. It's not a difficult procedure and delivers the blackest timber I've ever seen, I plan on iron staining some Swiss Pear which has an almost invisible grain structure, that should be pretty cool.

Third in from the left is some African Ebony from Gabon, this is the stuff that's almost impossible to find anymore when, like this, it's pure jet black. I've got a few cubic feet of this grade material and I won't be looking to replace it.

Next to it at the top is some thick saw cut veneer of Indonesian Ebony, more commonly known as Macassar Ebony. Even though it's usually cut quarter sawn to reveal brown and black stripes it's also available flat sawn, when you can find pure black examples. This is much easier to work than any of the African Ebonies, but it's also on the CITES list so is pretty rare. A bit of aside, when I first starting furniture making in the 1980's it was almost a right of passage for an ambitious cabinet maker to build a "masterpiece" Carlton House Desk out of Macassar Ebony. So much so that it became a bit of cliché and now hardly anyone wants to touch the stuff. Currently in the UK there's a guy doing the rounds of the timber yards trying to offload a massive barnful of Macassar Ebony which his father laid down as an investment in the 60's, he's now inherited it and is trying to cash in. But the CITES ban on exports means he's limited to the UK market. He started by asking £250,000 for the lot, and he's now down to £100,000 for the lot or two packages of £60,000 each. Still no takers, and my guess is he'll have to go a lot cheaper before he finds a buyer. It's astonishing how furniture fashions change, anytime up the millennium that would have been snapped up in a heartbeat.

On the right are two examples of African Blackwood. I'm surprised how purple/brown this looks in the photographs, in real life it's totally black, in fact it's traditionally used to make clarinets so you can tell how black it is. African Blackwood, although not available on the shelves at B&Q, isn't all that hard to find. It's actually a Rosewood (like DW's Cocobolo), and is easier to work than African Ebony. It doesn't fracture into such atomised dust, therefore it's a better bet for inlay work next to Holly or Sycamore where Ebony dust gets into the pores of the paler wood and makes a right mess. There is one strange quirk though, African Ebony despite it's propensity to fracture while being worked, actually bends fairly well with some localised heat to accommodate curved stringing. I don't understand why that is so, but I've seen it too many times for it to be a one-off fluke.

I'm now substituting African Blackwood for Ebony in a lot of my work. For examples I use it regularly to make the butterfly cleats on Nakashima style slab top, waney edged furniture, here's an example,

Odd that in this photo the Blackwood appears much blacker, even though it came from the same boards as the previous photo? Down to my rubbish phone photography I guess. These were sunk about 25mm or 30mm into the top, and have a 0.5 degree bevel worked on two sides to ensure a really tight fit with invisible glue lines. It would have been much trickier to pull this off accurately if working in Ebony.

I always wipe down both Ebony and African Blackwood with acetone before gluing as they're both quite oily. There was a link recently on this forum to a chap who claimed all oily timbers should be abraded rather than wiped with thinners before gluing. He sounded credible enough, but that's the problem with internet advice. On the web everyone can be Alan Peters! So unless claims are supported with copious photographs of people's actual work I tend to dismiss them. I can look at my own work in Rosewood and Ebony that was glued together forty years ago after first being cleaned with acetone, and they've held up pretty well, so in the absence of a lot more solid evidence to the contrary I think I'll stick with that procedure.

 

[Paddy Roxburgh]

Custard, how deep does the iron staining go? Can you sand/plane at all without revealing the lighter wood underneath?

DW, I'm looking forward to seeing your plane progress.

Regards, Paddy

 

[custard]

Custard, how deep does the iron staining go? Can you sand/plane at all without revealing the lighter wood underneath?

Hello Paddy, iron staining doesn't go more than half a mill deep at most, so a few rounds of grain raising sanding are in order first.

 

[Klaus Kretschmar]

Hi David,

interesting plane project for sure. Given the usual quality of your work, I'm looking forward to see it finished.
To my experience ebony stresses tool edges indeed ... but way less than some other exotic timbers do. Take wenge, zebrawood, iroko or bubinga, they eat up tool edges quicker than ebony does. And: ebony is rather forgiving while being planed or chiselled. It's brittle but it isn't splintery, that counts to me.

Klaus