Elm

[Fiddleback]

You are right in letting it dry. The peice I used warped on the knife handle, I had to remove the slabs and plane them down. I probably had to take about 1/8" off of them to make them fit:thumbdn: Luckily I bought some of the multi layer spacer material from Texas Knifemaking that I used to make up the space.:thumbup:

Yea, I'll probably give it another year actually. I've got a bunch of wood thats sitting around waiting for me to think its dry enough...

 

[misanthropist]

This thread is very interesting!

As testified in this very thread, a hard, dense wood ought to burn long and hot because there is more fuel there than in a softwood...

And yet when I was a kid, I heard the poem a million times:

Elmwood burns like churchyard mould
Even the very flame is cold.

So do the british have a different kind of elm with a lot of water content? Or is some folk wisdom actually every bit as unwise as most folk?

 

[Jeff H]

.........Elm, cottonwood and Ash. The ash was the most desirable .

I'll take Ash any day. I wentthrough a mess of Cottonwood last Winter that was a pain in the neck too though. The maul would sometimes bounce straight back off the top of an 8" diameter stovelength but would pop bigger stuff, sending the halves flying. Made good firestarters though.

 

[mete]

In the NE locust gives more BTUs than any other of the firewoods .They used to grow it just for firewood.Another very dense wood is dogwood, so dense that you need to add it to a hot fire and use more draft to keep it burning !

 

[dipbait]

I have burned elm before. Burns up quickly, wont split. Its alright for campfires. Terrible for home heating.