se7enthdevil

cheers mate... i'd love to get some holm oak but it rarely grows near me. it would not be heavy enough for skittle balls anyway. 50lbsft3 is not heavy enough as the woods i use for the balls are 70 plus...

i think your best bet is to go to a joinery that has a large CNC machine as they often have a planing or leveling cutter head and this would do the job you are after. it won't be speedy so no matter how many boards you have just expect it to take time.

only to fill up the lowest area with all my skittle timber i had delivered last week. there were 56 9' beams in total. about 2 tons that i had to shift by hand 3 times.

another thing i did was to clear up the timber rack at the joinery shop i'm renting.

also did a load more mahogany persian meels and a set of six 5 1/2" oak balls for the same customer.

and yet even more.

and even more.

and more.

here is some more recent work i've done.

sumac is supposed to glow under a blacklight bulb.

if it can be slabbed into 2 1/2"-3" then yes.

get lumps that size to a woodturner...

looks to be a huge sumac to me, but if it is then it's the biggest sumac i've ever heard of... i want to stick to hickory because of the size of the tree but the latex oozing from the bark means it's in the anacardiaceae... what's happening to the timber? what size is that lump on the tractor?

any chance it could be carya glabra? https://www.wood-database.com/pignut-hickory/ http://www.hobbithouseinc.com/personal/woodpics/hickory.htm

need to see the bark...

bone dry eucalyptus is wicked as a fuel wood. i've also burnt a few exotics and ekki is a hard one to better.

this is him. he sorted an 084 i had so it ran on aspen... https://arbtalk.co.uk/profile/30144-spudulike/

i think big j had a trakmet from poland and he did some very big logs on there including a big beech tree for my skittle timber which was 4 1/2' at the base. he seemed a happy customer so could probably help you make some decisions.

first of all that list of numbers is highly suspect and secondly this test does not "break" the wood. the janka test uses a press to find out how much pressure is needed to force a hemisphere at .0444" diameter into the wood on three surfaces. these are the face, side and endgrain. then an average is given as the hardness from those three figures. here is one of the tools used. the test has been done on thousands of different species but as most of these are commercial timbers the "hardest" wood may not be one of them. also the inaccuracy is a major problem as sometimes you only get a couple of sources and these can differ greatly in their findings. my mate eric at the wood database did a great video about the buloke species (supposed to be the hardest) and he has tons of books and has don years of research on the subject to try and get his website as accurate as possible. one thing to remember after digesting all the info you find on the hardness of wood is that is the hardness of a timber has absolutely nothing i repeat nothing to do with how easily the timber will split. not all hard timbers are that interlocked. the interlocking of the timber grain is what makes the timber hard to split.

i would have said lignum but i was sticking to stuff you actually see on the british isles.

i can't see a single ray. are you sure it's an oak a pic of the endgrain would be nice to see.

apple wood was used up to a point but my research shows that this was only true mostly during the 30's as the west country got rid of huge amounts of orchards during this time and i guess there was a glut of timber just waiting to be used. historically sycamore and beech were used as they are easy to dry in larger sections and bloody big trees. apple is difficult to season well and usually splits anyway and it's hardly the biggest tree in the world so you don't get much timber yield from it. tell these non believers that you know of the maker of most of the skittles in the UK and he uses sycamore and beech only.

the main reason i thought for timbers like hornbeam (and other hard woods) was for the wear factor. hornbeam is well known to have excellent properties against resisting wear and so wearing out too quickly and i expect a few others like apple, whitebeam and hawthorn are probably quite good too.

no, blame the people who reintroduced it from parts of europe in the late 18th century as an ornamental tree. timber is moderately durable to durable (not the sap) and if cut properly in 1" boards usually quartersawn then it is a very decorative timber as the species has fairly large rays.

hornbeam is only use for one sort of skittles. it's called old english skittles or london skittles and there is only one pub left (possibly in the world) that still plays the game. the freemasons arms next to hampstead heath in the cellar. other timbers used for skittles are beech, sycamore and boxwood.