8 hours ago
I want to make my next wooden handplane. I made the last one from beech, I like it, but I work with it on woods harder than it all the time, and wearing is a problem to some extent. I work with black locust most of the time. The options I have is to use black locust for the plane, or I also have osage, that is about 15% denser as I remember. I wonder if it would be a good choice though? Besides being denser, I also read shrinkage or movements are not a really big issue with that wood. But when I cut the osage tree out, the bark released some kind of gluey sap. Like the fruit. It is very heavy stuff, very sticky. I wonder if that is in the wood too, and if it makes it difficult to work with the wood itself? Or because of the sap can it irritate my skin?