Reply To: Texas Live Oak Experience?

I’ve worked with a California variant — the Coastal Live Oak. Absolutely beautiful stuff, but it weighed so much that you’d want to carefully consider a piece of furniture of any size. A slab-top dining table or etc of this stuff would really be daunting to move.

It was a PITA to work. It was a locally harvested slab, so perhaps I’d feel differently if it had been some carefully selected free from a professionally-managed lumber concern, but the grain was wild, it had tons of internal stresses and it moved as much as any wood I’ve ever used. Add on top of that the hardness — all work has to be done in very small increments with freshly-sharpened tools and takes much longer than you expect.

If you’re new to hand tools, and don’t have access to any machines, you might want to pass on this opportunity for a while, especially if you’ve not worked with very hard woods yet. OTOH, if you’ve done a few projects with, say, hard maple and you didn’t find it problematic then perhaps you’re ready to try live oak.