# Planing knots and curly wood



## marianarlt (Nov 6, 2017)

I'm doing a lot of pallet recycling to start out with all this woodworking and one of the fun and astonishing things is that you get a lot of different wood types out of it. It happens to be one slab resulted in being a very beautiful local tree which is called Huanacaxtle or Guanacaste in English with a tremendous open pored colorful pattern clearly separating sap from heartwood. I wanted to smooth the face and just have it around for a while until I decide what to do with it. But here's the thing. Even on the wood database it is recognized as


> "Diffuse-porous; solitary and radial multiples; very large pores in no specific arrangement, [...] Easy to work with hand and machine tools. However, tearout is common during planing, [...]"


So that's exactly what's happening to me. Massive tear out. Most of it is the result of huge knots but then there's another thing I had on another piece of different wood as well. The grain actually is going in two opposite ways on the same face.








From what I understand and observe is that the grain around knots is rather coming together and up towards the knot than going across it, which is apparently logical. I do not quite understand though why the grain would be in the opposite direction on the same face of a board. Still that is not my question (though it's interesting), as I can turn the board around.








My real issue with these boards is that they are heavily twisted and it's not just a matter of passing my low angle block plane a few times over the knot. I have to remove quite some stock on both faces, running over a LOT of knots. I resharpen my blades multiple times throughout the working session on one piece to diamond extra fine (about 1200). I do not use a strop. I do not own a low angle jack plane (I would guess this is one of the situations where it would shine). I've got a simple N°5 and two wooden N°4's with huge mouth openings because well, they're really old and I mostly use them as a scrub plane, although they can shave quite nicely. And my low angle block plane.

*What is your experience with knots, curly wood and opposing grain direction in general?*
_How do you plane them *when you have to remove stock* rather than just smoothing? What are your tricks?
(Like hollow grind, micro bevel, specific bevel angle, specific motions, better toss it, strop to 180,000,000 on a real cow?)_


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