So we needed a very hard wood for a special project we are making which is a speedloader for Glock magazines. The problem with using our normal wood was the magazine would tear the fibers up on the wood and they wouldn’t last very long. So we wanted to try Rosewood – something we knew was very hard and we had available to us thru our supplier here Greener Lumber.
Rosewood on the Janka scale 2,200 . Compare this to white oak at 1350 or western cedar at 350 – it is a lot harder than what we normally cnc. The Janka scale (which I had to look up) rates wood by how hard or how well it withstands dents, dings and wear – which also affects how hard it is to nail, screw, sand or saw. Flooring companies use this a lot with rating their hardwood flooring.
Well as you saw, it wreaked havoc on our bits and we had to slow things way down just to get it to work. So we reached out to the community and to Garrett at IDC Woodcraft. Garrett thought he had a solution for this and sent me a link to a roughing bit he calls The HOG. So we put it to the test…
I started with Mahogany which is 900 on the Janka scale (remember our Rosewood is 2,200). Let’s see how it does.
So the results speak for themselves. I am impressed with this bit. I will note – this was not sponsored – I paid for this bit from IDC Woodcraft (which I will leave a link to below). Garret was very helpful and has incredible customer service. You can tell he truly cares. I have some other bits I will be testing in the future from him so check back.
A Link to the bit used – https://idcwoodcraft.com/product/long-1-4-roughing-endmill/
