Greetings and salutations...

On 11 Aug 2005 13:41:41 -0700, "Phil at small (vs at large)"
wrote:

It's been a really long time since I've worked with pecan, but it is
pretty hard-- It's a member of the Walnut family-- as are butternut
and hickory. Walnut & butternut are the softer woods & hickory and
pecan are the harder woods. The grain is really nice. The last pecan
I saw had a lot of knots. Use a sharp blade. The color is more like
hickory. I believe it is an open grained wood like black walnut, but
could be wrong. I just did a quick search on Google using
"woodworking"+pecan
as a search string & came up with 15000 hits

Well, a friend of mine and I spent some time putting together
a really nice workbench out of some 8/4 Pecan from a local
lumber yard (Jeffery's Woodworks...a GREAT source of wonderful
wood of all sorts...not cheap but great stuff). It was VERY
hard, and, very dusty to run through the planer, but, produced
a spectacular workbench top.
As it worked out, we were able to book-match slices
across the bench, so, it looked rather like a slice from a
trunk that was about 30" thick. One FINE looking workbench
if I say so myself.
Regards
Dave Mundt