On the wood in our handles and planes, and its name.
We use red ring-cupped oak (红椆木) for chisel handles and for the bodies of our planes, always reclaimed old-growth stock. The color runs from pale to dark enough to pass for rosewood, with mineral streaks, ray fleck, and grain that shifts from one billet to the next. Two blanks off the same board can come out visibly different.
Botanically the wood is a ring-cupped evergreen oak, section Cyclobalanopsis (青冈类 in Chinese). It is a group of species. China alone has dozens, and reclaimed old-growth stock like ours is almost certainly a mix of several, hybrids among them. The closest single name is Quercus myrsinifolia, 小叶青冈, also sold as bamboo-leaf oak. The group is named for the cupule, the cap that holds the acorn: where the familiar deciduous oaks carry a cup of overlapping scales, these carry concentric rings. That ring is the quickest way to tell the group by eye, though the lineage itself is drawn by DNA. The Flora of China keeps them in a genus of their own, Cyclobalanopsis; the prevailing view since Denk and colleagues' 2017 revision returns it to Quercus. Either way it is an oak, but a different lineage and a different wood from the deciduous, ring-porous white and red oaks the word usually names.
The name is not botanical, and even in Chinese it is usually written wrong. 椆 (chóu) is the timber character for these hard, dense evergreen oaks, a class that runs from the 青冈 ring-cupped oaks to the 柯 (Lithocarpus). Our stock is the red kind, 红椆. It is usually written with one of two homophones instead, 红绸 (red silk) or 红稠 (red dense), neither of which is the timber character. Spelled any way, it names a grade: old stock whose heartwood has reddened with age, dense and tough enough to take a mallet. The people who cut it sort by density and toughness rather than by species, so the name is already a kind of sorting, done before it reaches us, and long before botany had a name for the wood. White oak, red oak, hickory, and cherry are named the same way: each is a working name, chosen for how the wood behaves, and the oaks and hickory each cover a whole group of species.
Japan uses the same group of oaks. Their tool woods, the 樫 (kashi) oaks, are section Cyclobalanopsis too: 白樫 shirakashi is Q. myrsinifolia, one of the very species in our mix, and 赤樫 akagashi, sold in English as Japanese red oak, is a red-heartwood sibling, Q. acuta. Japanese plane dai and chisel handles are made from these same oaks, though much of what supplies them now is imported and softer than old stock. Japanese red oak names only one species of the group, so it is too narrow a name for our wood, which is a mix from across the group.
There is not much old-growth left. This oak once grew across much of eastern Asia, and the big trees were cut slowly, over millennia. The last century took a heavier cut: what remained, in the mountains and the places hardest to reach, was shipped to Japan during the wartime occupation, by local accounts. What survives reaches us as reclaimed stock. We do not use freshly cut wood because it is usually not mature enough, and the red has not yet come in. So every piece we turn or plane is old, though we cannot say exactly how old.
China and Japan (and other east Asian cultures) have long used it for handles and plane bodies because it is both hard and tough: it takes mallet blows without denting, and it does not split. Most woods give only one of the two.
Because the wood varies this much, building a matched set requires not only sorting the turned handles by hand but also planning each cut around the grain and color of the board. We group handles close in color and grain, and that's why a set costs us more than the same number of single chisels. Even sorted, no two are identical: the color is close, but the grain and mineral lines differ on every piece. Staining everything one dark brown would hide the variation, but we would rather leave the mineral lines showing and do the sorting.
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