Bradford Pear

Appropriate protective equipment is therefore always recommended when working with this, or any other, wood, exotic or domestic, unless you have worked with the species before and are certain you are not sensitive to it.

Also bear in mind that many of the negative health effects, although certainly not all of them, are associated with high volume contact among industrial users working in mills and other processing facilities where the amount of contact with dust and wood is much higher than would ever be realistic for a hobbyist user.

Complete information about health hazards associated with a wide variety of exotic hardwoods is available from The Wood Database.  Additional information about how to best use a dust collection system and personal protective equipment, such as respirators, can also be found through this excellent and comprehensive resource.

Fortunately, I did not experience any adverse effects while working with Bradford Pear.

I realize it could all be a coincidence but after the experience with Timborana I am taking few to no chances with potential wood allergies.  Just because a negative reaction hasn’t been officially reported and documented somewhere doesn’t mean you can’t experience one all the same.

My Personal Experiences

This bowl made from Bradford Pear started out as a green turning experiment.

Green turning is a process in which a fairly wet blank is turned down to almost the desired finish dimensions, allowed to dry in a controlled manner, and then remounted on the lathe and turned down to the final desired dimensions, surfaced, and finished.

A good rule is to leave 10% of the starting material such that a 10” square would be turned down to 1” walls to allow for distortion in the drying process.

The drying process much be controlled to prevent checking, cracks, in the material.  Different woods dry at different rates with denser and harder woods generally drying more slowly, sometimes over literally years while some very dense woods are reported as never being completely dry at all.  There are multiple popular ways to control the drying process including kiln drying (quite uncommon for this purpose, but I have heard of it) boiling, and microwaving, all of which are potentially dangerous and/or require special equipment.  More common methods employ different chemical sealants which can include anything including diluted water-based glue, wax emulsions, latex paint, or shellac.  Other specialty products act on a molecular level to displace the water in the wood cells and replace it with a chemical additive.  Regardless of the method employed, the goal is to SLOW the evaporation of water from the wood such that rate is slow enough that the wood does not crack but not to prevent the water from escaping at all.  Personally I use the commercial product Anchor Seal for this purpose because it is very effective, readily available, easy to use, and cleans up with soap and water.  It is fairly expensive however but I don’t use large quantities at any one time.

My Bradford Pear blank was rough turned in January 2016 and coated liberally with Anchor Seal, which was allowed to dry.  I then weighed the blank, noted the weight, and then reweighed the blank about once per month.  Once the blank stopped loosing weight and remained a constant weight for three months running, I judged that water lose had ceased and that the blank was ready to be remounted and turned to final dimensions.

I was pleased that the rough turned blank had not distorted so wildly as to crack nor was it difficult to remount in on the Nova Chuck.  It turned back to round easily enough and was hard enough to take a fine cut and finish with sharp turning tools with carbide cutters from the Easy Wood Tool line.  The piece sanded nicely and I was quite pleased with the end results from this experiment in green turning and sealing.