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 Queen Anne Cherry.
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
I was quite excited to work with this small and unique piece of Queen Anne cherry for several reasons. I greatly enjoy working with Black Cherry wood, indeed it is one of my favorite woods to turn. And, I distinctly remember planting a Queen Anne cherry tree in my childhood home’s backyard, so there was a nostalgic sense as well. However, the reality did not measure up to the anticipation.
The piece of Queen Anne cherry wood that I had proved to have several severe checks, or cracks, at least one of which had been filled with cyanoacrylate glue, presumably by the seller. In addition, there was a small amount of bark present on two sides, and the blank actually square.
I cut the block to round on the bandsaw without incident and proceeded to mount it on a faceplate for turning. It was quickly evident that the wood was quite brittle and it did not turn cleanly at all. Compounding the difficulty was an additional check which revealed itself on the now bottom of the blank and the pressure of an expansion chuck proved to be too strong and the bottom of the blank broke with the remainder flying off the chuck.
Despite this, I was able to remount a smaller faceplate to the piece, remove the damaged bottom portion, and recreate a chuck mounting divot. However, the break necessitated the removal of almost half the thickness of the original piece, which as a major loss.
The wood, while pleasant smelling, was clearly quite hard and slow to cut, being extremely well dried. The wood never cut cleanly, despite the use of brand-new carbide cutter blades being added to my Easy Wood Tools. At times it was as if I was turning acrylic blanks because of the extremely brittle nature of the wood.
Ultimately, through sheer stubborn perseverance, I was able to complete a small bowl from this blank but it was not a joyous process. Given the rarity of this type of wood, I have no way of knowing if my experience was due to having a particularly tough piece to work with or if all samples of this type of wood would behave in a similar fashion. But, I don’t much expect that I will find additional samples to test in the future and given the experience that I had with this one, I don’t know that I would want to risk it even if I could locate additional pieces.