Wenge

In addition, the long-term negative effects of exposure to sawdust of any species are well documented.

It is important to remember that although many people may, or may not, be sensitive to any given wood the only experience that truly counts is your own, so use reported side effects as guidance but not as a substitute for cautious and safe practices.  After all, despite a lack of reported major health effects, turning a bowl blank of Timborana almost killed me through immediate respiratory distress followed by a multiple week long illness, so caution is ALWAYS warranted.

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.

But 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 experienced no negative side effects when working with Wenge.

My Personal Experiences                       

I have worked with Wenge before, in bowl blank format, and I don’t recall that I was thrilled with the experience due to the incredible hardness of the wood and the extreme difficulty in achieving anything remotely resembling a decent finish.  However, I thought that in pen blank format the difficulties would be minimized, and as I had the material I figured I might as well use it.

Wenge is obviously hard and dense and to compound the potential difficulties, the piece I was working with was cut on a diagonal to increase the visual appeal of the stripes, but this also meant that I was not consistently turning with the grain of the wood, and that always makes the process more difficult.

Knowing how brittle and hard Wenge is, I was very cautious in making the bores for the pen parts.  Slow and cautious won the day but I was nervous about it.

Under just about any circumstance, I prefer to turn really hard woods on the lathe because it is usually simple to achieve a very nice cut and finish without the need for a great deal of sanding as happens with softer woods.  However, none of that really applies with Wenge because the wood is so brittle while also being hard.  And, as noted above, the diagonal cut increased the tendency to break.  Therefore, I had a terrible time achieving a decent cut finish on the Wenge blank and it is practically impossible to sand both because it is so dense and because of the differential densities between the lighter and darker areas of the wood.  I confess that the blank moved on to finishing before it really should have, but I couldn’t see a practical way to improve the outcomes with such a difficult wood to work with in the first place.

For a finish I chose to apply cyanoacrylate because that is my go-to choice for a high gloss and durable finish on a pen that needs to withstand frequent handling and being tossed in a drawer and/or a purse.  As was true of the rest of the experience of working with Wenge, the finish process was not smooth, in part because the surface of the blank was not as smooth as it should have been, and that affected the ability of the finish to flow on evenly.  In the end, it wasn’t the greatest finishing disaster I have ever had, but it certainly wasn’t a resounding success either.