Scott Grandstaff wrote: "Did you ever carve yew wood? Pacific yew?
Its weird. Its not so hard but its ridiculously tough. A drawknife cuts, 
but then it wants to
blow out. The only reliable way to spokeshave it is to cut practically 
sideways. A super heavy skew angle in other words.
 ?But a scraper? A scraper feels really weird like you are carving some 
kind of plastic. But it cuts a treat."

Scott, do you use Pacific yew much for tool handles? Do you take precautions
about sapwood/heartwood or grain orientation?
I ask because, according to books on the English yew longbow, the advantage of
yew was that the sapwood had tremendous tension resistance while the heartwood
had tremendous compression resistance, so making a bow with 1/2" thickness of
sapwood in the back and an inch of heartwood in the belly gave you a natural
composite bow (the Turks achieved the same result by laying sinew in glue along
the back, and plates of horn along the belly, with a neutral wood core to carry
the horn and sinew). However, if you strung a bow backwards and tried to use it,
it would snap in half on the first pull, because the sapwood had no compression
resistance and the heartwood had no tension resistance.
Yew bows were always made fro.m relatively young trees for this reason. They
would be split into maybe six staves, so the diameter must have been only four
or five inches, with the staves arranged belly-out around the circumfrence

I remember when I was a kid, the local public library had an English book from
the 19th century on making archery equipment. It may have been published as late
as the 1890s, but the mental set was all the archery revival of the 1860s, with
young ladies being instructed in shooting by young gentlemen (who got to wrap
their arms around them for didactic purposes), and bowyers making no changes
from what they had been taught in a tradition that really was unbroken since the
late middle ages. All very different from the wilderness-and-wild-indians
archery that developed in America at the end of that century, with its emphasis
on experimentation and new methods. It's many decades since I saw that book in
the library, and I never tried to make a bow, but I still remember a surprising
amount of what was in it, like leaving extra wood around pinhole knots and other
flaws, instead of trying to smooth them out. I wish I had a copy.

I gather, again only from reading, that there is a similar effect with hickory.
The favored wood for impact tool handles is always sapwood, which has about
three times the bending strength of any other known wood. But hickory heartwood,
one of the favored woods for Conestoga wagon axles, gains compression strength,
weight, and hardness while losing springiness and impact strength; hickory
heartwood is no good at all for axe handles. Or so I've read.
I'm asking to enlarge my understanding. All I know about this stuff is what I
read in books.

Tom Conroy
Berkeley