Tropical wood · Tropical America
Pacuri wood
Pacuri (Rheedia spp., family Guttiferae) is a tropical timber from tropical America. Green, its Janka hardness is 1,250 lbf (5,560 N), and air-dry it weighs about 55 lb/ft³ (881 kg/m³). The figures are from the USDA Forest Products Laboratory's Tropical Timbers of the World, pp. 267–268.
Other names, by country: Palo de cruz (Puerto Rico), Limoncillo (Mexico), Caimito (Honduras), Madroño (Colombia, Venezuela), Pakoeli (Surinam), Remelento, Bacury, Pacuru (Brazil), Charichuéla (Peru).
Key numbers
- Janka hardness, dry
- Not printed
- Green: 1,250 lbf (5,560 N)
- As printed: “Janka side hardness for green material 1,250 lb.”
- Air-dry density
- 55 lb/ft³ (881 kg/m³)
- Basic specific gravity
- 0.72 oven-dry weight, green volume
- As printed: “Basic specific gravity (ovendry weight/green volume) 0.72; air-dry density 55 pcf.”
- Shrinkage, green to oven-dry
- 14.2% tangential
- Radial 4.0%, volumetric 16.6%
One source: USDA Forest Products Laboratory, Tropical Timbers of the World (Chudnoff, 1979 edition), the only published source read for this wood
Strength
Bending strength is the modulus of rupture (MOR); stiffness is the modulus of elasticity (MOE); crushing strength is compression parallel to the grain. The sheet collects these from published tests: it prints 3 data sets, from different tests and sources, so they can differ widely; all are shown, in the sheet's order, each at the moisture content printed beside it, never restated as 12%.
| Moisture | Bending strength (MOR) | Stiffness (MOE) | Crushing strength |
|---|---|---|---|
| Green | 13,000 psi (90 MPa) | 1.8 million psi (12.4 GPa) | 5,850 psi (40 MPa) |
| 15% MC | 18,800 psi (130 MPa) | — | 8,650 psi (60 MPa) |
| 12% MC | 18,400 psi (127 MPa) | — | 9,050 psi (62 MPa) |
A dash means the sheet prints no value; none is filled in.
What the data sheet says
- Color, grain and texture
- Heartwood dark yellow-brown, grayishor pinkish-brown merging gradually into the sapwood; surfaces sometimes specked with resinous exudations Luster medium to rather low; grain straight to irregular and roey; texture medium to coarse; odorless and tasteless.
- Working properties
- Reports on workability vary with species from moderate to high resistance to cutting to machining fairly well; reports on ease of finishing also variable.
- Durability
- Species in Surinam rated durable to attack by decay fungi and fairly resistant to dry wood termites. Species in Colombia are resistant to a brown-rot fungus but not the white-rot in a laboratory assay. Under field conditions the wood was susceptible to decay and attack by insects.
- Uses
- Furniture, flooring (quarter sawn), heavy construction, and general carpentry.
- Where it grows
- Widely distributed in tropical America from the West Indies and Mexico in the north to Argentina.
Quoted from Tropical Timbers of the World, pp. 267–268, a USDA Forest Products Laboratory work in the public domain.
Work it out for your project
- Rank woods for furniture with the species picker
Weigh pacuri against other woods on hardness, weight, movement and color, every figure from the Wood Handbook.