Teak

Also called: burma teak, tectona grandis

Teak is a heavy, durable hardwood from the tree Tectona grandis, grown across India and South East Asia, and for well over a century it has been a standard choice wherever strength had to survive damp, weather or the sea.

Grading and rival Indian timbers

Not every log lived up to the name. Only about a quarter of the teak logs brought down to port met the top European grade; beyond that the trade graded teak chiefly by size rather than by quality. Malabar teak was rated the finest teak grown in India, and was heavily used for shipbuilding at Bombay. Teak also had rivals at home: sal wood, though less durable than teak, was stronger and tougher, and ranked among India's best timber trees, while sissoo was placed ahead of teak in at least one ranking of strength among Indian timbers.

Character, smell and durability

Freshly sawn, dry teak oxidises quickly in the air, turning from an initial light-green shade toward dark brown. Its smell has two conflicting accounts. Joyce, writing in 1987, held that freshly worked teak can carry a strongly unpleasant smell, similar to Australian walnut and some African woods. Jones, in 1920, described freshly cut teak instead as fragrant, like rosewood, from an oil-resin that also keeps off insects and stops iron rusting where it touches the wood; only once the wood had seasoned, he wrote, did that fragrance fade into an unpleasant smell like old shoe leather. Freshly finished teak surfaces take glue well. Teak is classed among the durable timbers, alongside oak, chestnut, yew and greenheart, and resists rot and worm damage better than red deal and similar softwoods, though its cost kept it out of everyday work. In one class of work it was overtaking oak outright: as Ellis wrote in 1908, "Teak is largely taking the place of oak for constructional purposes, being more economical to work, and withstanding the weather even better than the latter; it is also considered more fire-resisting."

Uses

In superior joinery, teak replaced ordinary deal, a general term for pine or fir board, for door and window heads, jambs and linings, and was used specifically for door sills. In public buildings, teak went mainly into stair construction and door work. In India itself, teak went into bridge building and railway sleepers; little of it was exported except to Britain, where it was used to back armour plate, and for ship decking, railway wagons and greenhouses. Teak framing was commonly joined with pinned mortise-and-tenon joints, a mortise-and-tenon joint, a projecting tongue fitted into a matching slot, locked in place with a peg driven through it. Although teak's strength roughly matches that of some American species, it has not typically been the first choice in the United States when strength is the main concern.

Substitutes

Two other timbers have stood in for teak. Afrormosia, also called kokrodua, is a large, dense West African hardwood with a specific gravity of around 0.69, originally brought to market as a teak substitute, and it fills the same roles: decorative veneer, interior woodwork, flooring, joinery, furniture and boatbuilding. Iroko has also been used instead of teak. A further imported hardwood, its identity unclear from the record, was noted as heavier than most teak and harder and darker than its relative Padouk, though expensive to work.