So, I finally picked up a thick board of wenge for a small project I'm doing -- 8/4 stock maybe 5" wide and 8 ft. long. I've only just begun working with it, but already I've run into some very odd features of the wood.
I'm currently making the individual pieces of the board, and as I was trying to joint the edge of each piece yesterday, I found that many -- maybe most of my planes -- were ineffective on it. The low angle jack just rides over the surface and creates a fine dust. The jointer plane, bedded at 45 degree, did a little better, but was removing most of the shavings from the front and back of the cut rather than the middle. The only plane that would bite the surface evenly was my 4 1/2", which I have set to middle pitch with a 55 degree frog. The blades are super sharp -- I sharpened them all before starting, and they work great in normal wood. There's something about the wenge that prevents the metal from biting at lower angles of attack. I don;'t know what I'm going to do when I have to dimension the pieces to final size, which necessarily involves a lot of handplane work because of their non standard shapes. I may have to resort to shaving them down with a power planer.