More to the topic at hand - don't get me wrong, I'm not dismissing anyone out of hand - I have a section of robinia that has gotten itself extra dried out, ( coming from some significant splitting along the grain up from the but as a result of less than careful felling, and to be fair some ingrown deficiencies of the wood itself all contributing to and reinforcing one another in a feed-back loop leading to a condition deviating from the norm which in this instance, is pretty workable wood ) at any rate, fortunate or not, it's a lesson in the importance, really critical necessity, of working the wood while the moisture content is high, particularly so because of the fibrous nature of robinia combined with work that is primarily in the length direction which is to say, chopping a mortise, for example would not pose the same difficulties in similarly dried out wood.