I’m sorry if this is not in the spirit of the community, but I figured my dad would know because of his experience woodworking, and I don’t want to ask him for obvious reasons. I’m happy to remove it if it doesn’t fit.

I have an aluminum herb grinder, that regularly gets jammed up with resin. I tend to use a regular (probably pine) food skewer to clean it off, because I don’t want metal shards coming off of the aluminum from a metal scraper or plastic pieces from a plastic scraper. The pine works okay, but I have to replace it regularly and it can’t get everything.

I know pine is probably one of the softest woods, but would a hard wood be significantly more durable if it were cut as thin as a skewer (4mm diameter round)? Would anything be both reasonably obtainable (I live in a place with frequently abandoned old furniture, if that would be a good source, or I can go to a lumber store) and more durable enough to be worth it?

  •  Spoodle   ( @Spoodle@beehaw.org ) 
    11•3 months ago

    If you are using wood food skewers, they are probably bamboo. While not a wood, bamboo is actually really hard. On the Janka hardness scale it rates well above food safe, non-exotic, hardwoods like oak and maple.

    Bamboo skewers are cheap, food safe, and available at almost any grocery store. They are one of my go to cleaning tools.

    Definitely don’t go with any wood from a piece of furniture or a random piece of wood if you are worried about ingesting tiny bits of the wood. Some species of wood can cause real issues for people due to their oils and some more exotic lumbers are actually toxic. Wood used in furniture? You have no idea what that was finished with or what kind of glue was used.