We have some pretty hard woods too. The good old madrone, black locust, is sweet gum as hard as grey gum? We have that too. Many have the impression that Douglas Fir is a soft wood of soft woods..some of the pecker woods may very well be, but the big sappy older stuff is so hard that it is slower cutting than the hardest oak. Each branch has a crystallized tap that spears all the way to the core of the tree which hardwoods don't have.