Hey, cast bronze is cool shit, I recall some dog toys were actually usable sinew btw, but appalachian hickory is actually as good as you can get in the US
Strictly speaking, Maclura pomifera (Osage orange) actually has a higher crushing strength and a significantly higher Janka hardness than any of the Carya species found in the eastern US ("Appalachian hickory" not being a single species), so "as good as you can get" depends on how much you intend to hit things with it and generally bang it around.
Appalachian hickory refers to slow growing trees from a few areas of the eastern us:
https://www.kingfisherwoodworks.com/the-strength-of-wood.htmlI showed two videos with a guy who specifically tests to destruction, I wouldn't otherwise give any sort of credibility to a claim about some sort of hidden grove of super hickory.
Osage Orange:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MmEMib5hRTAAppalachian Hickory:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6alV4ASeygGuy has tests from shit as out there as Lignum Vitae, which is actually harder crushing wise but far too heavy for weapon use so it turns into an over heavy lever. Wood has lots of variations, take the reclaimed cabinets I've been making shit from lately, pine has some really soft easy to work with species, then it has trees which were chosen for their knots, that get called knotty pine but there isn't really any such thing. Parts of this wood are easy to work with, then you find a hidden knot while trying to cope out a pretty curve and PTWANG away goes pieces of the blade. I wind up with bits of the wood I remove beforehand and segregate due to knots like the one I made the saw holder from in the background here:
Still on topic because that handle makes me so happy, though also kinda disappointed at the ones I thought were pretty before.
Similarly, hickory is sturdy stuff in general, but tighter grained hickory grown under the right conditions would not be surprising to find it exaggerates those qualities.