I like to turn Gum but only the heart wood. My experience has been that the sap wood is rather bland but the heart wood is really nice, often with black streaks in it like some of the ebonies. I look for Gum with a large proportion of heart wood whenever I'm out scrounging wood but unfortunately most of the trees I find in our area have very little heart wood. I took down a 20" tree in our back yard several years ago and it had only 6 inches of heart wood.