I really like finely figured, well-grained pieces of wood. I've admired them for years in rifle stocks, cabinetry, dashboards, and so on. (Ever driven in a Rolls-Royce, where they not only make their own veneer, they also retain part of the log so that if your car is involved in an accident, they can recreate your veneer in exactly the same grain and detail?)
As you can imagine, I was very interested to discover a hardwood company offering pictures of precisely such woods, in their newly-cut, unpolished state. Talk about beauty in the raw! Here are a few examples out of scores on their Web site, most reduced in size to fit here.
Spalted Beech
Circassian Walnut Burl
Quartersawn Steamed London Plane Tree ('Lacewood')
Brown Oak Burl
Curly Quartersawn Old Growth Redwood
Aren't they absolutely beautiful? There are many more at the link. Go down the sidebar menu, clicking on every page, to see lots of them. Drool-inducing viewing for those who like finely grained and detailed wood.
Peter
7 comments:
I think that is one of the places that I found many years ago when I started looking for wood beyond what I could get locally. If you're looking for good prices and great service on foreign and domestic hardwoods, I have had superb luck with http://www.woodnshop.com/.
We used to have a sawmill. I LOVED the rare occasions when we ran across wood like that!
Thanks for the heads up. It's about 3000 miles away, but I have a customer that wants four spalted bowls and I've been having trouble finding spalted anything big enough. I'll give these guys a call.
Speaking of veneer, there was a time a fine automobile would use a plank. The dashboard on Jaguars of the XK series in my youth was a single plank of fine wood with holes drilled for the gauges. A friend of mine took the dash from IIRC an XK120 into a high school woodshop for refinishing.
The move to veneer was mostly a safety measure to avoid slamming body parts into planks that would then splinter and close around the body parts. The veneer and backing can be controlled in breaking and also cushioning during the break.
One of the nicest bass guitars I ever built started life as a skid on a pallet of reject lumber. Somehow, someone used a 2x8" plank of flame maple for that humble task, and allowed it to sit until one end rotted off.
I traded a fair bit of walnut for that puppy, and worth every plank.
Wound up making a 3/4 size Ric 4000 clone with maple/pau ferro lam neck and 33 1/8" Ric scale pau ferro fingerboard.
Googling images of guitars,gun grips, knife handles and furniture from various exotic hardwoods can lead to uncontrolled drooling, also.
Take a minute and look up pictures of Myrtlewood.
It only grows in two places, the Southern Oregon Coast area and the Holy lands.
The leaves are extremely aromatic, like Bay leaves on steroids and the grain patterns from the burls in the trees will make your eyes pop out when you see some of the finished pieces.
I grew up on the Southern coast of Oregon, there used to be little Mom and Pop Myrtlewood shops all over the place but they are almost all gone now.
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