On Saturday 27 May 2017 01:49:49 Erik Christiansen wrote: > On 27.05.17 00:01, Gene Heskett wrote: > > On Friday 26 May 2017 23:22:41 Erik Christiansen wrote: > > > Erik > > > (Who's carted some bricks, and quartered a small Blackwood log > > > with the chainsaw today, so will pass on the extra exercise.) > > > > Blackwood? Oh wait, your are an Aussie IIRC. Is that a kin of > > Ebony? Dry, sawdust like sand, fine grained, mills to a high polish > > if your tooling is sharp. > > Now I wish it were, but then I'd have to stand in a queue for the > trees which came down along the street in the last storm, instead of > having them to myself. I just have to beat the ones who'd cut it up > for firewood, but they fortunately don't favour green timber. > > > I am wondering if it could be used in place of Ebony, which is from > > Gabon, Africa, and about $150 a board foot here in the states for a > > pretty solid black. Getting it past customs takes more weight in > > paper than the square foot weighs. Chain of evidence type of thing. > > This stuff is actually dark brown, like walnut, though nearly black on > the end grain when freshly felled. The sapwood is white. Wikipedia > also likens it to walnut, then says it is now used as a substitute for > koa. I've used it for interior balustrading, and plan to make some > modular bookshelves.
Interesting description. But I've never had a piece of koa to assess its beauty, or lack thereof. Wood beauty is I've observed, in the eye of the beerholder. :) So what I think is a beautiful wood may be ugly to the next observer. I am in love with a now rare, beatles have killed all the local examples, white ash. So I've collected, as I've stumbled over it, quite a bit of it, some of it drying in the woodshed for a decade now, and some 2x8's bolted down flat in a steel frame standing in a corner in the machine shed. The steel never quits pulling on it, and I could probably go unbolt it today and have it dead flat by a couple passes over my jointer. It spent a decade under black plastic that has since gone away, behind the machinery barn at the wifes nieces dairy farm up in New York where Rusty had it milled and piled it up but found it had warped and wound pretty bad when he went to use it as framing for something, so he didn't mind when I abscounded with 200 or 300 pounds of it in our trips to see them. Very strong, and IMO quite striking when made into furniture and finished with clear oil. And it doesn't seem to age yellow either. I'm fond of maple and cherry too, but you've got to grab cherry as soon as the wind takes it down, it does not last long laying on the ground. Starts to turn mushy in 6 months. Vacuum dried maple makes good gunstocks, but the vacuum needs to be held for a year or so. > (Once I've finished the house plans¹ which I > refuse to pay an architect $6k to draw up, built the new house, > renovated this one and sold it, and moved all my klamotten out there.) > > ¹ Don't tell anyone that I've nearly finished drawing them up via text > input in the Postscript language. I find GUIs perverse unintuitive > undocumented atrocities, and can't abide the learning curve. With a > documented language, I'm in the driver's seat, rather than at the > back of the bus, constrained and thwarted by all the upholstery in the > way. I've defined doors, windows, etc, which auto-abut graphically, so > a wall can be textually created as a list of dimensioned components. > No rat-wrangling required, either. > > Erik Cheers, Gene Heskett -- "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
