My wife had to go to a few businesses yesterday in order to source some landscaping supplies, and what have you. I decided to come along as these places were in the industrial complex part of town where a few lumber places and metal depots were! After hitting a few of her stops we ended up going to the metal supermarket, and after discovering they didnt have the dimension of brass I wanted for my infil plane project, I went to the lumber place accross the street.
Its murder when you dont have much cash and the place you are going to is having clearance sales, but its even MORE excrutiating when they have gone through thier warehouse out back, sorted thier entire inventory, and discovered piles of gems that THEY didnt even know they had!
One of the treasures they had were back issues of woodsmith and shopnotes mags they had kept that didnt sell on the month they were stocked - issues that went back to the single digits! nice!
I was drooling over boards of gaboon ebony, figured maple, hondo boards 3&4" thick, bloodwood, tigerwood, lacewood, zebrawood, brw, wenge, a huge board of pink ivory at $1150 etc etc etc when I stumbled upon a couple large blackish chunks of wood, which I assumed was jet bl ebony.
I got closer and read the tag - It was lignum vitae that they had discovered - which had been sitting lost up in the loft of thier stock barn for nearly 20 years collecting dust.
I dont know if where you come from, its easy to source large chunks of Haitian Ironwood, but were I live its about as rare as hens teeth, never mind THESE dimnesions!
Ive always wanted a chunk of real haitian ironwood for a special project, and here I was looking at some prime time chunks of preban Haitian Ironwood, but.....at over $80 a bf I wasnt going to leave with these intact chunks today either,
The dimensions were huge too - one {4/4 I think} was over 14" wide 3" deep and almost 3' high, at about $350.
The other one {8/4} was about 4" by 2.5" and a little over 3' high,I think { it was nearly 3 bf anyhow}
I asked if they would cut a chunk of the 8/4, they absolutely refused to cut either!
It wasnt worth crying too hard over with so many other nice boards around to dream about, so I looked aroud and discovered a bin full of little hondo boards that were the cut outs of neck blanks from some guitar company,{they said they were from illinios????}
These were pretty nice chunks left over from single neck blanks and they were only a titch over $1 lb, so I got a big bunch {14 or so and some smaller straight boards too} with my limited bank for the day - about 35 big ones
{I am holding some money back for other obligations}.
All in all it was a pretty good score, I felt!
My wife had to look around for some stuff so I carried the hondo out to the truck and had a smoke, started readin my latest shopnotes mag which had come in the mail.
nearly 10 min later she comes wandering over to the truck and starts stacking some of the stuff she bought in the backseat,.....
"you forgot this"... she said,
and handed me an 18" piece of the 8/4 ironwood board!
I guess being female, curvy, and beautiful, its alot easier to convince a middle aged man to cut a piece of wood, that they dont want to.
What a woman!
I know alot of you guys are a little older, and have been collecting woods a long time,
{back when everything wasnt so scarce or expensive!}
perhaps you have big sheds full of nice wood, and this may not seem like a big deal score to you, but Ill tell you, it is a real treasure to me.
This definitely goes into the very special project wood pile, which is small........... but growing.
I wish I had a camera working guys,
Id like to show you the hondo cutouts and the Ironwood, but while Im able to actually take the pictures, they wont load onto the computer!@@@@#$%'
Anyhow, she made my week with her kind gesture and ensured herself a months worth of massages.
Cheers
Charliewood
