Amazing wood you may not have seen before

J

Javaman

Joined
Jun 22, 2009
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So originally I planned to use some of this to make a custom Ibanez Voyager guitar but it struck me that this would be wonderful to use in this venue as well!

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Here is the link to this 50,000 year old wood!
Ancient Kauri
 
I remember Dan Koster using that. Nice wood! I wasnt going to bugger up my post count until later but oh well.
 
Goldang, another knifemaker who's also into guitars... cool! There's been several posts from folks like us lately... we should start a thread in Gadgets&Gear. I'd start it myself but don't currently have a way to get pics from my camera to my laptop... cats chewed up the dang cord. :o
 
I'd really like to see this stuff in person before I shell out a bunch of money for it. The high grade material is 40 times what I pay for desert ironwood (per lb)!
 
I have some pieces that I purchased from Dan Koster. Forgot to send it in with my last batch for stabilizing. Definitely beautiful wood though!
 
I've used Kauri before. It's beautiful stuff, ages to a rich, deep honey color that changes depending on the angle you view it (brain fart, can't think of the word for that). Actually very similar to bois d'arc.
 
It looks a lot like plain brown / tan cedar, until you finish it out and it is soft, so it has to be stabilized. Comes with a COA saying its over 50K yrs old.
 
I picked up 4 board feet of it a couple years ago and have been using it for a few different projects. The only problem is the figured pieces are too dark when finished and the lighter pieces do not have much figure. Some of the nice figured pieces go for a premium. After sitting in a bog for 50,000 years it picks up some of the mineralization of the peat.

It's also very brittle wood but stabilizes real well.

kauriwood-1.jpg


kauripen.jpg


This chunk of root wood had some nice color to it. But it was the most brittle of all the chunks I got.
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It's very cool to be working away on something that is 50,000 (or more) yrs. old. I just finished a necklace for my wife made from some woolly mammoth tusk and kauri beads I made.
 
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there is an extremely expensive " fiddleback ancient Kauri" out there but its like $90 a block. this stuff is freakin amazing but darn for that kind of money there are many extremely gorgious wood species you can get for a 3rd of that price.-it seems each week the price goes up on it. most of the dealers sell not only by weight and size but also add on a subjective price for the look. so that $90.00 a block could be mediocre comparatively.-thanks marekz
 
I just got a knife block sized chunk of Irish Bog Oak and pound for pound it was more expensive then Kauri. But it is not as plentiful as Kauri and much tougher to get your hands on.
 
I have like 8 nice chunks of Kauri that are 2x3x6-7. The prices aren't that bad per pound if you are buying smaller blocks as opposed to something like a big bowl carving blank or table top sized slab. Kind of like buying curly maple. You can always find enough curl in "scrap" wood for a nice knife handle, but it takes a pretty special piece to be big enough to slice up for things like guitar tops or violin and cello backs. Supposedly, the neat thing about kauri is that even the relatively straight grained stuff has some degree of that 3D chatoyance. They recommend that you finish it out to at least 1000 grit.
 
B Finnigan said:
I picked up 4 board feet of it a couple years ago and have been using it for a few different projects. The only problem is the figured pieces are too dark when finished and the lighter pieces do not have much figure. Some of the nice figured pieces go for a premium. After sitting in a bog for 50,000 years it picks up some of the mineralization of the peat.

It's also very brittle wood but stabilizes real well.

kauriwood-1.jpg


kauripen.jpg


This chunk of root wood had some nice color to it. But it was the most brittle of all the chunks I got.
pendant4-web-1.jpg


It's very cool to be working away on something that is 50,000 (or more) yrs. old. I just finished a necklace for my wife made from some woolly mammoth tusk and kauri beads I made.
Click to expand...
FYI, those white spots on the box are probably not phot artifacts or dust. Some of the really good kauri has mineralization that they call "whitebait"
 
The white specs only showed up in the photo's and I remember wiping it down several times to get rid of them. If it was the mineralization then it only was visible with the full spectrum light of the flash.

I might have to re-photograph some other finished pieces to see if it will also show up. The wood does have some amazing chantoyance and can appear very dark, almost black in one light angle then burst out with golds and reds at another.
 
seriously though have you all seen the fiidle back ancient kauri http://www.geocities.com/birddogsix/knives.html now that stuff is expensive even by the block if you can find it. i did find some awesome knife scales they were like 290 new zealand dollars--that like $180 us dollars. to get the really awesome stuff is a hard find and way expensuve.. im sure you can still get nice kauri at a cheaper price--but boy does that fiddleback kauri look good.--marekz
 
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