Tasmanian Black Heart Sassafras Victorian

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tgsean

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G'day folks

Here is another pen that was auctioned at the fundraiser. Its a Victorian kit, first one I made and it sold for AUD 200. Tasmania has some lovely timbers, this is called Black Heart Sassafras. This timber looks spectacular on bigger turned items like salt and pepper mills, bowls etc. The unfortunate things is that most of the black heart is on the outer surface of the blanks, and they get turned off. Perhaps they need to be cut differently? Since I get them as blanks there is not much I could do! C &C welcome
 

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robutacion

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Aug 6, 2009
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Australia - SA Adelaide Hills
G'day folks

Here is another pen that was auctioned at the fundraiser. Its a Victorian kit, first one I made and it sold for AUD 200. Tasmania has some lovely timbers, this is called Black Heart Sassafras. This timber looks spectacular on bigger turned items like salt and pepper mills, bowls etc. The unfortunate things is that most of the black heart is on the outer surface of the blanks, and they get turned off. Perhaps they need to be cut differently? Since I get them as blanks there is not much I could do! C &C welcome

Sean,

I haven't seen this thread until just now and yes, Tasmania has some very pretty woods in general but, many of these woods are cut to produce max. yield volume and not high quality grain, that would mean, a large percentage of waste that sometimes is not viable otherwise each highly graded blank, would cost a lot of money, and this is fully understandable from the commercial viewpoint.

If you are buying the wood in pen blanks sizes, yes, you are limited to what you can do to utilise a particular feature of the wood that is close to the blanks edge however, it depends a lot of you confidence in accurate drilling, if you know you can achieve that anytime necessary, you simple off-centre the whole to utilise the part of the blanks you like the most, this off-course is easily achievable if the blanks size has enough "meat" and not 18 or 19mm square, when you want to use it on a kit that requires large sizes tubes.

Sometimes, is better to buy a blank that has enough size for you to play with, when visiting the shows, you have the possibility to see/inspect physically each blank so, if you see a piece that has what you want/like in a particular area of that blank, you need to invest in the whole blank to then, take it home and sliced it the way you want, you may endup with 70% waste or less quality wood but, that is the price you have to pay to get what you want, unless you speak with that fellow in South Australia, from the small town of Mount Compass and get him to advise, what he has that can be suitable to what you want, "he" (or someone else) will move a mountain of logs to find what you want/need, "is possible"...!:eek::wink::biggrin:

Cheers
George
 
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