Thanks for the nice compliments.
I am in the final curing stages of some of that wood and will be putting a quantity of stopper blanks in my buy/sell board within the coming week. There are already some catalpa pen blanks in there. .
That wood is very soft . One person suggested it looks like ash . It is darker in color than ash but the grain pattern is similar. But ash is a much harder wood. Catalpa is very light in weight . It is so soft that when I tap the threads to put it on a stopper mandrel I run a little thin CA into the hole and hit it with accelerator to harden the threaded surface . Even then, I bring up the tailstock for the majority of turning. I just sell enough blanks to cover my expenses of going to get the wood and chainsaw and bandsaw maintenance etc. Never get enough to cover my time :wink:
