USS Constitution

I bought some pieces of wood removed from the USS Constitution during routine maintenance several years ago. My wife was "organizing" (which typically means throwing my stuff away) one of our storage closets and asked if she could throw these little scraps of wood away despite the wood being in their original bags that were clearly labeled as wood from the USS Constitution. Her rationale being that l would never use them for anything. With some degree of indignation, I said absolutely not! Just to prove a point, I grabbed one of the blocks of wood and a nautical pen kit and headed to the shop. The block was pretty small and I had to cut it along the diagonal to get a blank long enough for the tube. The wood is pretty soft and reminds me of Douglas fir. Finished with Glu Boost.

Looks great! I still have a few pieces of USS Constitution wood. I make a Nautical pen with it for charity every few years. The Constitution store no longer sells it, so it's getting very hard to find.

Nice looking pen. The wood and antique Copper go well together.
I was able to buy some of the Constitution wood some years back. I used most of it for scales on a few knives. I have very little of it left but I'm just adding what I have left to my WWII Battleship wood collection. I sure wish the gift shop still sold pieces.

Nice pen. I also bought some of the pieces years back when we visited Boston. I'm low on what I have and call the museum to try to get more and was told they no longer carried it. I think they figured out that they could make things themselves and get a premium price for them, so why sell just the wood. I sold several pens at cost to friends that served in the Navy.

I have a few blanks made from left over lumber (150 year old Spanish oak) from the construction of this ship: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Salvador_(Cabrillo's_ship) While not as historic as "Old Ironsides", ship lumber is pretty cool.

Nice!

One of these days, I'll make something with the piece of "pitch pine" that was decking on the SS Nomadic - the tender ship that carried supplies, passengers and cargo from shore to the Titanic. It's a museum ship in Belfast now, when they restored it a few years ago the local woodworking clubs got some of the removed decking.