Post by majorminor on Jun 4, 2021 10:27:41 GMT -5
...just an observation. It's been several years but I used to occasionally search Ebay and a few of the specialty wood houses for little cut offs and chunks of Brazilian suitable for bridges or fingerboards and/or genuine Honduran mahogany billets suitable for acoustic back and side sets. I've got a little stash of this and that accumulated and over the years have done some millwork jobs in genuine mahogany, wenge, shedua(ovangkol) Kingwood, and Granadillo and grabbed a piece here and there. Not sure why as when I'm gone I suspect it will either be "worth" very little or worth a ton but illegal to possess. My plan was to rathole some of this stuff and maybe sell it off later in life for walking around money. The bland dark pattern grade quarter sawn mahogany is getting scarcer out there and the Brazilian and Madagascar in anything larger than a pen blank is slim as well now. Noticeably different than even say several years ago. I think we might be in the home stretch for commercial availability of a lot of this exotic stuff.
A little rosewood story. Some time around the winter of 2004 a high end cabinet guy passed away and his ex was cleaning out his storage unit and found a big unmarked board. She started calling around and got ahold of me and said it was super dark and heavy and he had brought it up from Colorado and been storing it for years so I went and looked. We met at a storage unit in Whitefish Montana at about 9pm and did a deal in the headlights of the cars with every ones breath steaming in the cold. It was a board that was approx 1 1/8" varying thickness x 12-13" wide slightly tapered 1 live edge x 12' long. It was filthy and caked with grime. Had a palm sized pocket of dry rot on 1 face that was about 1/4" deep. I was pretty sure it was rosewood of some type, and possibly Brazilian, but there are all sorts of weird, less valuable, rosewoods out there and that little spot of dry rot made me nervous. What if the inner parts of the board were riddled with that honeycomb rot? I honestly don't remember what we settled on but it wasn't much - like $250 - for the board. Took it to the shop the next day and fed it thru the wide belt and kissed 15 thou off one face to knock the cobwebs and the mouse piss off to see what I had. As soon as the board hit the first drum that pungent sweet smell started filling the shop and I knew I was in business. It wasn't a "sexy" looking board at all. Very dark, flat sawn, minimal landscape spiderwebbing that was hard to see because the board was almost black. If processed there would have been at least 250 beautiful almost ebony looking acoustic bridge blanks in that board. I'm guessing here but at let's say $35.00 a blank today(if it's even legal to private sale?) = $8,750 + maybe another 1K in smaller blanks, bindings, and headstock overlays. So pretty much a 10K board today give or take. Actually maybe double that if some back and side sets were sawn as well from the best parts of the board. I sold that board a week after I got it to a luthier for 1K and thought I was slick. He in turned milled it up and turned it in to many very dark, bland, and boring flat sawn back and sides sets for $1,200 a set and thought he was slicker.
A little rosewood story. Some time around the winter of 2004 a high end cabinet guy passed away and his ex was cleaning out his storage unit and found a big unmarked board. She started calling around and got ahold of me and said it was super dark and heavy and he had brought it up from Colorado and been storing it for years so I went and looked. We met at a storage unit in Whitefish Montana at about 9pm and did a deal in the headlights of the cars with every ones breath steaming in the cold. It was a board that was approx 1 1/8" varying thickness x 12-13" wide slightly tapered 1 live edge x 12' long. It was filthy and caked with grime. Had a palm sized pocket of dry rot on 1 face that was about 1/4" deep. I was pretty sure it was rosewood of some type, and possibly Brazilian, but there are all sorts of weird, less valuable, rosewoods out there and that little spot of dry rot made me nervous. What if the inner parts of the board were riddled with that honeycomb rot? I honestly don't remember what we settled on but it wasn't much - like $250 - for the board. Took it to the shop the next day and fed it thru the wide belt and kissed 15 thou off one face to knock the cobwebs and the mouse piss off to see what I had. As soon as the board hit the first drum that pungent sweet smell started filling the shop and I knew I was in business. It wasn't a "sexy" looking board at all. Very dark, flat sawn, minimal landscape spiderwebbing that was hard to see because the board was almost black. If processed there would have been at least 250 beautiful almost ebony looking acoustic bridge blanks in that board. I'm guessing here but at let's say $35.00 a blank today(if it's even legal to private sale?) = $8,750 + maybe another 1K in smaller blanks, bindings, and headstock overlays. So pretty much a 10K board today give or take. Actually maybe double that if some back and side sets were sawn as well from the best parts of the board. I sold that board a week after I got it to a luthier for 1K and thought I was slick. He in turned milled it up and turned it in to many very dark, bland, and boring flat sawn back and sides sets for $1,200 a set and thought he was slicker.
