Forgotten Woods

We milled a new species of wood today. Panguana is the Peruvian name for it. Brosimum utile is the Latin name. After cutting the first cant it became obvious why the local people call it Panguana, the wood colors and grain look just like the feathers on the Panguana bird. The bird is a small quail like grouse, very beautiful and very fast.

Panguana, the wood is not at all common and rarely cut commercially. The trees grow between 0 and 1500 foot elevation. It grows up to about 120 feet tall and can have 40″ diameter trunk and 60′ long. The tree yields nice wide and stable boards with little shrinkage.

Panguana seems to have a nice tonal quality and may turn out to be a good Luthiers wood. That makes sense because it is in the same genera as Manchinga.

These tremendous burls form in the tops of the Shihuahuaco tree. One of the largest trees found in the Peruvian Amazon forest. An extremely heavy, dense wood, these burls can be used in aquariums because they will not float and are totally awesome looking. An especially important and vital wood for keeping plecos since Shihuahuaco is a natural food fiber source for this species of fish living in the tropical steams and rivers of the southeastern Amazon jungle.

Four weeks, six flat tires, three dead batteries, failed brakes, and running out of gas to many times to count, our delivery of mango wood arrives. Delivery truck is a 1971 (?) Land Rover Four Door! Years of being driven hard and put away wet are starting to show.

Being prepared is having a spare tire, extra gas, and lug wrench right at your finger tips.

Note original leather seats, classic!

Ropes and old bicycle tire tubes holding it all in. Original paint seems to be in darn good condition.

Over 1200 kilos of mango! Anyone know the max payload for this Land Rover?

yahhh baby, that’s junk in my trunk!

Hollow stump with burl growing inside. Nice!

A recent storm blew down a large old Elm tree in San Luis Obispo. Rusty recovered the best part of the trunk and has just finished processing it into nice bowl blanks. Most have the bark on to allow turning natural edged bowls (NE).

The wood is very wet and does require being treated as green wood. I  turned a small bowl the day the wood came in from a random 4 inch blank. Water was spinning all over the shop! Rough turned down to about a half inch thick and soaked in alcohol (DNA) over night. Let it sit on the work bench in the open air for 5 days and then finished turning it down to about 1/4 inch thick. The bark on the edge stayed on without any problem. Soaked in linseed oil (BLO) over night and here it is a month later.

A couple weeks ago I roughed out a bigger bowl and soaked it in DNA a couple days and it has set out without checking or loosing the bark edge.

We have just listed a nice selection of Elm blanks

Lance

We have processed a new batch of Quillabordon bowl blanks! Quillabordon is a beautiful semi-hard yellow colored wood. Very fine grain texture. center of logs have a nice pink striping. The wood when cut is a bright yellow color and turns golden orange when anchor seal is applied. The color change will be similar if you finish the wood with linseed oil (BLO). These blanks are fairly dry and can be turned to finish without a delay. The blanks tend to have some fine checks that tend to aquire the pinkish color. The checks hold together when turning a bowl and tend to add to the interesting color combination.

In Peru Quillabordon is used to make furniture. When finished with clear lacquer the furniture is a nice light lemon yellow. Although we do not have lumber available we do have a limited supply of small thin boards 1/2″ and thinner.

Rusty turned this bowl about a month ago as a test. Turned and oiled without any drying time.