exotic bowl-wood lots

Each lot is made up of woods described below and packed in a USPS "Flat Rate" box, which is by far the cheapest way to send it. Each lot is mixed to give a good variety of color. Most lots will have a few 3" wide planks and the rest 1 1/2" wide. The Flat Rate boxes are 14" x 12" x 3+", and I stuff them pretty full, so you'll get just over 3BF. Each lot is $50.00 which works out to about $17/BF which obviously is not even close to the cheapest way to buy such wood if you have the time, energy, and $$$ to seek out this variety and buy full planks or more of each species. I believe it IS a reasonable price given the quality and the selection and the time it takes to cut/sort/pack each lot.

Depending on how you construct your bowls and the size you make them, you will get anywhere from 3 to 6 bowls from one lot. If you're new to doing these laminated bowls, I'd suggest that your first efforts have diameters of 6" to 7", in which case you should get about 5 or 6 bowls from a lot. If you are INCREDIBLY careful in your construction techniques, you could get 8 bowls of 6" diameter from each lot.

REMEMBER: glue the blanks up so that you minimize the amount of wood that will be cross-grain to the chisel when you turn. Look at the grain allignment in my bowls and you'll see what I mean.

The difference between what I'm selling here and what I use in my own bowls is twofold:

First, the wood I use has sections that need to be cut off and tossed. I do NOT include any such in these lots. All of this is solid useable wood, cut from the better sections of what I stock.

Second, the VERY best pieces of wood that I get in do not go in these lots. That's a tiny percentage of what I stock. I have about 35 pieces out of 1000 or so that I did not consider for inclusion in these lots because of high quality but more like 200 pieces that I did not consider because of low quality and that doesn't even count the cutoffs that fuel my barbeque pit.

So, while these lots don't have any of the very best of the best, they also don't have any of the poor quality that is in many sections of the planks I buy. You will not find splits, discoloration, edge flaws or any of the other problems that wood can be prone to.

Most of the woods will look MUCH better in bowls than they do sitting rough on the shelf in these pics. I want to emphasize that my own bowls are made from the same planks that these are cut from and you can see from the pics on my bowl site that they turn out pretty nice.

I have sanded one face and one edge of most pieces and many of them are also already decently surfaced on the other side. Some are rough on the other sides.

In the images below, the woods are labled as follows

AFRO = afrormosia
AND = andiroba
ANDIROBA = andiroba
ARC = aromatic red cedar
ASH = ash
BAS = basswood (also BW)
BIR = birch
BOC = bocote
BUB = bubinga
BW = In an apparent attempt to avoid consistency and promote confusion as much as possible, I find that I
have used "BW" for both basswood and Billy Webb wood. They are easy to distinguish (basswood is white and light, Billy Webb is golden and/or greenish and very heavy)
CAN = canary
CHE = chechem
CHECHEN = chechem (yes, I used the old name chechen by mistake)
COCO = cocobolo
COW = cowtree (= palo de vaca)
CY = cypress
CYP = cypress
D FIR = Douglas fir
ELM = elm
FIR = fir
GA = goncalo alves
HMAP = hard maple
IPE = ipe
KEKELE = kekele
LAC = lacewood
LATI = lati
LONGHI = longhi
LW = lacewood
MACH = machiche
MAH = mahogany
MAHOG = mahogany
MAK = makore
MER = meranti
OBE = obeche
OK = okoume
OO = osage orange
OSAGE = osage orange
OX = oxhorn
PAD = padauk
PAE = paela
PAELA = paela
PDV = palo de vaca
PH = purpleheart
PINE = pine
POP = tulip (poplar)
PV = prima vera
PW = Peruvian walnut
RED = redheart
RH = redheart
SAP = sapele
SAP (M) = sapele w/ pomelle figure (M => mottled)
SAPODILA = sapodila
SIPO = sipo
TEAK = teak
TIA = tiama
TZA = tzalam
VIR = virola
WALNUT = walnut
WAWA = wawabima
WEN = wenge
YH = yellowheart
ZEB = zebrawood

the smaller pieces are 2" x 12"
the larger pieces are 3" x 12"

thicknesses are mostly 3/4" but some are 1/2" and some are about 1"