Replies

1. 
   ring | Mar 04, 2009 08:49am | #1

   Bottom line - you have no way of knowing about any specific purchase.

   I have some limited experience with what goes on in Angola. There are large tracts of forest that are given away or used as incentives or offered at ridiculous prices to concerned parties close to the leadership. Historically, the forests have been "in the way" of mining for oil and diamonds. So the logging rights are used as a kind of perk to help make the deals that they are really interested in. And depending on who gets the logging contract in the end, anything can happen. There are European-owned companies working there who use reasonable forestry practices for their own reasons, but there is also a good deal of uncontrolled wheeling-and-dealing in lumber as a commodity. It won't change until the local authorities begin (if ever) to really care about such things. Like most things in the third world, documents and certifications are for sale to whoever needs them. So your bubinga planks might have green pedigrees from here 'till eternity but you really cannot know a thing about them. That's the situation.

   David Ring

   http://www.touchwood.co.il/?lang=e&id=1

1. 
   Rooms | Mar 05, 2009 04:40pm | #4

   Thank you, each of you,  for the information. It seems like I suspected, a lot of variations and mostly unknowns.

   Rooms

2. 
   hammer1 | Mar 04, 2009 06:10pm | #2

   Large slabs of Bubinga are usually representative of the most deplorable of forestry practices. The complete opposite of "green". Little more than a manifestation of human greed and total disregard for the natural environment. Those large slabs were likely a 100 year old giant.

   Beat it to fit / Paint it to match

3. 
   roc | Mar 05, 2009 08:06am | #3

   OK on a lighter note ( and I promise to stop working bubinga . Honest ) I been heeding lwilliams info on blade clearance angle and burnishing the wood surface which messes up the absorption of glue and finishes.

   I planed with a bevel down and with a bevel up with a back bevel and more clearance angle. I then looked at the pores with a fifty power microscope.

   What I saw in the bubinga, to my great surpass and fascination, was that the pores were ALL filled in with ruby red crystalline "sap" or "resin" or some thing. Beautiful ! So the pores could not close up no matter how I planed it. The other pores going the other way, I forget what they are called, were so microscopic I could not even detect them !

   But what I am getting at is . . . here and there in the red stuff were little crystals of nice emerald green. It was kind of Christmasy.

   So yes Rooms bubinga can be green. Hope this helps!

   I am pulling for ya ! We are all in this together.

   roc

   Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe. Abraham Lincoln ( 54° shaves )

   
   

   ---

   Edited 3/5/2009 12:11 am by roc