Once, many years ago, I bought a small truckload of what we called ‘Indian rosewood’ from a bespoke furniture-maker in Mid Wales (in the UK). He was down on his luck, needed the cash, and was selling-off surplus inventory.
That’s the last time (well, almost … see below) that I was able to legally buy anything resembling ‘rosewood’. I miss it. The Welsh-bought treasure trove lives on in my shop as a handful of scraps – deep purple-black, richly- aromatic, ivory sapwood, lovely to work and unmistakable even in tiny accent strips.
I’ve been searching for an alternative ever since. ‘Surely’, I’ve thought to myself, ‘ a nation as generously endowed with indigenous and unusual timbers as New Zealand must have something dark’. The Australians have some, although not much is commercially available, and little is exported. NZ? Nope.
Until now. A mate recently dropped-off a boot-load of weathered, gnarled, silt-impregnated drift wood, garnered from the Whataroa River in South Westland, in the South Island of NZ. Try this, he suggested.
I’ve just cut into it, and it looks like red ebony and polishes like basalt!
What is it? Southern rata. Probably recycled geologically through an upland swamp. maybe hundreds, even thousands of years old. Tough, heavy, incredibly slow-grown (almost invisible growth-lines).
Eureka!
Malcolmwww.macpherson.co.nz
Edited 1/2/2008 12:33 am ET by Malcolm
Edited 1/2/2008 12:37 am ET by Malcolm
Replies
Later, I'll reprise the story of my Australian desert acacia - a species only found in a small part of inland Queensland. I had a single piece, gifted to a Canadian medical emergency specialist who worked for the Royal Flying Doctor Service based in Townsville. Given him by an outback nurse, hand-carried from house to house for a number of years, finally given to me.
Malcolmwww.macpherson.co.nz
Edited 1/2/2008 12:43 am ET by Malcolm
... and then there's the story of how I bought a piece of real rosewood, also in Oz, and talked my way through NZ customs. It lives on in my Chopper panel plane.Malcolmhttp://www.macpherson.co.nz
Malcolm,
Stop that boastin' and send large samples of that timber here to Galgate, UK!
Incidentally, that stuff you obtained from Wales was probably exported to you illegally; but if you return it, via my free inspection and testing service, I will not shop you to The Authorities.
I coud boast about my coffee table, the top of which is made from a single 18" X 36" X 1.5" plank of Brazilian rosewood, reclaimed from the bartop of an olde pub being "refurbished" in Kendal. The table also has legs of the same stuff 4" X 4" from the newel posts of the staircase in a demolished Kendal bank, built in Victorian times. Various other bits of BR from the bank's skirting and door frames also got into the table.
This table positively glows in the sunlight, with nothing on it except Liberon Finishing Oil and a regular wax polishing. There is everything from purple & chocolate streaks to light walnut-colour in there - a wonderous timber beloved by them aforementioned Victorians and often found in their posher buildings, here in the UK.
Sadly I must report that the demolishers (ignorant fools) skipped or burnt the majority of this lovely wood, before it could be rescued by a friend who was working on site. I have devised a horrible punishment for the perpetrators, when I catch them unawares down that dark alley.
Lataxe, rosewood fetishist
Yeah!Those are the stories I love! That's what makes working wood such a fun thing.Here's another. In NZ there's an eBay substitute called TradeMe.Last week I spotted a blurry, too-small photo of a couple of planes and a handful of other things (levels, as I recall). No bids, only a couple of days to go, and one of the planes looked as though it might be a Scottish style (Mathieson or Speirs) panel plane.'Is that thing wood or metal', I emailed, ' and could you post some better pics?''Metal', came the reply, with 'Mathieson' on the lever cap, and probably also on the iron. Some new pics confirmed the make, but not the condition. I bid $50, and sat back to watch, hoping no-one else had spotted it.Some chance. The lot topped-out at $500+, and I dropped out at the mid 300s. There were bidders from NZ and Australia, and I think it went to a dealer, who is probably polishing it up for retail on the international market as I type.Sigh!Malcolmps I bought the rosewood from Crickhowell when I was based in Brecon, in the Brecon Beacons National Park. Most was used in the UK, the rest stuffed into the container of workshop stuff I bough as household effects back to NZ. http://www.macpherson.co.nz
We've missed you Malcolm, great to see you posting again.
Ron
Greetings Malcolm,
I trust you had a good hibernation (;).
I have some Rata, but it is not impressive at all-maybe I should bury it in the nearest swamp.
So let us see some pictures of the Rata you have....
Hey, Philip, how are you!How goes the plane-making?There's are varieties of South Westland timber (totara, some rimu, matai, even kahikitea) that the locals call 'mountain' (as in 'mountain totara').When I arrived in Whataroa (in deepest South Westland) from Wales, in 1986, a retired local farmer heard I was interested in timber, and showed me a giant lump of stuff, part-buried in the roadside grass and shrubbery, that he had dragged out of the Whataroa River with a tractor when he was a boy.He'd intended to dynamite it into fence posts, but never got around to it. As I recall it was about 25 feet long, and all the sap wood was long gone. A local chainsaw miller called Danny Nolan cut it into 2 inch boards for me. The biggest was nearly 4 feet across. The two of us could just pick them up. The farmer (Steve Nolan, long departed) called it 'mountain totara'. It was very fine grained (hundreds of years per foot of thickness), sweet to work, and had presumably come from the cold, alpine, high terraces of the Whataroa catchment - the same source for my dark geological rata, maybe? A North Island dealer sold me some southern rata a year or two ago - mid-red in colour, very plain and coarse-grained. Not very exciting. Paddy Kennedy's lumps from the Whataroa River are a different kettle of fish altogether.Malcolmhttp://www.macpherson.co.nz
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