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I can hardly hide, that olive wood is one of my absolute favorite woods. And when a batch of particularly beautiful and finely grained wood turns up, I can hardly help but buy that lot. That\'s exactly what happened to me here: A few thousand really very fine grained scantlings in a dimension not previously listed at the fine wood sale: 30 x 30 mm thickness.
Without exaggeration, these scantlings are among the most beautiful wood I have ever had: they are spectacularly colored, very fine and densely grained, indescribably fragrant, simply top quality.
The downer about this lot, however, is unfortunately that it is still relatively fresh and therefore needs to dry for some time before we will post these scantlings in the store. But if you look at these photos, you\'ll agree that it\'s worth waiting a bit until they\'re dried enough to be sold and processed.
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And again we could buy a small lot of very high quality Honduras mahogany (Swietenia macrophylla) in special widths. For many years, this wood, which is protected by the CITES agreement, has only been available from post-breeding plantations in South America and other parts of the world. Our wood actually comes from the former British Honduras, today Belize, and is of really exceptional quality: widths of about 30 cm are already something very unusual, especially the guitar makers certainly appreciate these properties for one-piece bodies.
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One of the important qualities and virtues of a timber merchant is to have a lot of patience when dealing with timber. That\'s why we usually store the wood we sell to our customers for several years until it is really dry enough to be processed immediately.
Sometimes we are particularly pleased when we find treasures in the warehouse that have been put away for a long time and had to go through a lengthy drying process. This is exactly what happened to us with a batch of thick olive wood planks. These had certainly been stored for a couple of years since their visit to the sawmill, yet they were far too damp to sell with a clear conscience.
These olive wood planks are certainly some of the nicest we\'ve had cut to size in a long time. Very large widths, respectable lengths and then thick planks with 50-60 mm thickness: it is a real pleasure to rediscover this treasure after a few years of drying.
By the way, this olive wood is not comparable to other wood from normal Spanish or Italian olive trees: it comes from a very special small-fruited olive species that grows almost exclusively on Corfu: the tree belongs to the Linaoleia family, a variety that grows unusually tall, often reaching heights of up to 20 meters. These trees have a long history dating back to the 16th century. Brought by the Venetians, these trees of the Lianoleia variety grow strongly in height and form strong trunks with rich foliage. Their wide distribution was the result of measures taken by the Venetian government, which rewarded the planting of young olive trees with high premiums. This led to an impressive increase in the number of olive groves on the island. The oils obtained were mostly burned in oil lamps, the tiny olives of this variety with their high yield were the first choice for this purpose, and since you can wait for them to fall voluntarily from the trees in autumn, you can still find dense forests of the trees as tall as houses on Corfu.
It is believed that all the cities on the Adriatic Sea occupied by the Venetians were illuminated with the illuminating oil produced on Corfu and exported from there. Certainly, the expansion of olive groves was at the expense of the cultivation of wine, cereals and vegetables, so that the Corfiotes were forced to import these species from the opposite mainland.
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Once again we have had great luck and were at the right place at the right time: a larger old batch of very beautiful Makassar wood was for sale and despite the high price we did not hesitate. In all likelihood, it will hardly ever be possible to buy something like this again on the market, because Indonesia has long ago imposed an export ban on all unprocessed wood.  For this reason, well-grained Makassar has been extremely difficult to obtain on the wood market for a long time, and often it is only very narrow boards that can be bought at high prices.
Such large blocks with a diameter of almost 30 cm are an absolute exception, they have veneer quality and are simply beautiful. As the pictures show, the result after ripping was better than could be expected with much optimism; such perfectly figured and almost completely crack-free Makassar is rare. As always: Coming soon in this webshop!

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Bog oak in itself is not rare at all, almost every day in Northern Europe during earthworks, excavations, river deepenings, dredging in gravel and sand pits, logs are found stuck in the ground, usually even a real nuisance for the workers. A log that is stuck in the ground, often weighing several tons, is not so easy to remove, and usually a crane has to be brought in to help.

When this nuisance is finally removed, the log is salvaged and the work can continue, the next question is: where to put the debris? Even if the log is still reasonably intact and not completely decomposed and cracked, a rapidly progressing process of decay and cracking now begins, which can lead to the complete destruction of the wood in a short time, especially in warm weather.

It is possible to wrap the logs in plastic sheeting, but this almost always starts a rotting process with fungal growth and mold; it is possible to sprinkle the wood permanently with a sprinkler and thus preserve the condition for a time, but immediate cutting of the log into planks and boards at the sawmill has been found to be a safe method of making this valuable material usable. However, bog oak logs are not at all popular with sawmills, in most cases there is sand or small stones in the wood, which quite reliably ruin any expensive saw blade...

Now, for the first time, the color of bog oak can be judged: the most sought-after is, of course, a deep black color, which, however, only comes about under the fortunate interaction of various factors such as wood ingredients, iron ions, oxygen exclusion and bog water. Very often bog oak logs are colored only light yellow-gray, brown to gray, which, of course, are much lower rated colors. After cutting in the sawmill, the logs are then stored for years in different rooms with varying degrees of humidity until, after several years, multiple restacking, relocation to other rooms and a great deal of patience, they are eventually dried to the point where they can be exposed to normal climatic conditions. Under these normal conditions, the wood then dries down to a relative humidity of about 10%, so that the bog oak can then be further processed like normal wood.

Drying naturally creates great stresses in the wood which can result in extreme warping, cracking and warping, you can find some photos of such crooked pieces in the photo gallery. So drying must simply be done very slowly and gently with constant monitoring of wood moisture content. Despite careful drying, more or less severe cracks can always be found in bog oak wood, also rotten spots or spots discolored by fungi have to be cut out of the wood, so in the end only about 30-50% of the salvaged wood can be processed. The larger and longer the dimensions of the desired cuttings become, the more the scrap increases, and recurring cracks can increase the amount of scrap to be sorted out to 80-90%. We use this wood for a variety of applications, and even the scraps, offcuts and minimally defective pieces that occur when cutting fixed dimensions are combined in assortments and sold, this thousands of years old prefossil material is simply worth treating it with special respect!


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It is rare to be lucky enough to find such and huge and heavy burl of an elm tree, which is neither rotten inside, nor boring grained, but shows such beauty: Highly figured burl wood is rather rare, as most of these trees develop straight and simple grained stems. This wood is an absolutely rare classic.  Elm burl (Ulmus procera) from the Carpathian elm tree is a very attractive burl wood with a wide range of colors. It can have many different colors from yellowish pale to glowing red to rich denkel brown figured and is rarely as beautifully grained as these pieces of stem burl wood. A disease rampant throughout Europe, caused by fungi, decimated the elm population quite significantly, making the wood a rare species. The wood is highly figured and shows fine irregular burl patterns all over the piece, it is beautiful for a bowl and lots of other fine turnings!

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Rarely does one ever have the chance to find unsteamed pear wood as a dealer, since as a rule on the commercial route from the submission to the sawmill and then to the classic timber trade pear wood is steamed in all regularity. Completely nonsensical, however, as this turns the beautiful golden yellow hue into a dull pale pink. Why is this done? No idea, it has always been done this way....and I find the tone of muted pear boring and dull. I was therefore all the more pleased when I was able to buy from a private source a freshly cut pear tree that had not been steamed and was presented in all its beauty in its natural golden yellow colour. Even greater was the joy over such a Methuselah of pear tree, which despite its surely more than a hundred years of life, the tree showed no rot in the core, but was impeccably healthy.
Unfortunately, the tree had to make way for an access road to a property, and I am therefore pleased to be able to offer this special wood to our customers soon after some drying. A pear tree trunk with almost 70 cm diameter of the earth trunk is certainly not ordinary at all. But that is our business: to find unusual wood and then offer it to our customers. In this respect, nothing unusual anymore...
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Although the handling of precious and rare woods is part of our daily business, we are all always very happy when a new shipment of olive wood arrives. This month, we were finally able to receive a large shipment of olive wood and scantlings here, and the daily joy of unpacking the large boxes while stacking them on the shelves is indescribable: the wood smells wonderfully aromatic, is very pleasant to touch and, above all, it never ceases to amaze us with its incredible range of grains, colors, textures and growth characteristics: this range is larger than that of any other wood! Especially beautiful scantlings from ancient, no longer fruit-bearing wild olive trees are so beautiful that many are immediately put aside and after proper drying will go on sale as especially beautiful and extremely fine and wild grained premium scantlings.
The wood comes from a special variety of olive tree, the extremely slow and fine-grained Lianolia Kerkyra  tree species, which is a speciality among all other olive trees in the Mediterranean area. The Venetians offered a premium for planted olive trees of this imported variety in order to ensure their own supply of olive oil, during their reign already in the 16th century, thus allowing them to produce large quantities of olive oil not only for the Vatican. Thus the wine culture, which had been predominant on Greek islands until then, disappeared and as a result whole forests of olive trees covered islands in the Mediterranean Sea.
The usual olive trees from Spain or Italy are on the other hand with much fertilizer fast grown, rather on high wood yield trimmed sorts, these supply usually fast grown and little beautifully grained coarse wood, which is in no case comparable with the special wild olive wood present here. The only downer in the delivery is that we have to store this wood carefully stacked with distancing strips on our shelves to forget it for several years: only after proper drying can we offer this wood to our customers. In order to create space on the shelves for our more than 10.000 newly received olive wood edges, we will be posting special offers of olive wood in the near future. So join us in celebrating this special pearl of nature: the most beautiful olive wood!
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It is rare to get such huge slices of pure burl wood, that's why we did not even hesitate to buy this exotic wood from SE-Asia, which was unknown to us at first. The size of the huge slices, the massive and very unusually large thicknesses and the beautiful red colour were the reason to buy this lot without hesitation, not even having it seen in reality.
After a scientific microscopic identification of the wood, the species turned out to be Bayur (Pterospermum javanicum), a wood completely unknown here in Europe, whose natural geographic distribution includes Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia.  Bayur or Wadang Burl is the burl wood of a tree growing in Indonesia, especially on the east coast of Java, which is rarely available on the international timber market and has been spread to other South East Asian countries. The tree grows to a height of approx. 30-45 metres, often grows crooked and with splayed backs, becomes approx. 1 - 1.5 metres thick, its wood is medium hard and medium heavy, approx. 600 - 700 kg/m3. Because of its unfamiliarity it is often described as red burlwood. The wood can grow up to huge burls on the stem, which can often reach a diameter of 1.50 metres and always have a fine and even grain, fine swirls, eyes, sleeping buds and wild structures. The wood is very easy to work with due to its fine structure and will surprise every woodworker after an application of oils or any other polish with its silky shimmer and an attractive red colour!

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It has been a long time since we had the finest and now rarest burl wood in the world in our range. Despite high prices, the demand for Amboyna burl was so great that the 370 kilograms of the large burl were sold out quite quickly and we have not been able to buy a reasonable product since 2014. But sometimes the persistent search for this truffle of burl wood leads to tangible results, so I am very happy to be able to offer you first-class, finest grained solid Amboyna burl wood again soon.
And the best thing about the delivery is: we have the real stuff: real red amboina wood, and not the much less beautiful, softer and coarser grained 3rd quality in yellow colour!
You can see a few photos of the new batch here, everything else will be available here in our webshop after very careful cutting of the wood!
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