Expensive Pieces Of Wood?

UKworkshop.co.uk

Help Support UKworkshop.co.uk:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

Cutting Crew

Established Member
Joined
5 Sep 2003
Messages
283
Reaction score
0
Location
Chesterfield, Derbyshire
Hi All,

Looking at Tom's post in the lathe section about making a snooker cue led me to thinking about the cost of hand made wooden items'

The snooker cue for the amount of timber used can be very expensive. Top cues cost £500 plus, they are finished by hand planing, take about a year to make and normally come from a piece of ash about 1 1/4 square by roughly 5 ft long and a scrap of ebony.

What other pieces of timber can you think of that come into this bracket?

CC
 
Hi CC,

I've recently tuned a bowl from a piece of oak 14" diameter x 4" thick. The bowl blank was obviously originally cut from a square and I have turned the bowl to a thickness of about 7mm (sorry to mix Imperial and metric!). Given the piece of wood's original volume and the fact that I don't have the facility (yet) to slice out bowl shaped pieces from the middle (oh, damn - more tools needed!) I reckon that probably something like 90% of the original piece has gone to waste in shavings. The amazing quantity of shavings filled my workshop stove, which is not that small, twice over! I should imagine the percentage of waste is even greater with large, hollow form turnings.

Trev.
 
Hi Trev,

Turning is probably the most expensive waste of timber, I was recently in the US visiting turners over there, most of the ones that turn large vessels rough them out and let the blanks stand for about a year before final turning. When they do this they turn as many as 20 blanks in a day, the shavings in one workshop were literally knee deep. The pile of waste usually looks bigger if you're working with a cutting tool such as the Pro-Forme, these produce long continuous shavings and nice big pile piles of springy waste. If you use the Kelton type hollowing tools, they cut by a scraping action that produces much smaller piles that look like heaps of sawdust.

Regarding my original post, what about archery bows, are they expensive, are they even still made of timber or what about musical instruments made from wood?

CC
 
Hi Chiba,

Clogs for Hi-Fi :shock:
I know I like standing on bits of wood, but how does putting a box of electronics on oak cone feet improve the sound :?:
 
Beats me! Like most things in hi-fi it's probably psychoacoustics, if you know what I mean. :wink: Pixie dust. Still, at those prices my scrap bin's worth about two grand... :twisted:
 
CC
You're on the right line with the musical instruments. A highest quality new violin (almost entirely wood) can cost around £10,000. Compare the amount of wood in a violin to a double bass... yet a bass would cost half as much!
As for old violins and cellos such as Stradivarius - we're into the millions of pounds! (It's all in the shellac apparently!)
 
.... but you can play a tune on a fiddle.

On the subject of expensive pieces of wood with no apparent use, I was looking at an arty-farty furnishing emporium in Nottingham Lacemarket the other day and they had a piece of Teak on display as an ornament in their window, nicely polished and scalloped on the edges, measuring 200 x 200 x 800 on sale for £250. it was entitled ' Teak Block', so no attempt to deceive there then......

By my reckoning that's about £220 a cube.
 
Hehe...I was a Barker and StoneHouse the other week and they have something similar......200x200x400 block of Oak.......£299 reduced from £399!!

Havin' a Larf!!!

I wish I could find some nut to purchase these from me, I'd be able to give up work!!!!

SimonA
 
Back
Top