Right, yesterday was an exciting, busy day.
At 11:30, TNT delivered a big box from Madinter (in Spain), containing 6 sets of Madagascar rosewood, 2 sets of Indian rosewood, and a bottle of titebond. YAY! TITEBOND! Oh, and the wood's quite pretty too. Needs sanding to clean up, and at least 6-12 months more drying time (IMO), but it's nice. Possibly the nicest set:
Although the others aren't bad:
Rest of sets may be found here. The Indian's might nice, especially the classical sized set. Then, to my surprise, just as I finished stickering and weighting the sets, along came the regular postman, and delivered not one, but two boxes! One contained a bunch of lovely quilt maple for electrics, that I later went off to get resawn into carve top and drop top sets, and the other a package from Jeff at Brazilwoods, packed with some Pau Ferro (which I haven't unpacked yet, because I'd just finished stacking all 100+ fingerboard and bridge blanks on top of the stickered stack of backs, and I needed to get out the door to drive the maple down for a re-saw...).
Pics I got from Jeff are here, for the curious.
So, yeah. Yay! Also, there was a box from Dick tools with 2 hand-cut rasps (Herdim, fine, fine looking and feeling tools), a couple of files of various descriptions (because the ones I've been using have been very bad quality dime-store ones, and I'm tired of having to deal with them), some riffler rasps for my sister, and the heaviest straightedge you've ever seen, ground to something like a .004 mm tolerance over the 55cm of length, with a rubberized plastic grip on the fat edge, in a nice leather case. Sweet!
And then there was today. See, I'm house-sitting for family of very close family friends, so I get to make use of the car (a Porsche 911, I might add
), so I took the opportuity to drive places that I wanted to go, and that are a pain to reach by car. So I headed to the 'other' large timber place in NL (the one I usually go to being here in Amsterdam); much bigger, a LOT of very tempting wood (mostly for electrics), but worst/best of all..some Brazillian.
Some very, very nice brazillian. Dark chocolate brown with some reddish streaks, the two pieces I've tentatively 'reserved' are around 1" thick each, look like they're from the same tree, one perfectly sized for sides (didn't find anything that looked like it would match the boards I already have, mind), one perfectly sized for backs (I guesstimate 8" wide). Straight, no cupping, the board for backs has some solid knots, some swirls (flatsawn wood), and the only flaw is one end check that's far outside any potential template area. With good resawing, I could get 2 very, very, very nice sets out of those two boards. The problem: I can't legally ever take them out of the country, because they don't have CITES paperwork. And NL? Small country. They came from an bankruptcy auction for a fine furniture factory a few years back, very old stock stuff, and they ain't cheap; total cost for the pair would be 460 euros (500 dollars, ish), meaning 2 sets at 250 bucks each. Which really isn't bad. And then there are the other 2 or 3 boards that are almost as nice with similar price tags that are a-tempting me. I'm trying to find out if paperwork is even get-able, and whether its worth buying these sets. I'm assuming CITES work would cost, if it is even possible (I somehow doubt the recipts for wood aquisition for the bankrupt company will ever actually surface/even still exist, sadly), and I really don't know if I'll stay in NL all my life. Family will, but will I?
In short: ARGH! I've got a week to think it over and decide what I want to do, then my nametag gets removed from the boards.
Mattia Valente38773.5292361111
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