http://woodfinder.com/marketplace.php
A good place to look as it has a lot of specialty wood suppliers listed.
http://woodfinder.com/marketplace.php
A good place to look as it has a lot of specialty wood suppliers listed.
Regarding maple: it's great for this use, and can be easily dyed to just about any color or shade you want. Below are some pictures of a spokeshave I made a few years ago from some curly red maple burl, dyed with a red aniline dye.
IMG_0790 by Scott --, on Flickr
IMG_0789 by Scott --, on Flickr
Don't let color be a deciding factor. Think stability and strength first.
It's much better to be a spectacular failure than an apologetic one...
http://scottperryphoto.wordpress.com/
My gosh! Ebony, purpleheart, Mesquite??? Those are certainly split-prone very heavy materials. Purpleheart doesn't keep it color at all after UV exposure and it a nightmare to
carbide. It is nice and straight. I was looking at some beautiful sticks of it over the weekend, and have worked quite a bit of it myself. There's a lot of old floors with it around
here. Ebony is a camera brand of course, and I own one (though in mahogany). They have
had some problems with end-grain splitting. Need to keep the wood from totally drying out,
with finish refreshment perhaps if the original finish wears off. I've got a customer who just
did over a hundred doors & window in solid ebony - needless to say, the client had a LOT
of money - (that was just for the barn with its seven bathrooms! The guest and main houses are yet to be built!). Mesquite is pretty but very squirrely stuff. If you want another difficult wood that is so heavy it sinks, try mountain mahogany.
There is a very good reason that so many wood field cameras were made of cherry or mahogany (and lately, walnut).
The key characteristics are density and dimensional stability.
Both cherry and mahogany are relatively light weight for a given size (they are lower density materials) and have excellent dimensional stability.
My personal preference is slightly in favor of cherry but, mahogany would be a very close second.
+1 to this. There's good reason these woods have been used for this type of thing for a long time. Don't let yourself be suckered into the "pretty wood club" with all of the guys who bought fancy stocked rifles that are either too precious to use and risk a scratch or else too heavy to carry into the woods.Originally Posted by BradS
Seriously though, quilted mohogany (African, Honduras or from Cuba/Dominican Repub) would likely be most stable and pretty for this project. The dense woods are superb, but they tend to be heavy. But, but but, I'd never walk away from a nicely figured KOA....it would be on par close to mohogany. Purchasing it, that's another story. Several years ago Hawaii stopped the export of this wood....and the price of it went through the stratosphere. Have fun deciding.
Les
Too much figure on a wood is just looking for trouble if you're thinking of a dimensionally
stable user versus some nice conversation piece on the fireplace mantle. The traditional
correct mahogany was "pattern grade" - plain, highly stable if properly seasoned, and very
difficult to acquire. In this day and age, engineered composites will do a far better job.
Thank you, Dick Phillips for starting the trend of highly functional if homely view cameras!
Cherry is a bit soft, but if you impregnate it with penetrating epoxy, probably the best
ordinary choice. The epoxy will yellow horribly over time, and shouldn't get a lot of UV
when not actually shooting, but with greatly strengthen the material without added wt.
You're 100% right about highly figured woods. My knowledge in this area comes from rifles and many custom rifle makers won't guarantee stocks of AA and higher figure because it's just not stable or predictable.
Cherry is plenty hard, especially if you pay the extra for wood from older growth trees. I've seen several cherry stocked rifles that are now well over 200 years old. A camera won't be used any harder than a hunting rifle.
Having worked on both gunstocks and cameras, I'd say a camera is a lot more fussy. A minor dent in the wrong spot and a Graflock back won't fit correctly, or a tiny bit of warp
on the back frame and focus might be off. And at least with a rifle you can get a spare
shot or two off, if there's a bit of imprecision, while the grizzly charges. With a view camera you need to focus really really fast! But that's why my tripod has spike feet, to
function as bayonets! We get ahold of lovely curly cherry here, but it needs a lot of
hand scraping. Heaviest stock I ever made was mtn mahogany. Just dropping the gun
creates a big hole in the earth which the grizzly will fall into before ever reaching you!
I used Makore on my 8 x 20. Makore is African Cherry I beileve. Looks like a cherry but with the color of Mahogony. Pretty good to work with and not that hard to get.
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