Here is some rare curly boxwood - some of the last of my 1980 vintage French stash - cut and turned round for a flute in progress.
Pretty stuff. Even though it does grow on trees, curly boxwood isn’t something you see every day!
I wish I had a whole bunch more of this. At best, I think I have only a few flutes worth of the curly.
Casey
Hi Casey,
That is a great piece of boxwood and it is a lucky person to get a flute made by you out of it. I have to say no one can get out of boxwood what you can. Solid, stable and easy to play.
It is too bad there is not a lot of wood of this quality left.
Casey, that’s some pretty wood. With the difficulty of getting quality boxwood, have you run across anything else with similar qualities? I wonder how dogwood would do? Eilam sent me some pictures of a flute that John Gallagher recently made out of it, and it’s a good looking wood.
I can still get excellent boxwood. Just not this stuff that was harvested 30 years ago from France! There is enough of the same species coming out of Turkey, however, and some of it is magnificent. I am working with some that was harvested around 2000.
Casey
So how old does boxwood get?
Hey, Casey, I have one of your flutes from the early eighties made from a wood you called “Mountain Mohagony.” You said it resembled boxwood and was a favorite material for you. Whatever happened to that wood? I still play that flute, but I have never seen Mountain Mohagony referenced on this site or anywhere else. What gives?
Mountain Mahogany is still one of my favorite flute woods. However, I do not have the means and equipment (or incentive, really) to go collect it myself - which is what is required these days. In the 80s my wood supplier had someone cutting logs for him for a few year and I worked off that pile till it was all gone. He hasn’t found anyone else cutting it, though I have found a few people trying to sell some at a high price. The Forest Service used to cut down the big trees or torch them, as the roots sprout abundantly and are used for deer browse.
Someday maybe. One thing to investigate is if any of the firewood cutters in southeastern Oregon or southern Idaho cut it. I looked at advertisements - most everyone was cutting pine. This makes sense, since the wood eats chainsaw blades.
Casey