I thought I’d give you a look at my current batch, even though they are all spoken for, because of the one in the front row at the right. It’s snakewood, one of the most interesting woods I’ve worked with. It’s as dense as African blackwood, but very expensive. The wood for one whistle costs eight to ten times what other woods cost. It gives a very smooth finish- in fact, even a slow lathe speed produces a fine powder off the tool. No sanding was needed. It’s like I was scraping the powder off a whistle that was already there inside the wood.
Other whistles shown are purpleheart, African blackwood and osage orange.
Snakewood is a really nice looking tropical hardwood. I remember reading something about its ability to crack easily (in relation to making fountain pens) therefore there can be a bit of wastage to get a good stable outcome in a few?
Beautiful whistles there, David. I recall looking at snakewood at my local exotic wood dealer and even finding a piece suitable enough for turning something so small as a whistle was difficult. So many of the pieces are already cracked when they arrive to the dealer.
Nice work! Snakewood is amazingly beautiful stuff. I made only one batch of 4 whistles from it and ALL developed cracks (including one I kept for myself). The cracks all were over areas where the whistle body had been bored out to accept the brass tuning slide. This is frightfully thin in any event.
Luckily, the hairline cracks were easy to repair: I filled them with water-thin cyanoacrylate glue and scraped off the excess when it dried. Mounted the pieces back on the lathe ,sanded them while they spun and re-applied the finish. The repaired cracks just looked like normal lines in the grain and if you didn’t know they were there, you’d never spot them. They’ve been stable ever since.
I also made myself a pen of Snakewood, and that cracked even worse.
Odd… Snakewood is used for violin bows. It’s particularly popular (considering this is a very small market to begin with) for Baroque replica bows. I don’t recall hearing horror stories from Baroque violinists I know about snakewood bows cracking. Again, this is admittedly a pretty small sample, and making a whistle, or a pen, is a different kettle of fish from a bow. As long as we’re mentioning bows, has anyone ever made a whistle out of pernambuco?
Yes, I was worried about cracking, but I read somewhere that you can prevent it by sealing the wood as soon as it is exposed to air by turning, etc. So I oiled it inside and out right away. So far, so good. I have enough wood for one more whistle and that will be it for me and snakewood. I felt almost like a diamond-cutter turning it- one false move and 80 dollars worth of wood wasted.
The cracking issues in whistles might have to do with the fact that we turn this stuff into thin walled tubes which shrink differently inside and out. A bow is a solid rod and perhaps less prone to this problem.
I have to confess that I love the look of a lot of these tropical hardwoods - it is much more than the look of course. The significance of the wood is more than looks or sound generated through it, in the case of musical instruments. Very attractive. However, I really struggle with the sustainability issues. The likelihood of ecological damage through most ‘sustainable’ schemes is high - no matter how sustainable a timber supplier says the provenance site is. It is one thing to replace trees by planting new ones but that alters the whole dynamics of everything else that lives there too. Taking a few out here and there just doesn’t really work and still has a huge impact. Felling and then leaving for a 100 years is better maybe but nobody sticks to that one. Sorry to rain on the parade…I wish I could find a supply system that I was happy with.
Most of my suppliers claim to use wood from sustainable farmed timber. No way to verify this, of course. Hmmm, I wonder if my accountant would accept a trip to Central America as tax deductible “fact finding mission” and buying expedition…
Having tramped some of the forests in Costa Rica and being a former Ranger guide with expertise in snakes, I think you may need my assistance. I am fairly cheap…but that probably comes across
