pkjames
KKF Sponsor
- Joined
- Jul 27, 2011
- Messages
- 1,064
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Australia is such a gifted country. We have a super long costal line that blue fin tuna pays a visit each year. While desert is over 70% of the total land area, it means a lot of great stuff is buried underneath. And a bit of dry desert and a little rain means we do have trees, but born in hell mode: desert means severely lack of nutrition, so the trees grow extremely slowly therefore tend to be super dense. What is the best of the dense stuff that we have? Ringed Gidgee of course 
It also means trees in this condition can frequently get attacked by diseases, and a by product often forms during the healing process: burls. Not like Asian burls, the desert burls means burls here are dense, I fact much denser than tropical burls (amboyna, a south east asia burl, for example has to be stabilized to use as handle material) and often has a higher density than water.
Today i scored a huge load of coolibah burls!
So what do they look like? I have a thin off-cut at home that I took a photo the other day ps, this is straight iPhone pic with no filter, and the piece was off bandsaw with no sanding, that just shows how vivid the color is!
The only drawback of these super dense stuff? They tend to have surface checks(cracks) that needs patching with CA glue, interlocked grain also means they are super hard to work with, and has a high fail rate. This is probably one of the reasons that we don't normally see Australian burls offered as knife handle material. As a woodworker, I just can't resist the beauty of the exotic figure, I have to give them a try!
It also means trees in this condition can frequently get attacked by diseases, and a by product often forms during the healing process: burls. Not like Asian burls, the desert burls means burls here are dense, I fact much denser than tropical burls (amboyna, a south east asia burl, for example has to be stabilized to use as handle material) and often has a higher density than water.
Today i scored a huge load of coolibah burls!
So what do they look like? I have a thin off-cut at home that I took a photo the other day
ps, this is straight iPhone pic with no filter, and the piece was off bandsaw with no sanding, that just shows how vivid the color is!
The only drawback of these super dense stuff? They tend to have surface checks(cracks) that needs patching with CA glue, interlocked grain also means they are super hard to work with, and has a high fail rate. This is probably one of the reasons that we don't normally see Australian burls offered as knife handle material. As a woodworker, I just can't resist the beauty of the exotic figure, I have to give them a try!
