Beautiful Bubinga

So George, have you used Bubinga much? Easy for you? No, it's not really. I, I just like using Bubinga because that's such a great word to say. Um I've done some turning with it.

I've made some lathe chisel handles out of it. Um But what a crazy cool wood. So one to your credit. This is an absolutely beautiful piece of wood. Um If you're not familiar with Bubinga, we're about to take care of that.

We're gonna familiarize you with Bubinga. It grows in uh uh western side of Africa in the tropical rain zone. Uh Trees get big, really big. This tree uh The bowl of this tree was over 6 ft across which is not a bowl. It's bole, right?

It's the, it's the trunk, it's the trunk of the tree. Yeah. And this one happened to grow with this spectacular curly grain. Not all b bingo has this curl in it. So it could be the stuff I've used.

Um It was very straight grained so it didn't have this curl to it, but it turns like a dream because it's incredibly hard. It's kind of like um you know, when you run into open grain woods like a red oak on the lathe and they tend to kind of tear instead of cut. Um The Bubinga turned almost like a piece of plastic. And one of the things we did is we looked up Jena hardness scale and that's a good indication of where stuff is in the maple. As a relative perspective, maple was something like 1400 ish and Bubinga is 2400, which is bigger like 100.

And as you said, the higher numbers indicate harder, harder. Um And so something you're not gonna find this at a local lumber yard you're gonna need, this is gonna fall into the category of exotic imported tropical timber. Um So places like um Rockler cook, maybe hardwoods might have it. Um So you're gonna have to shop around a little bit common enough in those, at those places. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um Board foot price any spitball, it's gonna be in the $13 range. So probably compared to North American hardwoods.

Um 34 or five times more expensive per board foot. Um Then, you know, Oak, Maple Walnut Jerry, but it works great. Yeah. So you, so when you made this table, I'm gonna guess, you know, based on my turning experience, machine ability was really good um, cuts, well, um routes, well, joints, well, sands up finish as well. Did you, was this a hand plane surface on this or?

Well, I'm only asking, look at the grin because you're a hand tool guy. But did you do that for this one or did you send it through a wide belt Sanders? I, um, I, I hand sanded it with a belt sander four by 24. Uh, it had a bow in it, so I routed three strips out of the back, clamped it flat and glued it in some, some persimmon and it's mostly flat now. All right.

So, um, but from a machine ability perspective, that's a good measure of that is between the sanding, the routing you had to do underneath. Um, that all went, well, not a, not a bunch of like woods like, um, wenge that tend to be so splintery and that kind of stuff. None of that bad stuff. Lignum V where it's deadly to route. It's all good.

Well, the table looks great and there's your little daily dose of Bubinga binga binga if you haven't used it because I'm like six. And I like saying the word anyway. Sorry, I cut you off. We could, we could nickname you Bubinga. No.

Thank you. Beautiful table. Thanks.