Teir 1/basic woods
Kamagong Ebony: From Laos, dark brown hardwood with light brown streaks
Wild Black Cherry Burl: This burlwood was harvested from a tree I felled last year
Macassar Ebony: From Laos, hard wood with dark brown streaks through lighter heartwood
Thinwin: From Laos. This is a very interesting wood. Normally, it is a dark purple, however, when freshly worked, it is a light yellow. (look at the second photo of a piece I sanded down to show you this) Over the period of a couple months, as air seeps into the wood, it begins to change from yellow to orange to dark purple all over again.
Kamphi Rosewood: from Cambodia. nice dark red wood with orange streaks and dark grain
Pheasant Wood: from laos, this is a wood named because its figure represents the feathers of a pheasant.
These are the three basic woods I currently have that I also have blocks sized for matching shave brushes if you are interested
Tier 2: Select Quality Exotic Wood Options
(In these photos, the further to the right you get, the more expensive/rarer the wood)
Spalted Timarind: from Burma, This gorgeous Asian hardwood is famous for its ability to spalt. (zone line spalting is all the black lines you see below. It is caused by a specific fungus that slowly softens the wood. If you can catch it before it ruins the wood and dry it, it makes for some beautiful figure!)
Claro Walnut Burl: From N.California. Everyone knows walnut wood as a dark luxurious wood, prized by furniture makers and builders. ClaroWalnut Burl is also pretty well known itself for use on high end custom Rifle and Shotgun stocks. The pieces I have access to are veneer quality, showing gorgeous curling grain and tons of eyes!
Camphor Burl: S.E. Asia - This is one of the most interesting burls to work with. It always fills the shop with a pungent spicy scent I always equate to vicks 44 vapor rub lol. Working with this wood will certainly clear your sinuses! It has a great range of colors from light oranges to pinks, purples, and reds. The eyes are bright purple.
Fiddle Back Koa: Hawaii. This wood is exclusive to hawaii. It has gorgeous light shifting curls that seem to dance when you move it. This gives this highly figured Koa an apearance similar to ripples on the surface of water, the grain looking three dimensional and deep. It is REALLY hard to photograph, really it must be seen in person. Gorgeous wood...
Ancient Swamp Kauri : NZ. This rather unassuming looking wood below is perhaps the rarest (species) of wood on the page. It was alive and grew anywhere from 30,000-50,000 years ago. Yes, this very piece of wood is that old. I HIGHLY suggest some google research on this stuff, its fascinating! The ancient mammoth Kauri's used to grow for over a thousand years per tree, ending up at a size that would dwarf a Californian Giant Redwood. Some of this wood fell into peat bogs and swamps, where under pressure, it was preserved in a relatively unchanged form. It still works like any old wood. Other than a dinosaur bone, or a piece of meteorite, laying your hands on a piece of ancient kauri you are touching one of the oldest single things you could possibly touch. (it hates water though, will crumble and crack, so it will take a lot of work to seal it completely for a razor. It can be done, its just work intesive. + you must make sure to keep the handles as dry as possible.)
Afzelia Burl: - from Laos. This is one of my favorite woods to work with. Great scent, very stable. It is also very hard and makes a great durable product. It is an exceedingly rare burl, surpassed only by Amboyna (pictured below a few) as far as Asian woods go. It has beautiful swirling grain and large well formed burl eyes. Great dark orange colors as well.
(unfinished)
Dot Ebony : S.E. Asia. This is the rarest ebony on earth. like all ebonies, its incredibly slow growing, and very very dense. It takes about 100 years for a tree to reach a usable size, so the rarer strains can go decades without new stock being discovered. This is an INCREDIBLY limited supply wood. The black streaks through the light yellow heartwood are just breath taking. The scales on the lower right are an end grain cut.
Snakewood ; From Suriname. THE SNAKE WOOD. This is, the single rarest hardwood on planet earth. It is sold by the Oz, a reasonable size log costing several thousand USD. It seems the razor world just doesnt know what this stuff is. Practically everywhere it it mis-labeled as a different species. IF they knew what they had, they would change the name promptly and jack up the price. This wood is really really hard to work with, prone to splitting and well, exploding on the lathe. This makes items crafted from it that much more special. I invite you to search around, compare the figure of the pieces I have below to any stock made by any knife maker or razor maker. (Their Issards, Dovo, or ever $700 snakewood knives by chris reeve) If you look, you will see the wood below knocks the socks off of anything else out there. The thick black banding is so dense and well formed, it is unrivaled. This is truly presentation grade. I even have several sets with swirling eyes (exceedingly rare)
Amboyna Burl :From Laos. As stated before, this is the rarest Asian Burlwood. It sells for $100 a pound many places, and as you can see below, I dont have any stock sized large enough for a razor. However if you have your heart set on some, I have no problem replenishing my stock for your project and others. This wood is really interesting as well. It is cut with hand saws by villagers deep in the jungle, and carried by hand out of the jungle many miles. 5 of the 6 countries that had this burl 10 years ago have been stripped barren due to its popularity with everyon from wood workers and craftsmen to the automotive industry for dash board and veneer industry (the worlds most popular veneer burl), and many people in between. It is predicted in another 10 years, there will be no more natural living stock.
Desert Ironwood: Arizona. This is the most expensive wood on the page. If you would like this, I would really consider it a separate higher tier onto itself. These little thin scales below cost me $80, just to put it in perspective. This is generally saved for the most special of projects (which these scales are already spoken for in preparation of one of those said projects) More is hard to find in this highly figured state, but its out there if you wanna pay for it!
One of my specialties in wood turning is the beloved badger hair shave brush. Which many of the teir 2 woods I have large stock that could potentially be a matching brush for your razor if you happened to be interested (Discounted of course due to the other work) I could do any species below for $40, using AAA quality badger hair. Hand laid silvertip badger (not trimmed while bunched to preserve the uber soft tips) is an additional $40 (its quite costly). The AAA badger is still better than a lot of commercially available knots.(not to mention, try to find a silvertip brush for $80 anywhere else, let alone made from burlwood!)
Three finished handles (afzelia burl has a knot of AAA badger in it, then there are the maple burl and Black and white ebony awaiting their knots)
In this photo the first three are my personal brushes I made from various woods, and then the same brush as above is on the right.
