what is the most Rarest expensive wood?
Brazillian Rosewood is rather rare…(second down here)
Another rare wood is pink ivory , named “the royal wood of the Zulus”
I don’t think it is possible to have a definitive answer to your OP, but rather the use to which the wood is put will affect the cost to a greater extent than the wood itself.
St Helena ebony was considered extinct since 1850 or so, but in 1980 a couple of botanists discovered two small specimens.
They will be sizeable trees by now; I wonder if they would cut them down and sell me the timber…
Sandalwood ??
costs around $500 a pound
I have a vague recollection that for awhile the United States’ shipping industry was very dependent upon prehistoric timber excavated from a swamp somewhere off of the Chesapeake Bay. I’m sure that as the stock dwindled it must have commanded a princely sum. Anybody know more about this?
In the late 1950s/early 1960s tropical monkeypod furniture became a sort of status symbol in California and a coffee table could run you about a thousand bucks, while U.S. servicemen stationed in the Pacific could pick one up for a song. I’m pretty sure that Tom Wolfe in The Right Stuff mentions that at one point Gus Grissom was so impoverished that he couldn’t afford “the obligatory monkeypod table” and was forced to build one himself in order to keep up with the Joneses.
SK–proud caretaker of a monkeypod table made by a rocket scientist, not an astronaut.
Sofa King: I think the prehistoric swamp timber story may not be factual. I know of no swamps “off of the Chesapeake Bay”. You may be thinking of Live Oaks, which were really good to have (but not 100% essential) in the days of heavy wooden ships.
There are trees that were cut in the 18th and 19th centuries which for reasons I still don’t fathom sank while being floated down stream to the mills. These are being hunted out and recovered like sunken treasure, which considering the prices the wood gets is an apt comparison. You (Sofa King) may have been thinking of this. Some of it comes from southern rivers and some from one of the Great Lakes. Look in the back of Fine Woodworking magazine for ads for such stuff.
Aro: Presently, it is illegal to import true Brazilian Rosewood into the USA. I still have a little (pre-ban). It actually isn’t so great, as it may have voids (empty spaces) within a given piece. It also is naturally very waxy, making cutting it difficult (it guns up the cutting tool) and sanding an exercise in frusrtation. Finishing it with anything except more wax is essentially impossible.
The most expensive wood AFAIK, would be a “figured” variation of some already pricey semi-unobtainable wood. I probably misspell the name, but there’s Amboyna, and then the higher end version would be Amboyna burl. This would only be used as a veneer for reasons of cost and just plain useability. Check a site like this:
http://www.wood-veneers.com/veneer_tones_l-1.htm
to see some veneers made from wood that are so expensive (but still legal) that no one in their right mind would think of trying to use a whole solid piece of it of any substantial size.
I understand that over-cutting of Ebony is on the verge of making it extinct, or at least exceedingly expensive to get in pieces big enough to make a clarinet from.
I once met a guy who made a living from (so he told me) only one tree per year. He traveled all around carefully picking just the right tree to get just the right figured woods from. He’d buy it, cut it and then dry it for a set period of years, and then sell the pieces to custom woodworkers and gunstock makers.
I am at a total loss to find a link for this but I seem to recall that some guys found some insanely valuable wood on the bottom Lake Superior (or Michigan…I forget).
Basically, way back in pioneer days, America and Canada had vast, lush forests of old growth timber. As old as old growth timber can get. Loggers would chop the stuff down and float it across the lake(s) to lumber mills. As might be expected some lumber floating in holding pools or being transported sunk. Some enterprising divers found the stuff recently (back in the 90’s or so) and found that the wood had been remarkably well preserved. They also found that lumber such as this cannot be found pretty much anywhere in the world today as all really old growth timber as long since been logged. Apparently this stuff set new standards for hardness and grain and any of a number of desirable things you want from wood.
If it will help anyone search the divers had to get a special law passed through the Wisconsin legislature to allow them to bring this wood up from the bottom of the lake and profit from it (not sure what law it was they needed to get a waiver from). The Wisconsin legislature did approve their ‘mining’ of the lake.
IIRC the wood they brought up is nearly worth it’s weight in gold given that there is only what is down there and no more (although there is a fair enough amount to make these guys filthy rich).
This stuff is pretty nifty, and from what I have heard, a royal bitch to work with.
http://www.lignum-vitae.com/page3.html
here
http://www.collinsclubs.com/woodworkers/lumber/table_s_04.asp
a hardwood supplier price list… some of it is quite pricey…
Whack-a-mole, you might be thinking of [url=“http://www.oldlogs.com/company/background.html”] these guys[/link]. They don’t list prices, but I can imagine that it is quite expensive.
:smack:
Thanks jk1245. That link sure looks like the guys I was thinking of. If not it’s close enough!
Ok, then, the most “unobtanium” wood I know of comes from the UK. An article in Fine Woodworking describes it (No, I don’t have the reference). Construction work in London discovered the pilings of a Roman-era bridge made from some of the huge virgin oaks that grew in the land in those days. The water had preserved and partially mineralized (which I understood to mean partially fossilized) the wood, and IIRC turned it rather black. The wood was removed; some was sent for study, but the rest was auctioned off with the benefits going to some good causes like the Archeological Trust. They said it was like working plastic.
Sapient pearwood is pretty rare. Makes good luggage.
Where are you buying sandalwood? I used to sell sandalwood beads and mala and while I did not sell by weight, as a finished product the beads went for $3.00 a strand and a little more for a mala. A strand weighs about 6-10oz. That makes finished sandalwood beads in the vicinity of $10 per lb (thats retail, halve that for my cost). Sandalwood carvings (idols, etc) were a bit more but not a whole lot more.
I know there has been reduced production in the past decade, but I can’t see sandalwood going for $500 per lb. Hell I see actual sandalwood sandals all the time for less than $20 a pair. Plus pure sandalwood oil costs less than that, and it takes a lot more than one lb to make that much oil.
Is this the kind of sandalwood you roll into paper and smoke?
Originally posted by Milton De La Warre:
Perhaps you have not heard of “The Great Dismal Swamp.”
Tris
Or Annapolis…
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- Possibly related: “The roof on Philadelphia’s Independence Hall and many of the three-foot shingles on historic American homes in the area were made of white cedar that had been buried under water for up to 1000 years. By the late 1800’s, the New Jersey cedar swamps had been depleted of living white cedar trees. It was then discovered that a layer of fallen cedar trunks covered the swamp bottom to a depth of twelve feet. These ancient submerged logs were mined and made into light, durable white-cedar shakes.” - from Isaac ASimov’s Book of Facts, p 134. ISBN # 0-8038-9347-7.
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- Possibly related: “The roof on Philadelphia’s Independence Hall and many of the three-foot shingles on historic American homes in the area were made of white cedar that had been buried under water for up to 1000 years. By the late 1800’s, the New Jersey cedar swamps had been depleted of living white cedar trees. It was then discovered that a layer of fallen cedar trunks covered the swamp bottom to a depth of twelve feet. These ancient submerged logs were mined and made into light, durable white-cedar shakes.” - from Isaac ASimov’s Book of Facts, p 134. ISBN # 0-8038-9347-7.
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Amboyna burl is very rare and expensive.
Pink ivory, ditto.
Snakewood, prized for canes and bows for stringed instruments, is also very rare.
Gaboon ebony is very rare.
The logs being raised from their underwater resting places are not generally rare woods. It is rare to have wood from a tree that has undergone such a series of events (being lost underwater for so long), but the species themselves are typically quite common. They are old growth, and it is this fact that distinguishes them. They are expensive when compared to other examples of the same species, but they are not so dear as the woods I listed above. The principal virtue of old growth lumber is the dense and compact structure of the grain. Having grown in lush forrests, filled with other trees (competitors), old growth wood is tight grained due to the slow nature of the maturity of the tree. IOW, they didn’t sprout up like weeds.
Lignum vitae is rare and expensive too. It is easily the worlds hardest wood. It is filled with an oily, waxy resin which, combined with it’s hardness makes it ideally suited for bearings. Propeller shafts on large ships often have lignum vitae bearings. The Queen Mary is a good example. I have a large piece of lignum vitae that I’ve had for quite some time. The little “parlor trick” that I’ve often played with this specimen (aout the size of a brick) is hand it to newcomers to my shop. Nobody who knows that I’m handing them a piece of wood is ever prepared for how heavy it is, and their reactions are always a little funny. I’ve never met anyone who was aware that wood could be that hard, or that heavy. It’s almost like brass. I use it to build small hand tools.
On a slight tangent, it would be interesting to know of wood objects made from singular famous sources.
An example:
If you ever see the film “I.Q.” (a pleasant comedy), filmed in Princeton, there is a scene where the characters are seen before a vast green field with a big gnarley oak tree in the center with a little wooden fence around it.
That tree was the “Mercer Oak” where General Mercer died during the Battle of Princeton. I had driven past it hundreds of times, noting its beauty, and then after one particularly nasty winter storm, my wife and I drove by and saw it in pieces on the ground with people milling about 
I have often wondered what happened to the wood. It would probably be disrespectful to make it into a coffee table, but they surely didn’t feed it to the woodchipper.
I remember reading an article a number of years back about this guy who had a collection of wooden eggs. He carved them himself, from every type of wood he could find. He had one from almost every kind of tree there is. I remember they asked him something along the lines of “Which egg is the rarest/was the hardest to obtain?” and his answer was his egg carved from Poison Ivy.
Yes, I know poison ivy is not a tree, so this may or may not qualify as actual “wood”, but it was really neat nonetheless.
This guy was not one who was lucky enough to be immune to poison ivy, so IIRC, he had to wear gloves the whole time. Even with gloves, I can see that being a helluva task, I’ve gotten rashes from picking up tools that touched poison ivy the previous year. I think he ended up varnishing/poly-coating the egg so it could be handled.