I called around every hardwood dealer in this small town and found one mill that had a few ipe boards. I went by there yesterday and sorted through 14-15 pieces. They were all 4"x4" and most 16' long! The longs ones probably weighed 100#! There were three 8' long. All the pieces but one had noticeable drying checks, or cracks throughout. I choose one of the 8' with no visible cracks. It wasn't as dark as some of the others, but pretty just the same. Supposedly, the darkest stuff is the very best, but all is good. They wouldn't cut it and sell me a 6' piece so I had them rip it down the center, so my little table saw could handle the rest. It was $8.99/board foot. Total was $92 (yikes)! The lady told me that they needed to get rid of it, and let me have it for $50. I went back to work and spent an hour trying to lay out how to cut it to get the most usable laminated bow wood. I wanted some full size stuff for use with boo backing only, some smaller stuff for R/D, and some cut even smaller for tri-lams. I found a couple of interior cracks that I had to cut around. Here is what I wound up with; three 1 1/4" wide X 3/4" deep for glue on handle straight profile bows, three 1" wide X 1/2" deep for multi-stacked handled R/D bows, four 1 1/4" wide X 3/8" deep for R/D tri-lam glue ups, and bunches of smaller 12" long pieces for handles, tip overlays, and knife scales. I have a bunch of boo backings, and action-boo cores coming from rudderbows.com. I have a bunch of projects planned, and am excited!
Topic: Found some ipe locally yesterday! (Read 280 times)
