El Guapo -
All of the wood in the first box in the first picture above, except for the small root piece to the left, comes from a plank that was 10" x 9" x 48" and when I cut that wood out I quartsawed it from plank at 1 1/4 thick. Then I planed it down on both sides to get a nice sweet satiny grain going on. So these two sides are planed to where they only need a 220 sanding.
So the pieces in the first pic are all matching pieces from the same part of the tree and after I milled down the plank and planed the pieces I had about 20 or so pieces. Then I laid all of these out on the floor of an empty room in my house for a week and I would pop in the room every so often and look the pieces over you know - rearranging them in different ways - like I would if I was making cabinets or something, Over several days I pulled out and set side by side the pieces that looked the sweetest together. After I pulled all these pieces out I then set them on the floor by themselves and rearranged them over a couple of days. When I got to point that no matter how I laid them out they just looked fantastic together as a group - I knew that this was the group to send on to you and those are the pieces in the first box.
The small pieces to the left in the first pic and the smaller pieces to the left in the second pic are from the roots that I trimmed off the tree. They are not real big but they have a lot of character. The wide board in the 2nd pic is a plain sawn piece from a large limb off the tree, I threw that in for you because I just love the Cathedral graining in that piece and its big enough to make a small side table top.
You can tell the difference between the quartersawn pieces in the first picture and the plain sawn large piece in the second picture by the graining of course (face and end). Also, I made sure that all the pieces are right at 1" thick or damn close so that you can also resaw them to whatever dimension you want and will have matching bookends for each piece.
Oh yea - when you work with this Mahogany you should wear some latex gloves because it will stain your fingers black. This is normal from the wood and it will come off with something like lemon juice, lime juice or orange Goop. I wear the gloves because I found that the stain on my fingers will leave finger prints on the wood which forced me to have to resand or replane the wood as I was finishing. Once you put a sealer on the wood it won't stain fingers anymore.
Lastly, upload some pics meson of what you make I be pumped to see it.
Have fun working your wood!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
