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Marketing Unusual Lumber

3K views 9 replies 6 participants last post by  Da Aardvark 
I gotta chime in here.
It's all a matter of what you want to accomplish as furniture/artisan/designer. Also what is the regional customer base?
Next is can you compete with fine joinery straight laced wood furniture designs and the Chinese/foreign offerings out there?
I can't and won't try. If I can't make something totally unique, I'll close up shop and go back to customizing cars.

It's sorta like cars. You either want a car with stock straight lines and a monotone paint scheme, and maybe custom wheels/rubber, or you opt for something very different.

Straight grained simple clean boards have their place in fine joinery and standard pieces. I highly appreciate that, but it's not what I enjoy messing with or building.
I'm considered by some as an artisan (to me I just butcher pieces together), and what I found living in the Chi-town area is most loved my furniture, but they didn't fit their home design scheme. Same with custom cars. Many will come to a car show and drool, but they wouldn't attempt owning one. Here in the Asheville NC area, my furniture style is sought after and furniture stores are telling me, they can't get enough of it in stock. Here you have the very wealthy tourists who own very expensive 2nd homes, in a cabin-esque wooded mountain setting. Their interior designers are after something different, and unconventional.
Now I gotta say, I've just moved here and am not established yet, but the market here will likely do me well.

There is something to be said about "live edge" heavily grained and colored pieces. You can stare at the wild out of control grains for hours and not see the same thing twice. It's the wood, and how to display it's beauty, not necessarily the fine joinery (since there is none).

There are differing challenges in messing with wild grains. They are inherently unstable and need tamed. You cannot do fine joinery or it will all blow apart on you. So you don't even try.

I applaud cutters like Tennessee Tim.
He has a God given eye for the unusual and looks for it before milling a log. He has splatted wild grained pieces in live edge and things I drool over. (Drooling on wood changes moisture content by the way.)
The nature of live edge wild grains is hard to deal with. They crack/split/move/shatter, and maybe you can make a piece work. Maybe it is a waste of time...(haven't lost a piece yet)

I consider it "Wood Re-hab"
I take the dregs of the wood society, dry em out, clean em up, de-bug em and hope they won't relapse.

Here's my site. Look at the projects section. Bear with the slow loading time.
http://gnarlywooddesigns.weebly.com/
 
AAAAK!
FIREWOOD ?
I can't imagine the 3 black walnut kitchen tables I built, or the ant chewed catalpa slabs I made coffee tables from....
Up In FLAMES!
(Hi Allen! I'm living around Asheville N.C., now.)

Allen was one of my wood suppliers when I was in the Chi-town area. Him and his cutter friend, Greg (who is also on this site), set aside many pieces for the artists and just plum crazy people like me. If pieces/slabs/etc didn't have ant/insect chew and massively twisted grain, I would walk away from the sale. Allen had some beautiful 20-22" (a 40"+ wide table) wide bookmatched, bark on, walnut slabs, longer than 8ft. and I walked away from them, since the grain was too straight. Price was right, look was wrong.

We who work in "live edge" artsy projects will glom onto a cutter/supplier who offers those kinds of pieces. Realize though, as a cutter, if you don't have the eye for those kind of pieces and aren't good at the cut, we likely will move on to the next supplier.
It's the wood we display. Not so much our abilities as a fine woodworker, with tight fancy joinery. We want the wood to speak to you.
I've used a lot of hollow log Maple and Oak, where the pieces were being pushed by a backhoe into a burn pile. They were a challenge to get de-bugged and dried out but the end product turned out awesome in many respects. These pieces cannot be repeated.
 
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