Silvan wrote:
I Am Reposting This One With A Lot Of Capital Letters And The Word
Mahogany In The Title In The Hope That Someone Will Take The Bait
This Time. It Seem Hard To Imagine Nobody Had A Single Thing To Say
About Any Of This.

snip

Personally I'd wait to get some walnut as I don't care for mahogany. Walnut
has so much more character. If you have a good trumpet then I'd wait for
the right selection of walnut for the case. If you have a pea shooter
trumpet like mine then........

I think showing off the trumpet with hand crafted walnut/maple case close by
would be awesome. If you use the mahogany you'll always be wondering how
much better it would have looked with walnut.

Now you have me thinking of making a nice case for my wife's flute (much
more than a pea shooter as she still plays and I don't)

Use the mahogany for other things like the chess box.

Gary


I've been dreaming of an exquisite walnut/maple trumpet case, because
I need a trumpet case, and because I like the combination of walnut
and maple.

I squirrled away a little cash I earned from a bit of moonlighting,
and went forth to ye olde butchered and baked tree merchant to
purchase as much walnut as I could afford.

Their walnut stock was abysmal. Almost every last board was thin,
cupped, severely twisted, and composed predominantly of sapwood.

I came home with the one walnut board that was pretty close to
straight and flat. It's a mix of heart and sap, but it has some
interesting figure if I don't plane it off when I work it up.

I also came home with 5 bf of mahogany. Honduran, Philipine, Upper
Slobobian, Dinzl Ptekian, I have no clue. It's about a raw sienna
color, and the color is fairly even, though there is some striping.
The butchered treeseller's upstream supplier can supply either
"African mahogany" or "Genuine Mahogany." I don't know which this is,
and neither did the little old lady behind the counter. It was
$4.98/bf compared to $4.70/bf for walnut (the same prices they had a
year ago, incidentally) if that makes it likely to be one or the
other. I have a vague idea that it's "supposed" to be "genuine"
mahogany.

I also spent up the last dregs of my cash on a couple bf of soft
maple.

So now I'm trying to figure out what I want to do with this. It just
isn't saying "trumpet case" to me anymore. Actually, now that I've
got a
five-leg stand coming, my horn will almost never see the inside of
the case anyway. If I ever do get some contacts going and get out in
the world and play with other people at some point, it might be cool
to show off my ridiculously snazzy trumpet case, but this is seeming
less and less likely. I've been trying to play the social life game a
little, and it's just not my bag. I was born to be a hermit.

I've been thinking of doing another chess box, but I had intended to
do walnut/maple for that too. I have a real thing for walnut. Mahogany
looking interestingish, but it's not a color I'm really in love with.
It seems a sure bet it needs to be mixed with something more
interesting.
This figured heart/sap walnut is interesting. I'm thinking maybe a
predominantly mahogany chess box with this swirly walnut for the
contrasting element. I'm not sure if this will be a letdown compared
to
the walnut/maple vision I have to do eventually or not, really. That
one I made for Dad last year sure is awful puuuuuuuuurty.

SWMBO doesn't need any jewelry boxes, and there's not enough wood
here to build anything of any real size. I guess I'm stuck in a rut
on chess
boxes, but I can't quite think of anything better to do with it. It
sure seems a waste of all this disgustingly expensive wood to make a
trumpet case out of it.

What say ye? Also, what say ye about trying some other kind of
shellac on the two-tone walnut? I'm debating whether to try garnet or
orange instead of the blonde I used last time. It might darken the
light patches a little and make everything look more walnutty, but
then it might have unwanted clashes with the (faux?) mahogany too.

While I think about it, I guess I'll stick it in the house. I still
don't have any satisfactory way to store lumber flat in my shop. I
should probably let it sit a few weeks anyway before I work it.