Looking for Horse Chestnut Burrs

[Chris Scott]

Hi Folks, I've been lurking here for sometime but never posted before, so gotta start somewhere eh!

 

I'm a woodworker who makes electronic cigarette mods, I stabilize and often dye the timber with cactus juice as this is what the customers are generally looking for and I've found that horse chestnut is particularly good for this. But I'm having a devil of a job finding it, I suspect it all goes for fire wood.

 

So I though it was worth a shout to you folks to see if there was anything floating around that I could purchase, happy to pay a good price for the right wood.

 

Thanks for reading.

[Billy]

How much do you require and where ?

[Chris Scott]

I'm based in the west midlands, solihull area. The items that I make are small, I can get 100 blanks from a cubic foot of timber, so even small burrs can be useful to me though I'm happy to take large ones if they're available.

[Ian Leach]

It would be interesting to see your work and pictures.

[Chris Scott]

I begin with small blocks of wood, dry them to 0% moisture in an oven, then stabilize under vacuum in cactus juice with or without dyes. The softer and punkier the wood the better. So I take a really rotten lump of spalted beech like this -

 

 

Turning it into blanks like this perhaps, which are double dyed in red and then in blue -

 

 

I then shape them into the mods using pillar drill, hand router, belt sander and sand paper, and polish them up then assemble them with the electronics and hardware to arrive at the finished article like so -

 

 

 

Really dense woods like oak, or really dark coloured woods I can't dye, so they generally remain in thier natural colours, but the customers are very much looking for the funky coloured dyed stuff so I need softer, lighter coloured woods to do it with. Also having timber with a varigated density throughout the blanks causes it to absorb stabilizing resin to differing degrees and therefore the dye so I can acheive much more interesting colouration from Burrs and Spalted woods.

 

So the horse chestnut being fairly soft and light is giving excellent results. Woods like maple and buckeye are excellent also but its serious money to import them, the shipping is insane.

 

Its possible that sycamore could work well, though I've never seen a sycamore burr, but i'm sure rippled and spalted sycamore would work well.

[se7enthdevil]

i have some heavily rippled sycamore. there is also plenty of slightly spalted sycamore.

 

pm sent.

[slackbladder]

Poplar burr would be really good for that

[slackbladder]

I have some poplar burrs here at the minute,afraid they are just lying in the garden and some are soft but they might be good for you and I,m only in Leicester

Give us a ring

01455273894

[Alycidon]

i cut up over 50 tonnes of Horse the summer, good lot of burr in there but its all firewood now.

 

A

[bob]

Cheers for that information it's so helpfull:thumbup: