Quilted maple
- Thread starter weegee3
- Start date
i believe it is a soft maple. Should at least be cored. It is my favorite though. my jump cue is made from stabilized quilted maple.
Well, actually the veneer slicers pay the most for the best stuff because their yield is so high. The guitar guys get lucky sometimes... but then again we'd need a pretty large billet to make a jumbo archtop, but only thin stock to do a flat top acoustic (for the back and sides.)
As to rarity, it's not exactly rare. It's rare that it gets cut up into billets suitable for guitars or cues. Here where I live there are many streets lined with them. There's still plenty of Brazilian rosewood trees; they just can't be harvested.
Many streets lined with what? If you are talking about Quilted Maple, how
do you know it is quilted.
Dale
Though Quilted is much more common in the soft Western Maples, you do at
times see it in hard Eastern Sugar Maple. I have some stashed away in an
undisclosed location.
Dale
Having handled logs from felled trees in the past...
Log brokers and dealers know they have something special just by looking at the outside of the log. Probably the most famous example would be "The Tree" mahogany...
It is not as easy to come by as the other maple figures... and yes rock maple with quilting is even harder to come by than it's softer big leaf sister! when you find it... it will cost you! as stated above veneer and guitar guys scoff it all up long before we ever see it. so odds are you need to buy a large blank and mill it yourself! I have a large amount of both and love working with it even though it is the biggest PITA to work due to the grain pattern of a tye-dyed shirt :angry: just take time to get it right!
Bought a large lot off a furniture maker a few years back...
Bought a large lot off a furniture maker a few years back...
Hard quilt/blister is unicorn rare in a forest tree, but surprisingly common in yard and street trees. Cue makers and other fine wood workers would be sick to know how much gets dumped in the landfill or turned into mulch.
The eastern half of the country also has silver maple. It's normal for silver maple to have extreme quilt & curly & blister figure. It's actually a whole lot like the big leaf. It grows along river edges and in wet lowlands. The bad part is that it's never commercially cut except for pallet or pulp. Nobody mills it for lumber, yet it's one of the biggest hardwood trees in the country and arguably the most commonly figured.
The eastern half of the country also has silver maple. It's normal for silver maple to have extreme quilt & curly & blister figure. It's actually a whole lot like the big leaf. It grows along river edges and in wet lowlands. The bad part is that it's never commercially cut except for pallet or pulp. Nobody mills it for lumber, yet it's one of the biggest hardwood trees in the country and arguably the most commonly figured.
If only for the fact that large billets are used for instrument building. I don't know how nuch cue makers are willing to pay. A 1.5" square x 30" billet is only .5bf. Like such narrow billets are drop offs from larger billets. At the low end, unsorted, about $15-20/bf. 5A grade instrument wood - air dried - with extraordinary figuring, can run over $500/bf... and guitar builders pay a premium over that to get the best of the best before anyone else sees it. Usually the drop offs are made into binding and purfling and other inlay.
