Wenge: Millettia laurentii

Inventory:

Rough: 4/4  & 8/4  RW

D2S: short boards of various widths & lengths

Turning Blocks & Knife Scales

Pricing: from $21.75 /BF +

 

The Wood: 

Wenge wood is an exciting exotic wood from Africa, with dark brown background colours and intense almost pure black striations. End cuts, like the zebrawood, show interesting banding like the ripples on a sandy beach… and the black tones intensive, particularly with oil finishes..

 

Wenge grain lines can be very linear if quarter cut like on the right of the photo… or in regular sawn, show dramatic arch and cathedral grain patterns as you would be familiar in regular red oak.

 

The wood is relatively easy to cut and plane, but I might suggest you use gloves in fabrication as it has a bad habit of splintering … and those splinters, at least in my hands, tend to get infected. Having said that I still persist (with gloves!!) I love to pair it with zebrawood, because the colours of the wenge, draw out the drama of the stripes in the zebrawood….

 

NOTES: Sand using a block, rather than your hand, because the block will help to keep the wood flat. The black parts of the grain are of a greater density than the brown bits, and sanding with your hand alone,  tends to encourage ripples in the finished product. The wood is relatively “open pored” so it will require a bit of work to fill the grain if you are looking for that glass like appearance. I did have one client that used bronzing powder with a filler and rubbed that into the open pores, to create pretty cool gold pen marks in the pore lines.