Spalted Sassafras and Gun Metal Fountain Pen
Of all Tasmanian timbers, Sassafras has the most variable and dynamic colouring. It is a beautiful and pale creamy grey to white normally but can be streaked with rich browns and black heart. It is attainable in two major groupings: Golden Sassafras and Blackheart Sassafras.
Finishing to a grey and golden tone, Golden Sassafras is particularly attractive as a veneer or as a solid timber with knots providing figure. If the tree is infected with a staining fungus it produces Blackheart Sassafras. Blackheart is a timber with distinctive dark brown, black, and even green streaks running through the wood. Blackheart is highly prized for decorative work and bowl turning as no two pieces are ever the same.
Sassafras is versatile. While the wood is light and strong, it is rather soft and easily worked. Renowned in furniture use as a solid, a veneer or a laminated board, Sassafras is used for panelling, mouldings, joinery, veneers, cabinet-making and turnery.
Sassafras grows as an understorey species in lower altitude wet forests throughout Tasmania. It is not related to the timbers known as Sassafras that grow on mainland Australia. It is an aromatic evergreen tree with some quite distinctive qualities; the bark, sap, and associated oils are highly aromatic and smell like cinnamon, while its leaves have a strong sarsaparilla scent. The leaves are dark green, turning yellow as the tree ages. The best trees are found in gullies where Sassafras may reach 45m in height and almost 1 metre in diameter.
Sassafras is a component of wet eucalypt forest and young rain forest where it may live for up to 150–200 years. It is a heavy seed producer although germination can be erratic. Seedlings are subject to heavy browsing by native animals and many young trees become established where they are inaccessible, on mounds or on man fern trunks.
Pen #615 was turned on 7th August 2016 at Bugbrooke.
It's a peaceful stretch of canal between Napton and Braunston and we stayed here for a good few days watching the passing boats and thunderstorms and catching up with making penstock for our next festival at Blisworth. We even managed to bump into fellow boater and blogger Maffi who very kindly gave me a log of cherry wood that he had started to season on his roof. It's not too often that I can get good quality English cherry wood so I will cut this log down into large pen blanks and finish seasoning them over winter to see what they turn out like next spring.
After a short evening cruise to Braunston we were very surprised to find a free mooring right opposite the Boathouse pub perfect for our stop off to meet up with local friend Richard and then later the same day Jenny and Chris all of whom brought some nice seasoned wood for me to add to my stockpile. We left again early the next morning, not so early that we would disturb people that managed to go to the pub the evening before, and then it was time to go up the Braunston locks, through the tunnel, down the Buckby locks and moor up a few miles further south in one of our favourite canal side villages Bugbrooke.
You can follow my pen making here on this blog and our travels on another blog here
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