A few gift sets of coasters...

[scottp55]

Yep Doug....I was just looking at the two Padauk boards I bought from you 3(4?) years ago, that I kept wrapped in your plastic in a back bedroom sandwiched between 2 bigger Chestnut boards.
Almost the only room in hose without direct sunlight, and the ARE redder than the Ocooch Padauk, but I've never cut into them.
There are 3 different Padauks;
https://www.wood-database.com/?s=padauk

I think Ocooch carries African, and by pics..perhaps yours are Andaman?
Pretty sure UV is the culprit, as I was reading many bar/pool hall/man cave signs still had original color(and even high end 30yr old pool cues kept in cases and used in pool halls that looked original color.
My house and shop get direct sunlight almost all the time, and you can see in the stack of Ocooch I have where the boards weren't aligned exactly, the color change on the edges and where tips of wood were exposed. I always called the color "Salmon" when first cut, after the salmon that gets the lightest smoke treatment and gets shipped mainly to NY for lox(Nova Scotians prefer it smoked for another 2-3 days and it much darker red in the two smokehouses I wandered across)

Ocooch certainly LOOKS orangish/reddish when first cut from Ocooch stock....

makes me want to take a surfacing cut on one of yours that has gotten cupped even with 4 boards on top of it.
Think yours just may be a redder variation of heartwood....like you get when you order a bunch of Bloodwood? (The deep red Bloodwoods you save for special projects!!)

[laflippin]

There is a lot of interesting information in the linked descriptions of the three known padauk sources but one thing that bugged me a little was, in the description of Andaman padauk it was implied pretty strongly that a secret to preserving the initial orange color of the wood is revealed in an associated article on preserving the color of exotic woods. I read that article as well but didn't find the promised secret...there were certainly some general suggestions but nothing specific about preserving orange padauk that I could glean from it. One of the general suggestions in the color preservation article, i.e., using UV-resistant spar-grade polyurethane, certainly does not preserve padauk's orange--it immediately turns padauk blood red in my experience. Maybe (I hope, I hope!) the UV-resistance will slow down any future browning of the blood red padauk in finished pieces.

[Xxray]

Any prolonged UV will kill off the shine of any exotic wood in all circumstances.
For indoor use, never used it but I have heard good things about this for conditioning/preserving wood luster https://www.amazon.com/Howard-FW0016-Fe ... B001BKQYGW

[Xxray]

Yep Doug....I was just looking at the two Padauk boards I bought from you 3(4?) years ago, that I kept wrapped in your plastic in a back bedroom sandwiched between 2 bigger Chestnut boards.
Almost the only room in hose without direct sunlight, and the ARE redder than the Ocooch Padauk, but I've never cut into them.
There are 3 different Padauks;
https://www.wood-database.com/?s=padauk

I think Ocooch carries African, and by pics..perhaps yours are Andaman?
Pretty sure UV is the culprit, as I was reading many bar/pool hall/man cave signs still had original color(and even high end 30yr old pool cues kept in cases and used in pool halls that looked original color.
My house and shop get direct sunlight almost all the time, and you can see in the stack of Ocooch I have where the boards weren't aligned exactly, the color change on the edges and where tips of wood were exposed. I always called the color "Salmon" when first cut, after the salmon that gets the lightest smoke treatment and gets shipped mainly to NY for lox(Nova Scotians prefer it smoked for another 2-3 days and it much darker red in the two smokehouses I wandered across)

Ocooch certainly LOOKS orangish/reddish when first cut from Ocooch stock....

MIM PADAUK MALE FONT SEPARATED.jpg

makes me want to take a surfacing cut on one of yours that has gotten cupped even with 4 boards on top of it.
Think yours just may be a redder variation of heartwood....like you get when you order a bunch of Bloodwood? (The deep red Bloodwoods you save for special projects!!)

Yeah I still have some of that batch too, I wouldn't describe these planks as vivid, kind of a burnt orange and some of them fade into blonde streaks. I might have ripped the ones I sold you, don't recall. They came from a plank that was about 3x4". I have some really vivid dark red cut pieces that have kept their colors for years, not 1 minute of UV exposure.

[scottp55]

Lee,
Here's an excerpt from a different article;

"Bonus note on shellac: Based on an experiment of wood finishes for African Padauk put on by Woodworker’s Source, it was found that shellac outperformed all other major finish types in preserving the orange color of the Padauk. My theory as to why this is the case is that Padauk’s colors (as well as many other exotics) are very much soluble in alcohol, and the solvent present in the shellac may actually be pulling some of the wood’s natural colors out of the wood surface and locking them into the lac resin."

Probably be a BEAR on Paul's VInlays because the denatured will pull and smear the Padauk color?
Here's a link to that article(NOTE I was trying to use our button "Mix" that was SPECIFICALLY noted as the WORST for Padauk! ) ;
https://www.wood-database.com/wood-arti ... hes-works/

Yep Doug, I think I'll keep those 2 boards in that backroom, until I decide what I can use them for in three rooms with very low UV:)
scott

[laflippin]

Thanks, Scott--in your last linked article the author does explicitly commit to the idea that shellac finish will give a truer representation of the original padauk color. I will give it try next time I have the chance.