I can't remember exactly how long ago it was, but I bought a big lump of wenge at the woodturning show at Tredegar House, near Newport, some time last year and it's sat on the shelf ever since. It was a stupidly expensive piece of wood, but it had potential! Then, two weeks ago I was at Yandles, rummaging through their stock looking for a bargain (which was quite a task) and I came across a piece of 2x2 wenge, about 2ft long.
Today I had a go at using the two pieces to make a table garniture - a bowl and a pair of candlesticks. The wenge was a pig to work and didn't produce much at all in the way of shavings when I was roughing out the spindles, rather, it was splinters and dust. On the plus side, it took a good finish off the skew chisel. When working the bowl I really struggled to get a finish off the gouge despite honing it after every pass. In the end, I resorted to using my heavy scrapers with the handle held high and the cutting edge kept well below centre, but tipping the scraper over to shear scrape seemed to make little difference.
Here's the set of three....the bowl is 11" x 3", yet looks strangely shallow in the picture; in fact, it's the better part of 2.5" deep, and 2.75" overall height. The candle sticks are in the Osolnik pattern, which I particularly like (and which sells well) and are just under 11" tall. I gave them all 3 coats of cellulose as the grain was very 'open', then a couple of coats of micro-crystaline wax, which I like to leave for 24hrs and then apply a third coat and then buff off. Candle inserts are solid brass - bought from Ockenden Timber.
