Jatoba with a bloodwood heart

The spousal unit and I were cruising the lumber store, looking at wood-porn and just having a nice time. The budget was very tight, so we didn’t expect to take anything home…but there was this pile of flooring remnants. Three-foot-long pieces of a very unimpressive looking wood, sort of muddy. Never heard of it before; “jatoba”. They were $1.50 per, so we picked up four and took ‘em home. They still looked muddy, though, so I didn’t plan to do much with them.

Then I got my bandsaw fence. I needed to test out my resawing capabilities on something, and there was that pile of jatoba. I figured I’d turn one of the pieces to scrap, but discovered that a good fence makes for very nicely resawn lumber. I now had some 3/8” slabs of this jatoba stuff. I figured I’d lay it into the miter box and make a small box, just for the joy of it.

It worked out pretty nicely, but 3/8” was too small for the barrel hinges I had on hand. Remembering my resaw trick, I found a 12” piece of bloodwood in my scrap bin and turned it into thin stock, and made a built up lip. I still didn’t know what I wanted to do for the top, so I started the sanding on the carcase.

That’s when I found out what the jatoba stuff was all about. Brazilian cherry, jatoba, that stuff is PRETTY. That’s also when I found out that bloodwood looks almost guilded when it’s polished up. This box is where I learned the word “chatoyance”, and found out that I absolutely love it beyond all wood qualities (except smell—love the smell of wood).

I had spent an ungodly amount of cash on a slab of Mexican cocobolo, and decided that this serendipitous box rated a part of that, so plopped a piece in the top.

I am moderately in love with this one. It has a nice dense feel, lovely thin walls, and the bloodwood (just for a change) didn’t savage me too badly.

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