The smell of carved wood

Anybody else love the smell of carved wood. I'm working on a piece of Cocobolo right now it has this wonderful smell, maybe like spicy licorice. Also the sweet smell of Basswood will have me carving it again even though I like many other woods more. Haven't carved Pine yet but I'm guessing that will be quite nice.

Yeah different woods smell strange. Fresh Cypress smells sweet enough to eatFresh Fl Mahogany smells tartly sweet. Cocobolo can be hazerdous to smell the sawdust, but the wood itself smells like a spice.

Weird but true. I had a very poor sense of smell for years. Why? I dunno. Anyway, in the past few weeks my olfactory powers have improved tremendously. That's not always such a good thing, unfortunately, but I'm smelling things I haven't smelled in years. I was trying to figure out what precipitated this change. No change in diet. No change in anything...except a few weeks ago I started playing around with woodcarving. It especially seems to correlate to when I began using wood stains in an admittedly ventilation-challenged environment. Coincidence? Maybe. Crazy? Perhaps. But I'd like to thank the TC Creating Tiki forum for inspiring me to get my sense of smell back. And yeah, the wood can smell downright edible at times.

I carved and burnt some Koa the other day and it smelled awfull. (ya, ya. You burnt what??!! Anyone going to Oasis will find out)

Maybe I'm just used to the smell of fresh cut Giant grass in the morning ( do doo do dooo do. do doo dooo dooooo do, do doo dooo do, do doo do do! Chime it out. Charlie don't surf)!!!

I like the smell of carved naPALM in the morning!

[ Edited by: FLOUNDERart on 2004-03-25 06:47 ]

I managed to salvage a short log from what I believe to be a Camphor tree. The tree was in our front yard and was removed while we were out of town. The stump grinder came after we had returned and when they grinded that stump the whole neighborhood smelled spicy. After a couple days it got to be a bit much. Before putting the chisels to that wood, I am going to let some time pass.
I dont want to smell that scent again for a while.

Chongolio

-- I believe that our Heavenly Father invented the monkey because he was disappointed in man."
... Mark Twain

Come explore http://www.lost-isle.com

[ Edited by: Chongolio on 2004-03-25 18:51 ]

So far, from the limited amount of types of wood that I've carved, my favorite is redwood. It has that "I'm a woodworker" smell to it that other people recognize too.
I just scored some Pepper Tree logs (at least that's what the guy told me) - don't know how it's going to carve, but I do know that if you burn it, it smells horrible.

Cedar smells fantastic. Fresh, burnt, or wet and on the BBQ with a big salmon cooking atop it, fantastic.

my wife thinks im crazy, is it just me. but each time we go to florida, i swear i can smell the palms. sort of a sickly sweet smell?

Yellow Pine smells like, well, pine...White Pine smells like Pine mixed with fungus.....Black Walnut has a nice spice smell but burns the nasal passages and irritates your eyes for days...Cherry wood smells wonderful, like cavendish tobacco (my favorite weapon wood) but hard as an arm on muscle beach. Poplar smells like a memeographed test (remember those?) in elementary school.....That about covers my choices down here!

It took me a while to isolate the smell from the log I'm carving, then it hit me, a freshly husked ear of corn.

On 2004-03-27 21:45, Basement Kahuna wrote:
Poplar smells like a memeographed test (remember those?) in elementary school..

Nothing puts the "pop" in "pop quiz" like a damp purple memeograph hot off the press.

You're right kctiki.Careful you're showing your age cuz I remember those and they go Way back.

That's what's wrong with these kids today, they haven't ever sniffed purple ink!

If that's what poplar smells like, it'll be my choice if I ever make a stab at carving. Stab would probably be an accurate description of my potential carving talent. I sliced off the tip of my finger trying to cut ham with a ginsu knife.

Tree of paradise smells like peanut butter in a kind of overwhelmingly unpleasant way. I can't imagine anyone carving it though. Its only virtue that I've noticed is that when I cut one down and burn it in the fireplace, it's sap seems to be more flamable than most. It shoots little jets of blue flame out of the cracks in the wood and whistles as it does so...kinda "fireworkish."

Kctiki, you have taken the first step to becoming an aprenyice woodcarver: slicing off any finger tip. Welcome to the world of wood carving. Now get a log and a knife or 2 and remove anything that does not look like a tiki.

Yes, our workshop always smells totally like redwood. It's funny some times of the year you can smell the wood more than other times. We've always got a small stack of redwood sitting there for our signs. I usually get it in 8 foot lengths and then slice it up as soon as we get it home so it is ready for the next batch of signs. I spend a lot of time in there - so I'm used to it now.

When we're busy I spend whole days at the scroll saw cutting out lettering and little tiki heads and stuff. It's fun, you just kind of zone out and the time just flies. I love our workshop!

The only bad things is after we paint the signs we have to seal them with a spray sealer, we do it outside, but then we bring the signs in to dry and it smells awfull!! But the smell is gone by the next morning.

Oh if anyone's interested, I use an RBI company scroll saw and you can see one on the web at: http://www.rbiwoodtools.com/s/static/scroll_saw_one/scroll_saw_one.htm
No I have no connection with them at all! I ran across one of thier saws being demonstrated in 2001 at the L.A. County Fair and thought it was a really cool thing, well I ordered one just for fun - a month later it was 9/11 and a month after that I got laid off from my job at Disney after 21 years! Well, we kind of got into the sign business by accident, you know one thing evolved into another...

Anyway I've been using that saw since then for our business and I just love it. It can cut really teeny little detailed things and also big sign outlines. And it's very sturdy. Boy I should be in a commercial for them, I think it's that good.

Heavens to mergatroid, sorry about all the rambling....

I just finished carving a Tiki in Meyer Lemon Wood. The tree it came from was in our yard and died from something lethal, probably a boring insect. Anyway the wood was a little hard to carve, but the color of the wood was a pale yellow. It still smelled of lemons, until I rubbed it with oil stain.
Tikiboy