Huon Pine – Sawn – Turning Blank – 45×45×300mm

Huon Pine spindle blank, 45×45×300mm. Salvage-only supply, sweet-scented, cuts clean and finishes to a silky glow.

Ideal for Spindle Turning

A 45×45mm section at 300mm long is the workhorse spindle blank — enough for
handles, bud vases, boxes, pepper mills and finials, with room to true up between centres.
Huon Pine is a forgiving blank for anyone still building confidence at the lathe: it cuts
sweetly, it does not fight the tool, and it sands to a finish with very little effort.

Huon Pine (Lagarostrobos franklinii)

Tasmania’s most storied timber, and one of the slowest-growing trees on earth —
individual specimens have been aged well past two thousand years. The colour runs pale
straw to a deep honey gold, the texture is fine and even, and the grain frequently breaks
into bird’s eye figure. What everyone remembers, though, is the smell: Huon Pine carries
a high natural oil content that gives it an unmistakable sweet resinous scent when cut.
That same oil makes it extraordinarily durable — timber pulled from
riverbeds after a century underwater comes out sound.

Supply is salvage only. No living Huon Pine is felled in Tasmania.
Everything on the market is recovered material — trees drowned by hydro schemes,
logs retrieved from riverbeds, and old stockpiles. It is not a timber that gets restocked
on demand, which is exactly why we buy it when it comes our way.

Working Properties

• Workability: A pleasure to work. Soft enough to cut cleanly with hand tools,
  dense enough to hold crisp detail. It turns and carves beautifully and does not tear out.
• Finishing: Takes an oil or wax finish to a silky, low-lustre glow.
  The natural oils mean it needs very little help.
• Stability: Very stable once dry, with low movement in service.
• Durability: Among the most rot-resistant timbers in the world —
  the reason it was the boatbuilder’s timber of choice for a century and a half.

Specifications

• Common Names: Huon Pine, Macquarie Pine
• Botanical Name: Lagarostrobos franklinii
• Origin: Western and south-western Tasmania
• Density: Approximately 720 kg/m³ air-dry, measured on our current stock
• Appearance: Pale straw to honey gold, fine even texture, frequent
  bird’s eye figure

Working with figure or character? Clear casting resin fills a void or a
bark seam and turns it into the feature of the piece — we stock
Luci-Clear
for exactly this.

More species in our timber range, and more blanks under turning blanks.

Kiln dried and ready to work

All of our timber is kiln dried to Australian standards, so it arrives stable and ready to be worked.