Exotic Wood redheart

WOOD ID POSTER:
co-created by, and sponsored by, HobbitHouse

240 woods on a poster (24"x36")

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REDHEART

Cosmocalyx spectabilis
Cosmocalyx spectabilis of the family Rubiaceae

Although I find this wood to be widely available at exotic wood dealers, details of its provenance seem less available than just about any other exotic wood I am familiar with.

Alternate common names include chakte kok even though that name actually belongs more properly to a related wood of similar appearance. The wood is dull pink to moderately bright red and fades severly with long exposure to UV; UV blocking agents will slow, but not totally inhibit, the fading and will generally cause the shift to somewhat more towards brown than just very faded red. There is often a very attractive purple area at the juncture between the heartwood and the sapwood, changing from lighter to darker as it moves towards the heartwood. This wood has a fine to medium texture and works very easily.

Sheila at Pens of Color reports that she has pens of redheart that she turned 5 years ago and they are still vibrant red. She did not say what finishing agent she used. On my own segmented bowls with UV-blocking polyurethane, the woods has always changed to a reddish-brown.

my samples:

redheart exposure series --- both sides are raw, freshly sanded, and half has been covered and the rest exposed to light. The first pic is the raw baseline and the 2nd pic shows the exposure after one month. To see the complete series, click here: redheart exposure series As you can see just from these two shots, redheart does not darken with age but rather fades in an unattractive way.

another example of redheart fading due to exposure to sunlight. This piece was in a place in my garage for a season or two in a position where the part on the left was sticking out a little beyond the end an irregular piece of plywood that also let in a little light under it. SO ... the part that stuck out was exposed to direct sunlight briefly every sunny day and the lower portion was exposed to mild indirect sunlight at the same time and only faded a little. As you can see, direct sunlight is a killer for the color on this wood.

plank --- in my experience, redheart is usually not this dull (although it is NOT as bright as some of the bogus-colored pics you'll see in the web pics down below)

both sides and end grain of a wonderfully bright red piece

end grain closeup from the piece directly above --- color is too dark

both sides and two closeups of a plank I bought from the BogusColorVendor --- at the bottom of this page, I demonstrate once again the incredible dishonesty of that vendor.

small planks

misc solid pieces just to show some variation in grain and color

redheart sticks. The ones in the background show sapwood and the ones on top were chosen for excellence of color.

plank and end grain

end grain closeup of the piece directly above

small plank and end grain

end grain closeup of the piece directly above

two views, showing all 6 surfaces, of a small slab. The demarcation between heartwood and sapwood in redheart is typically somewhat vague, as seen on this piece, although it can be sharper, as exemplified by the piece directly above, or even immediate as seen in a couple of the web pics.

A NOTE ON THE NEXT TWO SLABS: these are shown just to illustrate how the red sometimes is highly variable in this wood. Each set shows all 6 surfaces and the 2nd set has end grain closeups for both ends (ends in this case does not refer to the smallest surface, which it normally does in English, but rather to that surface that contains the end grain).

set 1

set 2 --- a really excellent example of how and why it is that smoothing a surface reduces the amount of light-reflecting surface and thus appears to deepen the color --- before I fine-sanded one end-grain surface, both end-grain surfaces of this piece were identical in color and now one of them is clearly darker. The smallest surface on each end is side grain and differs in color because of where the cut falls relative to the variable red in this piece. The one on the left is cut through a dark red section and the one on the right is cut through a light red section.

another set of small planks and a closeup

stick and end grain --- this one is a little darker red color than the average redheart (to the extent that there IS any such thing as an "average")

a "top and side" pic and a side grain closeup. The apparent lighter color of the side grain closeup is because of the bright light I used.

end grain closeup of the piece directly above --- in doing the color correction, I lightened this one up just a little too much.

3 sides of a stick that has an unusually dark red color --- the darker red of the face in the middle pic is accurate

end grain and end grain closeup of the stick directly above --- I did a REALLY poor job of sanding this end

the transition from red heartwood to tan sapwood is frequently accompanied by a transition area of purple, but rarely as strong as in this piece (it shows up a little more clearly in the enlargements)

nice little chunk showing pretty typical heartwood/sapwood demarcation and color

both sides of a small plank

end grain and end grain closeup of the piece directly above

plank

planks

two planks and end grain closeups --- the plank on the left shows a transition from red heartwood to purple sapwood to light red sapwood and the plank on the right shows a transition directly to light colored sapwood.

planks

plank

a pair of pen blanks and an end grain closeup of the pair

web pics

planks

plank and closeup

plank and a closeup from each side

curly plank and closeup --- I believe the distance pic has the more correct color

curly bookmatched pair

scales

waxed slab

waxed bowl blank and raw bowl blank

listed as quilted redheart with no botanical designation but based on the color and the fact that I have never otherwise seen quilted redheart, I wonder if perhaps these are from one of the other species that have redheart as one of their common names but which are not normally sold as redheart in the USA.

curly redheart stool

bowl turned by Al Amstutz

bowl

three views of a particularly nice bowl

these are from the BogusColorVendor, so the bright red is probably fradulent

turning sticks

planks

planks and a closeup

both sides of a plank and a closeup

fiddleback --- obviously nice figure and this is probably a very nice board, but as is usual with the BogusColorVendor, the saturation level of the red color is just ridiculous

here's a plank I bought from the BogusColorVendor with a direct comparison of my accurate-colored pics and their standard GROSS exaggeration of the color (their pics are exactly as posted on the Internet and mine are accurate)

their pic

actual color from my camera
good side

their pic

actual color from my camera
other side

closeup with their pic on the left and my accurate one on the right