Bluewood or eBay Scam Artist

It is important to remember that although many people may, or may not, be sensitive to any given wood; the only experience that truly counts is your own, so use reported side effects as guidance but not as a substitute for cautious and safe practices.

Appropriate protective equipment is therefore always recommended when working with this, or any other, wood, exotic or domestic, unless you have worked with the species before and are certain you are not sensitive to it.

Complete information about health hazards associated with a wide variety of exotic hardwoods is available from The Wood Database.  Additional information about how to best use a dust collection system and personal protective equipment, such as respirators, can also be found through this excellent and comprehensive resource.

Fortunately, I experienced no negative side effects when working with Bluewood.

My Personal Experiences                       

I have only worked with two small pieces of Bluewood in pen blank format so I am certainly not an expert, but I will share my limited experiences.

My pieces of Bluewood were quite soft, so soft in fact that I find myself wondering if perhaps what I had been sold was just Tilia americana (Basswood, Linden, or Lime with the latter two being European common names) that had been cleverly dyed blue and then sold as a naturally blue wood.

As a soft wood the Bluewood cut rapidly and easily but not very cleanly.  Bluewood, as I expected, sanded quite easily and quickly.  And it is obviously blue completely through with even the sanding dust being distinctly blue in coloration.

I opted to use a cyanoacrylate finish, as I tend to do on most all pens that I make, and I discovered, somewhat to my surprise, that the finish significantly darkened the Bluewood.  It was still recognizably blue but it was much darker following the application of the finish.  Unfortunately, I don’t think that the person I gave it to as a Christmas gift appreciated the rare nature of a naturally blue wood, but I remained impressed.

The characteristics of the true Brazil Bluewood from Texas simply do not match up with the wood that I worked with although those characteristics seem to be in doubt as well since almost every source that references C. hookeri refers only to the botanical nature of the shrub with only two sources addressing the appearance of the wood and those are in conflict with one source claiming the wood is red and the other claiming it is gray.  I suppose a blue dye could be extracted from a reddish wood but I am skeptical about that although I can easily believe that a grayish wood could yield a bluish dye although I can’t imagine it would be a bright blue.

True blue is a very rare color to have occur in nature, being rarely seen even in flowers and not in any fruit that I am familiar with.  In the final analysis I think that the wood I purchased as a wood that was naturally blue throughout was an eBay scam.  I simply do not believe that if there really was a wood that was naturally intensely blue throughout that more would not have been written about it or that other examples of turned pieces would have turned up online somewhere.

I think that in 2009 I was credulous and easily misled by wood scammers due to my lack of familiarity with different woods and I fell for it.  If this wood was real and not simply a dyed softwood surely it would still be sold because it would have a high appeal to wood turners and other wood workers.  This experience further causes me to be quite vary of buying much of anything, let alone wood, on auction sites such as eBay where the barrier against scam artists is low to non-existent.