In this blog, I almost always recommend several vendors with whom I have done considerable business and in whom I have great confidence. These vendors are: West Penn Hardwoods, Bell Forest Products, NC Wood, Got Wood?, and WoodTurningz.
Of these fine vendors, only West Penn Hardwoods and Bell Forest Products are currently offering Argentine Osage Orange. West Penn Hardwoods is offering dimensional lumber at $17.60 per board foot as well as pen, spindle and bowl blank sizes. Bell Forest Products is offering only pen, spindle, and bowl blank sizes with no dimensional lumber being available at this time. As a point of comparison and to demonstrate a general price range, both vendors offer a 6” x 6” x 2” bowl blank for about $15, with West Penn Hardwoods being cheaper by less than $0.50.
Woodfinder is an excellent website that is dedicated to advertising wood dealers. In your search for Argentine Osage Orange, this can be an invaluable resource provided you use multiple search terms to capture all the possible listings. I can’t speak to the quality of any of the listed dealers, but Woodfinder does have the advantage of allowing searches to be performed based on location which might allow an interested buyer to visit a listed wood dealer in person to hand pick pieces at a comfortable price.
A significant problem with using Woodfinder is that many vendors are listed for woods that, upon further investigation, they do not offer. I don’t know if perhaps once they did and they didn’t update their listings or if some vendors use a standardized list of woods that include most everything conceivable with the idea that once you land on their page you will find something you want to buy even if you didn’t know it beforehand. It happens to me all the time!
Uses
One of the primary uses for Argentine Osage Orange, within the trees’ natural range at least, is heavy construction. Argentine Osage Orange is also used for flooring, furniture, and turned objects as well as small and specialty wood items that take advantage of the hardness, color, and durability of the material.
Sustainability
Argentine Osage Orange is not listed as being in any way threatened or endangered by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) Appendices nor does it appear on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List.
To the best of my knowledge, Argentine Osage Orange is not subject to any special restrictions by any United States government agency.
I realize that inherent in working with wood is the killing of a part of the natural world that may be slow to return and if I become deeply concerned about this fact, I will have to find a new hobby. I hope that such a time does not come to pass or at least not any time soon. In part because I am concerned about legally and responsibly obtained wood, I am reluctant to buy from sellers outside of well-established and known vendors. I am highly unlikely, for example, to purchase any wood from auction sites, such as Ebay, because of uncertain sourcing and documentation, as well as the potential, even likelihood, of material being misidentified in order to achieve a higher selling price.
However, due to the commercial scarcity of some domestic woods, resorting to auction sites such as Ebay or Etsy may be the only way to obtain some desirable domestic, or in some cases exotic imported, species that are not routinely commercially harvested. The potential risks of buying in these marketplaces have to be balanced against the desire to work with a specific species of wood. That is inherently an individual decision.