Bradford Pear

The wood of the Bradford Pear is rated as non-durable in terms of its ability to resist fungal rot.

Working Characteristics

In general, Bradford Pear, as well as other species of Pear, is considered to be an easy wood to work with both hand and machine powered tools.

Bradford Pear is known to be an excellent turning wood.

Bradford Pear Interior

Bradford Pear also glues well and is easy to finish.

While some sources claim that Bradford Pear wood features no distinctive scent when freshly cut or turned, my experience argues otherwise with freshly turned fairly green Bradford Pear wood smelling distinctly of, you guessed it, pears.

Pricing and Availability

Common pear is a well-known, popular, and high-end premium hardwood in its native Europe.  In the United States, pear wood of any time is only available in very limited quantities, if at all.  In most cases, the larger logs are turned into veneer for architectural purposes.  Because of this, one must be prepared to pay very high prices for the limited supplies of Pear veener or lumber.

However, the situation is a bit murkier for Bradford Pear specifically.  Bradford Pear is not generally commercially harvested as a timber wood, being restricted in most cases to landscape specimens, however, hobbyist suppliers, or commercial tree services, may occasionally have Bradford Pear turning blanks that have been processed by smaller scale mills that specialize in hobby and craft lumber and turning blanks.  Prices will vary with availability and quality, but one should expect prices to be higher for Bradford Pear wood, when available, than for other, more common, domestic hardwoods.

In this blog, I always recommend a range of 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, WoodTurningz, Woodturningblanks4U, Amazon Exotic Hardwoods, Exotic Woods USA, and Griffin Exotic Wood.  Each vendor offers their own unique specialty products with varying strengths, but I would feel confident buying wood from any of these companies.

Of these vendors, only the great guys over at Got Wood offer any Bradford Pear at this time and their stock is limited to whopping total of four 2”x2”x8” spindle blanks.  This was my source for several smaller, 6”x2” turning rounds, in the past but supplies continue to be extremely limited and I count myself lucky to have obtained any at all at the time I did.  Knowing the scarcity of Bradford Pear, I purchased the entire stock over a year ago and it has not been replenished nor can I locate another source for the material.

Bradford Pear Exterior

Woodfinder is an excellent website that is dedicated to advertising wood dealers.  In your search for Bradford Pear, 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

Some sources say that Europeans use Pear wood in much the same way that Americans use Black Cherry, but this is not broadly applicable to Bradford Pear.