Two Rojo stools, Queensland maple, fiddle back / blackwood,…
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Two Rojo stools, Queensland maple, fiddle back / blackwood, Australia, c 1950s, 46 cm high, 42 cm wide, 29

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  • Blackwood - One of the best known and most widely used Australian timbers, blackwood (acacia melanoxylon), is a member of the Acacia (wattle) family and grows in eastern Australia from about Adelaide in South Australia, as far north as Cairns in Queensland.

    The largest, straightest and tallest trees come from the wet forest and swamps of north-west Tasmania where it is grown commercially.

    Blackwood timber colours range across a wide spectrum, from a very pale honey colour through to a dark chocolate with streaks of red tinge.

    The hardwood timber has been commonly used in the production of furniture, flooring, and musical instruments in Australia from the late 19th century. However, the straight grain timber is not the most prized or valuable, that honour falls to blackwood with a wavy, fiddleback pattern, which is used both in the solid and as a veneer. Fiddleback was only used on the finest examples of furniture.
  • Maple - Maple, native to North America, is a dense heavy timber from light to yellow-brown in colour. It has very little distincive graining unless it is one of the variants such as birds-eye maple or burr maple, so was not used extensively for furniture in 18th and 19th century, where cabinetmakers and designers preferred timbers with more distinctive features such as mahogany, walnut, rosewood and oak.

    Birds-eye maple has a seres of small spots linked by undulating lines in the grain, is highly sough and is used as a decorative veneer. Burr maple has larger and irregular grain swirls than birds-eye maple.
  • Fiddleback - A name given to the pattern of the grain in some timbers, where the lines of the grain are compressed and at the same time wavy. Fiddleback grain is prized as a timber for furniture and musical instruments, and is expensive becasue of its scarcity.

    In Australia fiddleback graining is found in blackwood. Other non-native timbers that are sometimes found with a fiddleback grain are mahogany and maple.

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