A wild grain appears - pistachio wood

Love the texture and figure in this wood.

Piece of pistachio wood centered on the graft (which is what causes that funky line down the middle) I got as a rough turned blank from my cousin at HighWestWood during the road trip to southern Oregon last fall. He'd rough turned it to a bit over 1" thick and then I brought it home and finished it up. It wanted to check and split a bit on the end grain a bit and warps some while drying but really shapes beautifully once you get to it.

9 1/2" across, 3" deep wall at about 3/16 with a 1/4" bead on the rim.

that must have been touch and go with the crack right in the middle like that.. nice looking wood again ryan

larry merlau said:

that must have been touch and go with the crack right in the middle like that.. nice looking wood again ryan

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Actually that part was 100% solid - its just color from where the tree was grafted although yep it does look pretty scary if you don't know what it is . There was a wee crack on the one end that I filled but it wasn't enough to really cause concern.

Ryan, I Love the grain in it! I don't know if I've ever seen Pistachio used before. Are both sides Pistachio? In your second pic, the right side seems to be a little redder than the left.

I didnd't know that pistachio trees could grow so thick. Looks great Ryan. Here one cannot find such woods.

Norm Michelsen said:

Ryan, I Love the grain in it! I don't know if I've ever seen Pistachio used before. Are both sides Pistachio? In your second pic, the right side seems to be a little redder than the left.

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Yep, two varieties grafted together though the rootstock was one kind of pistachio and the fruitstock (is that a word?) was another kind. I'm not entirely sure which side was up or down (or what the varieties were), but yes one side is definitely a bit redder and the other (which I ?think? may be the bottom) has more of the blue streaks and an almost rosewood looking center to it. This came out of some central California orchards a couple years back

Its actually REALLY nice wood to work - this was my first exposure to it as well. Its quite hard (not ebony hard but more than and average domestic hard - you can't really dent it with a fingernail) but still cuts very nicely. He has pallets of the stuff there - apparently he's sold a fair bit for use as fretboards and another fellow somewhere in washington is buying a lot for urns. I have 3 more chunks of it that were fretboard rejects that I'm planning to make into carved cutlery... I was sort of dreading it because its so hard but after having worked with the stuff I think it'll actually carve pretty well.

Toni Ciuraneta said:

I didnd't know that pistachio trees could grow so thick. Looks great Ryan. Here one cannot find such woods.

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Toni - he has some slabs that are much much larger than this - approaching 2' across. Really neat looking stuff. I'm guessing you can get some olive and similar though?

Very nice piece, Ryan. The graft makes it unique.

Crazy amazing! Never had a piece of pistachio big enough for anything but a small box. Beautiful stuff!

Very cool, Ryan. I've only turned one piece of pistachio, but it was a smaller piece. (It was a gift from Jim Burr, in fact.) Very cool figure but it blew up quite spectacularly when I tried to make a Christmas ornament out of it. (I hadn't even started hollowing it yet.)