importing timber into Australia

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Paul Henneberry

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Howdee,
I'm thinking of importing a few Koa soprano sets from Hawaii and a couple of curling maple blanks from Continental USA into Australia.
How does this work with Australian customs and quarantine and am I going to have problems importing unfinished timber?

My idea is to break up a wide curly maple blank to make the neck, sides and back of one instrument for continuity of colour. I've never worked with maple before so should I be buying soft or hard maple for this project?

cheers

Paul
 
I like Big Leaf Maple, from the Pacific Northwest (think Oregon) better than either Hard (sugar) or Soft ( silver) maple. I strung this single 0 a few days ago:
newcase.jpg



Some of the best Ukes I've seen come from Oz and are Australian Blackwood acacia. I saw them at the Healdsburg Guitar Festival in 2011. My personal concert has Oz B'wood sides and neck and koa plates. I have made many guitars from both OzBW and Koa and my money is on the former. It would be a lot easier to get for you.
 
Can't speak for Australia but I brought back into Canada some koa lumber pieces from a recent trip to Hawaii. When I first said I had "wood items", the customs officer wanted to know what items. I said "lumber" but then quickly explained it was "finished lumber, not branches or logs". He waved me through no problem.
 
Importing wood into Australia is easy as long as you keep in mind the restrictions. Don't think that you're going to slip something in that's on the CITES list without great risk to having seizer of the items and possible fines.

It must be clean and dry, with no sign of bugs, dirt, bark etc. Most reputable luthier suppliers know that this is the case and would never send wood that didn't meet those standards.

Packages that contain wood may be opened and inspected by AQUIS, and probably 1 in 4 of my imports are inspected.

Finally, don't go over the $1,000 AUD threshold including shipping and insurance, otherwise you'll be up for duties and GST and anything else that they think to toss onto the bill.
 
Hi Bruce, wow that is beautiful and just the kind of wood I was thinking of. Is it that curly on the sides? If not, is it possible to bend it when it is that curly? I love curly figured woods but the quilted maple is very special and high on the list as well.

Re Koa: I had in mind to make a couple out of Koa and a couple of more to indentical dimensions out of Tassie Blackwood to compare sound properties. I was thinking one straight grained and one curly in each species.

cheers

Paul
 
Paul Henneberry said:
Hi Bruce, wow that is beautiful and just the kind of wood I was thinking of. Is it that curly on the sides? If not, is it possible to bend it when it is that curly? I love curly figured woods but the quilted maple is very special and high on the list as well.

Re Koa: I had in mind to make a couple out of Koa and a couple of more to indentical dimensions out of Tassie Blackwood to compare sound properties. I was thinking one straight grained and one curly in each species.

cheers

Paul
Click to expand...

OzBw it generally a bit more skookum than Koa, so if you build to the same dimensions the former will be relatively overbuilt.

Quilted big leaf looks fantastic, but it is structurally questionable. Big leaf is a wood that is amazingly different quartered than slabbed. Not only is quilted (flatsawn by definition) much less stable in variable humidity, it becomes ridiculously floppy when thin as compared to quartered material. The maple in the guitar I pictured is of one quality and truly quartered.
 
Anything that has that much curl is certainly going to test your skills at bending, especially in the tight sections. I've got to curly maple ukes finally in the finishing stages. They were very difficult to bend the sides on, and I'm keen to move onto something easier to work with for a spell.
 
Bending is a skill that improves with practice, but it isn't so challenging that you shouldn't just dive in. I bent the super highly flamed guitar pictured above in a Fox Bender, and didn't even think of failure. I bend my cutaways and all of my Ukes by hand on a propane heated hot pipe. I use a 2 1/2" x 6" piece of steel pipe I literally tripped over on a sidewalk 40 years ago. I work hotter than popular wisdom suggests, keep the spritzer handy, and keep the wood moving. Breakage is rare, the last unrecoverable failure was many years ago. Talking like this means I'll have to be extra careful for a while.
 
I recently saw a video of machine bending at just over 214F - I didn't know it could be done at this temperature. I use between 310F and 325F depending on the wood on my Ibex and like Bruce, a spritzer is used to stop burning. Any curly timber is problematic starting at the prep stage right through to finishing. When I hand bend curly I have a 6" piece of .005" stainless shim to back the bend. It helps with even heat transference. Another critical factor is thickness. 10 thou in either way can be the difference between success and failure. Remarkably, there is no formula for this tho most of us use 'set' thicknesses. However O'Brian in his video on bending has some excellent advice on thicknessing.
 
Don't bother with using Koa in Australia apart for custom orders- Use Tassy blackwood.
 
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