Quote from: TonyT on December 03, 2014, 04:30:43 AM

Quote from: WoodCollector on December 02, 2014, 06:53:11 AM

At 8" round and 2" thick Mazuma weighs in at just over 12 pounds and is carved from the highest grade Purpleheart wood a person can ever get their hands on. This high grade Purpleheart only comes from the top 3 or 4 feet of trees that exceed 160 foot tall and contains the highest resin concentration of Purpleheart wood which leads it to turning the deepest "crown royal" purple color you will ever find.

Please feel free to ask any questions below, and if your board and just browsing the web, take a minute to check out my other Bitcoin artworks.

Awesome. This is a truism come to life: "making money is an art"!

I do have questions about how you managed to get this wood imported to the USA, which has very strict import laws (even Fender guitar has problems with getting rare woods imported).

Maybe you have connections, or found some local source, or don't care to say, that's fine.

TonyT

Sure Tony, i dont mind sharing.

I have been in the trade craft of wood carving, wood turning and wood collecting for over 2 decades now. With that, i have made literally hundreds of connections around the world with people with direct access ( meaning they can go cut it down ).

Fenders problem was the commercialization of what they were doing. The didnt care about law, regulation, process, or time/due diligence. To them it was all about how much rare or exotic wood they could get for the best price and how fast as the more they could get the faster they could get it the more profit they could make and their pitfall was records keeping. When they were raided, the were unable to provide necessary documents for the wood they were in possession of, that was the same area lumber liquidators got in trouble for when they were raided.

In order to keep your head above hot water you really only need a few things to get any wood in the world.

1: a certificate of origin (if the wood is protected, endangered or on the watch list )
2: a forestry permit ( again if the is protect endangered or on the watch list )
3: a fumigation certificate ( if the wood comes from a region known to have wood dwelling hazards )
4: a good set of book keeping skills

Although i do import a lot of wood for what i do with it, its nowhere near on the scale as the guys who get in trouble all the time like fender so i do not draw much attention. I have never been raided but i did have a pretty nasty surprise inspection from a few different government agencies that all showed up at my storage warehouse at the same time. Even one guy with a gun is never good so a few of them wasn't pleasant. All in all, it didnt take more than 10 minutes for the nightmare to stop. They asked for documents, i pulled out dozens of 3 ring binders full of documents on every piece of wood in my possession that required them and each piece of wood on the shelves that required paperwork was tagged with a number which corresponded to a page in one of the binders. I looked at them, smiled and said "i'll be in my office having some coffe, please let me know if you have questions or when the audit is done" The guy who appeared to be in charge looked at me and said " No need, it appears you have everything in order" then they left.

If required, i always get the paperwork, i will not make a purchase without it, Once i have it, it really takes me only 2 minutes to write a number on each piece of wood, and slide all the documents into a page in a 3 ring binder.

Put simply, i play by the rules for the most part, i know what all the rules are, i have the connections to the people to get what i want, and because of that, there is nothing i cannot get. I have species of wood which have not been able to be harvested for over 40 years now. i have wood that has been extinct for over 100 years, and wood that is over 52,000 years old. For every piece i have the proper documents for it, and when i turn it into art and ship it, the documents go with it if required.

If i cannot play by the rules for some reason, i do not store it in the USA, and i travel to my "offshore" storage facility and wood shop when i need to work with it and i do not ship the art piece to anywhere in the USA. Now if the client has it shipped to Paris or some other place where it is legal to import then decides to bring it home with them to the USA in their luggage to display in their home / office. It then becomes their problem not mine. I never violated any rule or law and cannot be held liable for its possession in the USA. Knowing ALL the rules is the best way to know how to work around them when a person needs to. Big companies always try to take shortcuts for profit, i don't care about the money aspect of it, my clients over the years have set the tone for what i charge and even if i couldn't make a dollar i would still create art and hoard it in every corner i could find like one of those old ladies you see on TV. I am an artist and a collector first, the business aspect comes second. Fender is a business first and only and all they really care about is quarterly statements for their investors. Too many hands and the one responsible for the paperwork didnt do it.

Hope that answers your question, sorry if i went into to much detail, i didn't really know how to summarize all that.