The Costs of High Grading Koa Forests

In forestry, high grading is the process of selectively harvesting the highest grade of timber from an area of forest. Harvesting wood in this manner is commonly described as “cutting the best and leaving the rest”, and differs from selection cutting.

The practice of high grading is very detrimental to the long term health of forests. After several harvests, the remaining forest stands will be left with only lower timber quality. While lower grade timber can make it more difficult to sustain healthy silvicultural practices, it’s extremely important that we don’t take only the best trees from our precious forests. High grading can also have a negative impact on other activities such as hunting, wildlife watching or hiking. Harvesting only the best trees in a forest also has an ecological cost that negatively impacts biodiversity, genetic diversity and species mix. If we leave only the inferior trees in a stand of forest, we also create unsafe conditions due to an excessive amount of unmanaged trees that could potentially fall in a storm.

High grading can also be a method of defrauding the landowner where the timber is being harvested. Stumpage rates are an agreed upon price that the logger will pay the landowner for a certain volume of wood and they are based on the average quality of the wood in the managed stand. If the logger high grades the harvested timber, then the average logs harvested will be more valuable than the normal average price of timber from that stand. The logger in this case took the best and paid for a stumpage rate representative of a mix of grades.

The opposite of high grading is low grading, where the lower quality trees are harvested so that the genetic stock remaining is faster growing and of higher quality. Harvesting in this manner is also known as thinning and is a useful method of managing a healthy forest stand.

As carpenters who choose to work with Koa wood, we have to be careful to not encourage practices such as high grading. We all love curly Koa wood for obvious reasons – it truly is the most beautiful wood in the world. However, it’s our responsibility to help manage our precious resources by also considering the lower grades of Koa lumber. If we only decide to work with the best Koa wood and leave the rest we create a market that causes extreme demands that encourage the practice of high grading our precious forests.

Koality Woods is proud to offer curly Koa wood when it’s available. Even though there is an enormous demand for curly Koa lumber, we primarily focus on supplying a more representative mix of wood from our forests. Curly Koa trees are one in a billion in modern times. Part of being a responsible wood supplier means we cannot selectively harvest only the best while ignoring the rest.

If a wood supplier is only selling curly wood of the highest quality, they’ll surely succeed in making numerous sales. We have to ask ourselves if only selling our most precious trees is truly what matters.

Koality Woods believes in something greater. We believe in the long term health of our forests and we know that without the utilization of lower grade Koa wood we create a system that encourages the damaging effects of high grading. Please consider the use of our beautiful lower grades of Koa wood in your next project. By supporting the use of all grades of Koa lumber we create healthier forests.

Hawaiian Koa Hardwood Flooring

It’s been almost a full year since we’ve posted in our blog and we’re well overdue for an update! This has been one of the most challenging years with the pandemic but in many ways Koality Woods has grown immensely despite the circumstances.

We’ve moved our shop to a new 10,000 sq. ft. factory in Kapolei, HI where we now have access to heavy industrial equipment to produce more great Koa tonewood for ukuleles and guitars! We’ve been extra busy milling ukulele wood lately using many great species endemic to Hawaii such as Naio and Kopiko Ula. We just completed production of over 270 Koa ukuleles and a decent amount of Koa acoustic guitars and also a few Koa electric guitars. We are quickly becoming the largest retail provider of ukulele tonewood in the world! We have plans to offer more curly Koa tonewood as soon as we can start travelling to Big Island again.

Now that we have a large supply of Koa ukulele and guitar wood we are going to transition to offer Koa wood flooring for sale. While the cost of solid Hawaiian Koa wood flooring can be quite expensive, we have a few methods to keep things affordable for those looking at premium hardwood flooring options. True Hawaiian Koa flooring used to be manufactured in the late 20th century when the cost of Koa was nearly 20x less than it is today, but due to the high prices and limited supply, almost no local companies are producing authentic Koa hardwood flooring.

We aim to bring back Koa wood floors to the homes of Hawaii! While we currently offering ¾” tongue and groove Koa hardwood flooring, we also intend to offer a prefinished Koa engineered hardwood flooring. The benefits of engineered Koa hardwood flooring are numerous and really help to decrease maintenance and cost!

Engineered Koa hardwood flooring is similar to the ¾” Koa hardwood tongue and groove flooring we already offer, but instead of the entire plank being solid wood, there is a ½” Baltic birch base that a ¼” top layer of Koa wood is glued onto in a press. The plywood base allows the Hawaiian Koa wood flooring to be used in environments with higher humidity without the risk of warping.

Engineered Koa wood floors also come with the benefit of using 75% less wood than traditional Koa hardwood T&G flooring without sacrificing the ability to refinish the floors to extend their life. With a solid Acacia Koa hardwood floor, you are only able to sand down to the top of the tongue and groove, which amounts to ¼” which is nearly the same thickness as our engineered Hawaiian Koa wood flooring.

Because we use 75% less Koa wood when compared to tongue and groove hardwood flooring, we are able to keep the costs lower in additional to more responsibly using the very limited supply of Koa wood.

We anticipate that within the next thirty days we will have our first samples of engineered Koa wood flooring for sale in addition to solid Koa wood trims and moldings for all of your hardwood flooring needs! In the meantime, please feel free to see an example of our Hawaiian Koa Hardwood flooring by clicking here!

Koa Ukulele Sets, Koa & Mango Chop Sticks and Wood Stabilization

We’ve been hard at work photographing and editing our recently listed Hawaiian Koa ukulele sets! We now have all our currently available Koa tonewood online and we’re excited to finally have the inventory available for everyone to pick and choose from. We pride ourselves on the “what you see is what you get” method of displaying our Koa tonewood and we hope you’ll find that it’s easy to know what you’re getting based on our method of photographing the ukulele and Koa guitar sets. You can find our ukulele sets here and if you’re looking for acoustic Koa guitar sets they’re here, or for electric guitar sets check here!

Now that we have our Koa ukulele and Koa guitar sets online, we’re shifting focus to wood stabilization. Stabilized wood is the process of removing all air from Koa wood blocks in a vacuum chamber and then soaking the wood in a polymer that solidifies when cured in an oven. By stabilizing the Koa wood and curly mango knife scales and pen blanks we create a wood product that is virtually waterproof that can be easily turned without fear of shattering the wood.

When the stabilized curly Koa knife scales are used as handles for custom knives, the wood can be washed without the normal problems associated with mixing wood and water together. You don’t need to fear rot or warping when you use our professionally stabilized curly Koa knife scale wood, and you don’t need to worry about splintering or cracking when turning with our curly mango and curly Koa pen blanks.

In the future we will supply stabilized curly Koa wood for call blanks and also stabilized curly Koa wood for pool cue blanks. We’re excited to provide people with these woods because it offers wood turners an excellent building material to choose when they’re looking to make custom Koa hunting calls and Koa pool cue blanks while also helping to maximize the use of all the Koa trees we salvage.

We plan to differentiate from other stabilized wood providers by using 360 Photography. We pride ourselves on the “what you see is what you get” presentation style and we’re really looking forward to giving our customers the most accurate view of the curly Koa knife scale, pen blank, call blank or pool cue blank that they’re purchase. By taking a picture of all angles of the curly Koa and curly mango knife scales and other stabilized wood, you’ll be able to get a full understanding of the amount of curl and texture of the grain of each piece of stabilized curly Koa and stabilized curly mango wood.

Finally, we recently purchased the Chopstick Master by Bridge City and are looking forward to making stabilized curly Koa chopsticks and stabilized curly mango chopsticks. As a wood supplier we don’t always get to make finished products so we’re excited to have a new project to build. The first prototypes of our spalted curly mango chopsticks are beautiful and we can’t wait to show everyone!

We still plan to produce more Koa wood ukulele sets and curly Koa guitar sets, but the next items to go online will be curly mango and curly Koa knife scales, pen blanks, hunting call blanks, pool cue blanks and chopsticks.

Thanks for reading and don’t forget to check our stabilized wood page for more details!

Setting Up Shop

It’s been about six months since we last posted so we decided to make an update.

Quite a lot has happened in the past six months. The Laguna Resaw Master arrived in May and after some modifications we finally got it running correctly and we were able to slice lots of sets for orders that had been delayed due to the equipment issues. We’d like to apologize to everyone we’ve kept waiting. Dealing with machinery issues in Hawaii is especially difficult.

We have a pallets worth of Koa instrument sets that we still need to go through and post online. Six months ago when we first launched the site we quickly listed tonewood sets as individual pieces (tops, backs and sides were individual items). We knew this wasn’t an ideal way to purchase sets but we needed to get our site online and we had lots of wood to cut at the time.

Now, we plan to list our Koa guitar and ukulele sets like this curly Hawaiian mango tenor ukulele set. We think this will be a much easier way to see exactly what we have in stock at the time.

We’re happy to take orders still, feel free to contact us, but please note that 5A Koa is extremely difficult to find right now and it might take some time before we can get more. We highly recommend that luthiers choose to use the lower grades of Koa in their production of guitars and ukuleles so that we can more consistently meet your needs. Using the lower grades also helps us to better use the resources of our precious forests.

Aside from tonewood sets, we also had some 4/4 and 8/4 Koa lumber that we kiln dried and surfaced on 4 sides. We posted the lumber we currently have here. We have about 75 more BF of select wood still in the kiln and there’s about 150 BF of old growth, super wide 8/4 boards that will make amazing guitars that’s still green (wet). We’re still in the process of separating the old growth lumber into tonewood for guitars and quarter-sawn billets but soon We’ll have some amazing tonewood sets online.

In addition to tonewood and lumber, we also processed Koa veneers in Japan. We contacted the owner of the veneer manufacturing equipment in Japan and they helped us bring the Koa veneer cant from factory to factory as it was processed into an 8 ft. x 4 ft. sheet of veneer.

The first factory sliced the cant and dried the raw veneers. The second factory took the raw veneers and book matched them together so they could be laid up at the third factory on a special fleece back material called Span Bond. The final veneer is only 0.6 mm thick and can be tightly rolled without cracking. It also has the benefit of unrolling and laying flat right away. You can find the 16 sheets that we currently have in stock here. My wedding ring is made of this same type of veneer so you really can roll it tight enough to wrap a finger.

Finally, we wanted to talk about the long term plans for Koality Woods. The goal of this company isn’t to take as much Koa and other woods from the forest. It’s quite the opposite in fact.

While every successful forestry management program requires proper maintenance of the forest, which sometimes means removing old or injured trees, we believe the primary goal of Hawaiian forestry should be to restore the Hawaiian forests to as close to their natural state as possible. We’re in the beginning phases of forming a massive reforestation effort across the state of Hawaii and hope to return the forests to their full potential across the state. We’re interested in talking with anyone looking to be apart of the initiative, please feel free to contact us.

Thanks for checking in!

My Intro to Hawaiian Forestry

I want to make my first post an explanation of how I was introduced to the world of Koa wood. I’m very grateful for the opportunities I’ve had to be involved with Hawaiian forestry, but the journey has been a challenge that humbled me and taught me to never give up the pursuit of my dreams.

I graduated from college in Chicago and right after moved to Hawaii. I didn’t know a thing about Koa wood at this point. I lived with a friend from university and when our diplomas arrived, he talked about getting his framed in Koa. This was the first time I heard of the wood and while it did look nice, I really couldn’t afford the high price. I just didn’t understand the value of this special wood at this point in life.

I worked with my friend at his dad’s construction company for about a year and then went on to work with a high-end custom cabinet shop manufacturing cabinets. The job was very satisfying because I got to use my hands to work with wood daily, and wood working is something I’ve been passionate about since I was a child. I loved milling hardwoods and creating beautiful kitchens for people to enjoy. My second introduction to our island’s special wood came when we were hired to create an entire kitchen out of Koa.

The kitchen was gorgeous, and we made several more beautiful projects after that but soon after an economic recession caused us to be without work for several months. At that point I was forced into homelessness and did everything I could just to survive.

Without cabinet work and unwilling to work a desk job, I resorted to using the leftover Koa wood from our cabinet project to create a picture framing business I called Aloha Woodcraft. I sold frames on Amazon, Etsy, eBay and locally through Craigslist. The picture gave me just enough cash flow to survive the rough patch in my life and it also let me stay involved with Hawaiian woods. I also must mention that without the help of my wonderful wife (girlfriend at the time) I never could’ve made it through this rough period.

Eventually we ran out of falloff material for my Koa frames and I was forced to find a local wood supplier. I turned to Plywood Hawaii who originally sold us the lumber for the job, but they couldn’t get their hands on any because of the lack of supply. They recommended I check Winkler Woods and this introduction led me into the second phase of my experiences in Hawaii.

I was a customer of Winkler Woods for about a year before working there. I would hunt through the shop for hours looking for the perfect sticks for my picture frames. At the time the shop had piles of Koa wood from wall to wall, floor to ceiling. Finding Koa lumber took quite a while, but I didn’t mind because I was grateful to be working with such an amazing wood. One day when I went for more Koa, I was notified that the operations manager had quit suddenly and that it would be a while before I would be able to get more wood for my frames.

At this point I was burnt out from building cabinets and I was ready to move on to a job that let me pursue my passion and utilize my college degree. I asked the owner of Winkler Woods if he needed help at the shop. That led to a 3-year career that exposed me to the amazing world of Hawaiian woods.

We manufactured all things Koa. We had an ukulele factory where we made handmade instruments from beginning to end. We manufactured raw building materials such as paper veneers for plywood, Koa moldings for picture frames, Koa T&G flooring, custom furniture and much more. The main product we produced was Koa instrument sets for ukuleles. In addition to ukulele sets, we sold Koa lumber and Koa guitar sets. I got to meet the most interesting loggers and landowners on Big Island in the rarest forests of the world. Most importantly, I got the chance to form amazing relationships with people in many different industries that utilize our island’s rare wood.

I loved the job but challenges in the shop forced me to leave the company. I did so with a heavy heart, but I had to move forward. In early 2018 I left Winkler Woods and started working with a construction company that builds custom homes on Oahu.

After about six months of serving the construction company as their business developer, I started to miss Koa. I felt the world of Hawaiian woods calling my name and I decided to make my first solo trip to Big Island to get more wood. I got a modest amount of Koa lumber and started the website Koality Woods to show the music manufacturers of the world what I could offer.

Today, I’m still serving the construction company as their business developer and the remainder of my time is spent working with Koa wood. I love working with Koa so much and I’m so grateful for the opportunity to be involved with Hawaiian woods. I hope you feel as passionate as I do about our very special wood!

I’ll continue this blog sharing insights into the little-known industry of Hawaiian forestry. There are many amazing woods that are unique to our islands. Even trees that are found elsewhere just seem to grow better in our forests. Follow along for many stories from the Hawaiian forests!

 

Big Koa Tree Near Hakalau Forest National Wildlife Refuge

Big Koa Tree Near Hakalau Forest National Wildlife Refuge