My guiding principle in pricing is that my Creator commands me to love you, and that means I have to care for you like I care fore me. That’s why I give everyone great latitude in all areas of their lives. I require it myself! 😉
Anyhow, when I wrote up my price page for custom builds, which is my guide for how I price everything I do, my business model was that I scout, harvest, and process all my own wood, except for the wood I use for cores and shafts. I don’t own a sawmill yet, so I’m not processing that myself, but for everything else that’s the way I operate. I’ve found several giant logs that will supply my needs for spalted birch, cherry, tiger maple, maple, and beech, such that I won’t need to scout a new rotten log in those species for five years.
But burl is special. One isn’t as likely to find a log that lasts for years. It’s like gold or gemstones; you have to go looking for it and when you find it, you’re in a quandary. Most of the time the burl is deep into the tree. Cutting it out would probably collapse the tree on the spot, and even if not, the tree won’t survive its removal.
Kill a rhino for a horn?
Not how this hippy redneck rolls. (Again, wide latitude. You cut whatever trees you want. I just don’t like to hear their cries and have their women throwing acorns at me.)
Now as it happens, I had the good fortune to spend some time bullshitting with the crew of Amish who built a garage for my father last summer. I’ve always admired the Amish for their goals, as I believe good people have good goals, whether they meet them or not, and bad people have bad goals, whether they meet them or not, and on the whole, keeping oneself and the people one loves away from the insanity of too much consumerism (and its materialist undergirding) is a good thing. (Just to be clear, buy/owning a Character Cue is not a materialist act, but instead, a spiritual experience.)
So I like the Amish. When the world falls to total shit I’ll probably join them. (My bug-out bag consists of a black outfit and a beard.)
Anyhow, I figured the Amish I was speaking to likely knew the Amish I wasn’t, and that somewhere among the Amish I wasn’t speaking to existed men who tromp the woods felling logs… The ideal sort of men to change my burl scarcity situation. I therefore mentioned being a cue builder, and that I have a need for burl, and they agreed to get my message into the Amish Underground.
Lo and behold right before Christmas I get a text then a pickup truck load of black cherry, maple, and tiger maple burl. The regular maple isn’t very useful but the tiger maple and black cherry… holy ever loving… just wow damn.








The burl these fellas scouted in 4 months… and they just stood there grinning while I babbled, giggled and pranced about the burl, giddy with burl, my soul dancing and leaping, singing praise and worship, burl out the yin yang, as Ma would have said, given enough burl.
I started trying to use my spatial reasoning to estimate the yield in 100% burl cue butts. Let’s see, looks like about ten 1.5″ slabs, the burl probably ten inches wide, maybe fifteen inches long… twenty in places…
Then I did the same for the other sizable black cherry burl (hard to do, because they hadn’t brought it. Not enough room in the bed, with all the other pieces… so I estimated based off them holding their arms to show how big that sumbitch was.)
We dickered on a price, which was basically me saying numbers and them agreeing, so every time I said a number they nodded and my conscience started calling me a thief, so I kept upping my number until finally that night, once I studied everything they brought in detail, I sent a text and raised my number again. I might have overpaid but they’re happy and I’m giddy, things work out.
All that’s to say my original calculus for pricing burl based on its scarcity is out the window, and as I said in paragraph one, Jesus commands me to love you people, and that means I have to want your best financial health, and that means I can’t charge a price based on a scarcity that no longer exists. Thus my price for half and full burl butts is reduced.
So long as my Amish friends keep bringing me burl, it’ll be this way.
While I’m on the subject, however, burl does require different processing and handling than spalted wood, and I use different techniques for coring it and building with it. And now I’m buying the material instead of locating and cutting free stuff. I can’t make it cost the same as spalted wood, but the prices are massively down:
100% burl butt from $2,000 to $1,200
50% burl butt (remaining wood spalted): $1,200 to $1,000
Burl handled butt (remaining wood spalted): $800
Like the one below: https://charactercues.com/product/stick-70-politics-for-1000/


