In about 1984 I became acquainted with a tukang wrongko whom I got to know very well.He was the grandson of a very famous tukang wrongko, and he knew the trade intimately.Between 1984 and 1997 he was only able to obtain a single piece of timoho that he considered suitable for use in a wrongko. From memory I think he got one normal size wrongko and two of three small wrongkos from this piece of wood.He worked alone, rather than as a member of a community engaged in making wrongkos, and this perhaps limited his sources of supply to a degree.
After 1997 I became acquainted with a different tukang wrongko, once again the grandson of one of the old-time greats.He refuses to try to obtain wood and will only work on wood provided to him by a customer. Between 1997 and April 2007 he had not worked on any new pieces of timoho wood.
During the period from 1984 until the present it has never been easy to obtain quality wrongko wood.When there was a lot of forest being cleared in Sumatra and Kalimantan there would be spasmodic floods of acceptable wrongko wood, but tighter governmental controls over the last 10-15 years have seen these inflows of material cease.
One of the woods favoured in recent times for wrongkos is burl teak (kayu jati gembol) and there is still a dribble of this material. Another popular wood is akasia, and there is a reasonable amount of this available. Once you remove these two woods from consideration, there is almost nothing else with good figure that is currently available.For a long time woods have been imported to fill the demand . In the absence of wood with good grain, other common woods such as sono, mahony and cendana Jawa are used, however, even good sono has become difficult to obtain.
As to the possibility of the dark spots in timoho continuing an active rotting process. I have encountered only two timoho wrongkos where the dark spots had rotted away. The rot was not confined to the dark spots, but took considerable portions of the light wood as well. Both these wrongkos were Balinese. On timoho wrongkos that I have re-finished myself, I have never encountered any unusual difficulty with working the dark areas of the material; where a dark spot intruded to an edge, this edge was no more fragile where the spot was, than in the area around it. I do not believe that any special treatment is used by tukang wrongkos to treat timoho prior to use.
According to Haryono Haryoguritno, at the end of year 2000, the trade price for a piece of timoho with kendit grain, sufficient to make a wrongko, was equivalent to 7 to 10 grams of gold. This was for untried material only, that is, the wrongko had not been shaped, thus there was no certainty that the material would provide a wrongko with a good kendit. The market value is already there, if good timoho were available, it would be appearing in the market-place, but this is not the case.
In Indonesia "legal reasons" do not apply. If timoho with good grain existed, it would appear in the market-place.
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