Using Cali Bamboo ™ flooring product 759151, “Fossilized” (apparently meaning glued and injected with a hard plastic) strand woven solid bamboo, carbonized at the factory to a dark brown, TSG serial-numbered knobs now go up to s/n 205. They run from 0.511″ to 0.556″ high by 0.794″ to 0.860″ in diameter, all with horizontal grain. The first one, #188 was polished to a high gloss and finished with generic superglue. Because that made it too dark to see the mottling in the end grain, the rest were polished to a high gloss and finished with Kiwi neutral shoe polish.
Here are some semi-matched sets of knobs with similar contours. The pictures look a little weird because of close-up camera fisheye distortion, which is partially corrected with the perspective edit in PhotoShop. The original digital images looked to saturated to be real, so in PhotoShop ™, the saturation was dropped by -15.
In this last one, #188 with superglue finish shows on the right, compared to the other two with shoe polish. Note that with superglue, the colors are darker, and a little redder and more saturated. It’s all a matter of subjective personal preference. Pictures on a monitor can’t tell the full story – they look a bit different when seen directly. If you look closely at the knob on the left, you can see some chipping on the top that is common to this material. It can also crack along the grain, where the “strands” are glued together, as did two of the 20 knob blanks.
If you want perfection, get molded plastic. Wood knobs each have their own unique character, which will sometimes include flaws that were not discovered until after finishing. Then again, when you get to be 70, you can entitled to bad days, too.
Here is an older set, made of Padauk. See if you can find it in the first picture.
The middle knob has been rotated compared to the other two in order to show the natural iridescence of the wood. My notes don’t show the finish, but at the time, I was priming with superglue and finishing with polyurethane.