Mystery woods...

The subject of mystery woods came up in Brad's thread about archtop ukuleles recently, but I thought this might be of general interest. People may have wood they haven't been able to identify, or there may even be quiz masters out there who just want to test our skills at identifying what they post.

OK, here is our mystery wood. It came with some pieces of maple and walnut that we got recently. I took a piece to the wood shop, and they said it maybe might be, could be spruce. But it doesn't have any clear grain lines at all. The grain is more like mahogany with very fine, short, irregular strokes. There is also some very fine cross-grain figure that you may be able to see in the pictures.

Anyone know what this wood might be?



EDIT: I forgot to say it's very light-weight - similar to spruce in density.

genuine mahogany. except it isn't that light...
(The picture I supplied makes me think it's likely not genuine mahogany, but it's hard to say. The image was taken from one corner of a plank I have, the other corners did not look the same, and that's on the same plank, let alone different ones.)

Looks to me like Luan Mahogany which isn't really a mahogany. It is a name for a group of similar appearing woods which come from the Phillipines but are of a different genus and have different qualities, mainly that they are less strong and less stable. They are often used as facing materialss when you are trying to make something like a hollow core door look presentable. I would'nt use it for making instruments but then again not having tried it I really don't know how it would work out.

Luan Mahogany

It looks very much like "Helium Mahogany" supplied to me by Pete Howlett..Turned out to be a great tonewood

Timbuck said:

It looks very much like "Helium Mahogany" supplied to me by Pete Howlett..Turned out to be a great tonewood

Click to expand...

Whoa, sounds cool. We've yet to use it, but I guess we could give it a try. If it flops we can still make model airplanes out of it