Can you identify this wood please?

[OscarG]

Hi

I think it's Cocobolo, but what do you think?

It's really hard and amazingly heavy for it's size. This rod is about 180mm long and about 25mm in diameter and weighs 110g.

Comes from a musical instrument.

Cheers!

 

[scooby]

The first thought I had when I saw the photos was cocobolo. I'm far from an expert though.

 

[ED65]

African blackwood maybe? I don't think there's enough to go on in this one piece to be definitive from the photos as lovely and clear as they are.

Oscar, for future reference the end grain of wood is the #1 identifier. Two random pieces of wood can look extraordinarily similar while having very distinct features in the end grain that make distinguishing them easy.

If you want to prepare a sample for ID, plane or sand the end grain very smooth and wet it just prior to taking the shot. The photo should be either very large or a macro shot.

 

[Phil Pascoe]

Blackwood, I'd think.

 

[Bm101]

No idea personally (I know, shocking right?) but searched Phil's answer purely out of interest.
You'd have to say that's a close guess from this bowl.

http://www.mcivorwoodworks.com/african_ ... wl%201.htm
That colour change is startlingly sudden. Almost no crossover.
Learnt summat new.

1.5" square by 12" is £26 odd on a quick ebay search.
What instrument is it from?

 

[Lons]

I think blackwood as well Oscar and have some stock bits like that, will look later, but I also have some lignum vitae looks like that.

 

[CHJ]

As ED65 says, studying and comparing the end grain may be the answer.

African Blackwood
Cocobolo
Blackwood Malaysian

 

[Trevanion]

Isn't Blackwood one of the top woods for wooden instrument making anyway? I remember seeing a lot of "reject" pieces of Blackwood at Yandles years ago that had come from an instrument company along with the Blackwood clarinet bells they sell.

I don't think it's Cocobolo anyway, that's usually a brown-red with black streaks although it does then to have a yellowy sapwood.

 

[Phil Pascoe]

We often tend to see it as clarinet bell blanks now as I believe it gets around export restrictions.

 

[custard]

It's almost certainly one of the many, many different types of Rosewood, the sprawling Dalbergia family.

Looking at the end grain won't get you very far. Distinguishing between one Rosewood and another is a guessing game, if you've plenty of experience you might make a more educated guess, but it's still a guess. The key reason that all Rosewoods have now been added to the CITES list, rather than just the most endangered, is because attempts to identify different Rosewoods in court, even with expert witnesses, consistently failed to meet legal standards of proof.

 

[OscarG]

Oscar, for future reference the end grain of wood is the #1 identifier. Two random pieces of wood can look extraordinarily similar while having very distinct features in the end grain that make distinguishing them easy.

If you want to prepare a sample for ID, plane or sand the end grain very smooth and wet it just prior to taking the shot. The photo should be either very large or a macro shot.

Ah good point!

Will do that in future.

I might be given the job of repairing a small ding in this thing so thought I'd try and find out what it is.

 

[OscarG]

It's almost certainly one of the many, many different types of Rosewood, the sprawling Dalbergia family.

Looking at the end grain won't get you very far. Distinguishing between one Rosewood and another is a guessing game, if you've plenty of experience you might make a more educated guess, but it's still a guess. The key reason that all Rosewoods have now been added to the CITES list, rather than just the most endangered, is because attempts to identify different Rosewoods in court, even with expert witnesses, consistently failed to meet legal standards of proof.

Cheers Custard

So is Blackwood a subset of Rosewood?

Ha... can you tell I don't know anything about wood?!

Thanks for your help chaps.

Edit - my friend tells me he bought this thing in Cuba, don't know if that helps at all?!

 

[Phil Pascoe]

Dalbergia Melanoxylon. Dalbergia's are rosewoods. It's equisite stuff to turn. I used to have vid. of Dolmetsch turning clarinet bells something like 90% fly into pieces during the process, which iirc is done at something like 10,000rpm with tooling like metalwork tooling. It's used for bagpipes as well.

 

[custard]

Your photo is probably African Blackwood, but it's a long way from being a certainty.

If I get the chance later today I'll take some photos of Rosewoods in my timber store. They mostly have very hard, straw coloured sapwood, so that's not a useful characteristic for distinguishing between Rosewoods. And when it comes to colour there's such a huge variation, even within individual sub-species of Rosewoods, that just because your sample is very dark doesn't necessarily mean it's Blackwood.

 

[custard]

Here are two examples of Indian Rosewood.

On the left is the good stuff, slow grown, old forest growth, and from quite high altitudes on the slopes of the Himalayas. This is the Indian Rosewood that our grandfathers knew, it's virtually unobtainable now and I'm down to my last few boards. In its place we usually get the board on the right, Sonokeling Rosewood. It's the identical species (Dalbergia Latifolia) but fast, plantation grown at lower altitudes in a warmer climate and in different soil. Net result is it rarely has the density or the deep purpley/black tones or oiliness or intoxicating fragrance of the original. But botanically they're identical.

And if you want to see how Rosewood can age then take a look at this Rosewood front handle on an American Stanley plane,

I'm no expert on older planes but i've read that Stanley used Indian Rosewood. Actually I'm not entirely convinced, from the samples I've seen (at least the cleaner samples) I've always thought it might be Cocobolo (also a Rosewood), and probably Mexican Cocobolo which when freshly sawn looks like this,

The finest grades of Cocobolo tend to come from further south in Central America, in particular Nicaragua. I've got a number of boards of Nicaraguan Cocobolo, sequentially sawn from the same log and in different thicknesses. Cocobolo is a big tree and these boards are huge.

I've never seen African Blackwood anywhere near this big, so one clue for Rosewood identification can simply be the size of the piece.

Here's a board of the almost mythical Rio Rosewood,

Large, virgin boards have been prohibited by CITES for many years, and even before that it was virtually unobtainable. You used to sometimes find a few boards for sale when an antique restorer was retiring, but the days of every small village having a polisher/restorer are long gone. Nowadays the Brazilian government allows the harvesting of the stumps from the Rio Rosewood trees felled thirty or more years ago, but these only yield small pieces which tend to go for astronomical prices to luthiers.

 

[Suffolkboy]

Out of interest Custard. For a wood like the Indian Rosewood that is virtually unobtainable now. I assume you will one day use it for a piece of furniture or a project etc. Do you save that for the really special jobs, how do you go about pricing up something like that?

 

[custard]

That's an interesting question Suffolkboy.

I've always had a soft spot for Rosewood and for thirty years or more I've been buying exceptional boards whenever I came across them. But I noticed that my clients are increasingly turning against tropical timbers, in particular the commercial clients (and they're the ones every maker really wants) are clear they won't tolerate the risk of an environmental embarrassment and stipulate temperate zone, sustainably sourced, FSC/PEFC, full chain of custody, etc.

Another factor that's driving the business is that Guild Marks now stipulate no CITES timber, and given that CITES is changing quickly and you can easily spend two or three years planning then building a Guild Mark submission, most makers have abandoned not only CITES timbers, but also woods that might become CITES listed in the near future, like say Wenge.

There was a case not long ago when a guy inherited a barn full of Macassar Ebony and offered it for sale in one lot at an astronomical price. The surprising thing is there were no takers. He dropped the price and broke it into smaller lots, still no takers. It was clear his gold mine wasn't quite so golden after all. That made a lot of people re-think their views on how much certain timbers are really worth.

And when Brexit was confirmed I realised that I either had to use my Rosewood or CITES meant it would be confined for evermore to the UK. So I sold almost all of it to a luthier wholesaler on the continent.

I kept a few absolutely prize boards, thinking I might make something really special for my children. But even there I'm hesitating. Imagine if your father or grandfather had made you something out of ivory or polar bear skin, instead of being a treasured heirloom it might now be a burden and an embarrassment. Then there's the fact that their taste and my taste will probably diverge, especially with changing fashions. So do I want to condemn them to lug some oppressive white elephant piece of furniture with them from house to house?

I'm sure I will make them something special, but it'll more likely be something smaller and made from a more politically correct timber.

 

[Suffolkboy]

Thanks Custard for the full and really interesting response.

Funny how the wood is already cut so if you were to use it, or the guy in your example used that Macassar Ebony, no more trees would be felled but someone would get to appreciate the timber. I suppose you could argue that it fuels the trade in exotic hardwoods - does that even exist?

I imagine it's similar to the people that argue that we should lift the ban on trading in old Ivory to devalue new ivory and ultimately save Rhinos and Elephants.

 

[Woody2Shoes]

...... I suppose you could argue that it fuels the trade in exotic hardwoods - does that even exist? ...

I think that far-eastern people still have a penchant for furniture etc. made from tropical hardwoods (a bit like the Brits had for mahogany etc. in the 17/1800's) . Also, the Chinese, who have now amassed vast supplies of little portraits of dead presidents (and HM QE2 as well) have got significant buying power now. They also seem to be the main consumers of shark's fins, rhino horn etc. etc. To be fair, until recently, the Quangsheng works was importing bubinga (from Africa I guess) to make woodworking tools to export to US/Europe (until it got CITES listing recently)! I guess quite a bit of Chinese consumption gets re-exported, but perhaps less will in future.

I recently bought some beautiful sapele for making a couple of doors, and I felt a twinge of guilt/sadness when I saw it had come from the DRC - which contains one of the largest chunks of relatively intact equatorial rainforest that still exist (certainly in Africa).

We are all directly and indirectly responsible for driving demand for timber (from the tropics and everywhere else).

+1 for interesting comments (as usual) from Custard

Cheers, W2S

 

[Trevanion]

How long does it take for these tropical hardwoods such as the rosewoods to grow? It's not something I really know anything about, I would assume anything over 200 years for a decent sized tree. Surely there are plantations that have been growing these trees and we should see some again in a century or so? (Perhaps not us but our great-grandchildren :lol Or is it mostly the rainforests being cut down and replaced with palm oil plantations and nothing is really happening to regrow any of the trees?

We get these gigantic Sapele boards (Upwards of 2ft wide, 3in thick and over 4m long) in work sometimes, seems a real shame to cut them up into smaller pieces. How long will it be before you won't be able to get your Sapeles, Irokos, Idigbos or Utiles and they end up on the CITES list? If Accoya wasn't 3-4 times the price of Tropical hardwood it would almost definitely be the first choice every time for every job, but since it's so expensive at the moment (price is creeping up over £2100 a cubic metre) most customers don't want to spend that kind of money and end up chosing the hardwoods.