Acoustic Guitar Construction

I had a friend give me 6 foot milled 1/4" thick plank of wood that he retrieved from his dad's workbench after his dad died. He is a classical guitarist and he really wanted to see it in a guitar. Given that it was dead flat and milled the 1/4" thick worked for me , so I am going to use it in the guitar I am working on and other guitars in the future.

I know it is a rosewood, when cut it has a smell as strong as the Brazilian I have used, to me it smells a bit different, where I smell more cinnamon in Brazilian this has more of a vanilla smell. Same intensity though.

Any guesses?

If you scrape the surface is it purple or does it stay dark brown --- purple = eir. Dark brown maybe Brazilian

It does not turn purple and the browns stay dark brown also On another forum I was sent this useful link
http://www.wood-database.com/wood-artic ... rosewoods/

From it "Brazilian Rosewood has another characteristic that can be leveraged in order to help distinguish it from other rosewoods: its heartwood extractives are not water soluble, and will not fluoresce under a blacklight."

So I performed a test between my sample and wood I know to be EIR, shown below. I put some shaving of the unknown wood in water, it did not fluoresce under the black light, I put some EIR shavings in and they turned a sickly green under the light, where the unknown shavings just stayed dark brown.

A Picture in the sunlight.

Also a little clear in this picture, the EIR has an order of magnitude more pores.


The tests say Brazilian!

Wow, by looking at it I was thinking EIR. Best to have it in hand.

FWIW:If you now think it is Brazilian, stop searching and be happy, John.
Herman

It would be nice if it was BRW but that is not the case. Although I jumped to the black light test first there were other simpler test I could have done. This stuff sinks like a rock, and the sanding dust is orange. Also I have cocobolo bindings in my stash so I pulled one and sanded it a bit. It smell just like the wood I have.

I went back to the Black light test. Where the EIR lit right up shaving from this sample did not. But as I looked carefully I saw faint spirals of luminescence following the edge of the shaving curls. Given all of that I do think it is cocobolo.

I could buy that (I mean.... not literally buy it but.. oh well you know what I mean:))