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So I finally was able to cut this Santos Mahogany billet up a few weeks ago. This is the wood that was sent to me by someone who thought it was Brazilian Rosewood. It does come from Brazil however.
My wife's uncle has a grand Grizzly 17" bandsaw, and he worked with me to resaw this chunk, and I was able to get 4 B & S sets out of it. 3 sized for OM or smaller, and one sized for a dred.
It looks pretty good. There were some splits in this billet so I had to work around those. It was rift sawn, so I made the side out of the mostly quartersawn area (down the sides of the billet), and took the backs from the rest, which are close to quarter at the center and going to flat out to the edges.
I will post some pictures of a set or two in a few weeks once my daughter and grandkids have gone back to India.
I am pleased with the wood and should be able to build with it.

Kevin

Worked out nicely, good job. I'm not familier with this wood. Post a pic of a B/S set. Is it similar to Honduras Mahogany?

It is a tighter grained wood than honduras hog, and a little more dense I think. In the billet it rang like a bell, cut into thin slices, it sounds more like hog or walnut.
This picture is one I posted last winter when I first got it. The sides of the sets will have nice swaying ribbon figure, the backs will show some, but not as much.

Kevin

Pretty cool. How thick was the piece? Actually, what were the dimensions of the board? I have been looking at some large blocks of wood and wondering how many sets can come out of them.

This piece was 2 3/8" thick, 9 1/2" wide and 48 inches long.
The saw did a pretty good job, but the kerf was quite wide, and I knew there would be alot of clean up, so we cut the slices at about 7/16" wide. This size piece could have yielded 2 complete sets from 4 slices, but because of the splits and it being rift sawn, it was touchy to get the 4 sets. I think there were 9 slices total when done.
I contacted a guy here in California who said he could probably get 14 slices from it, but the wood was not worth the cost to have it done. I glued some splits in one set of backs....but the sides are all solid.
We will see. I am very interested in getting some walnut billets to resaw.
Tony, I know you like walnut. I think it is Goby Walnut that has some awesome 1/4 sawn billets for sale. I will look it up and make sure it is them, or see who it is I had found.

Kevin