Rosewood ID\Guess

[johnnparchem]

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 as a fret board ... 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?

[tippie53]

looks more like East Indian Rosewood

[johnnparchem]

I was OK with EIR but I got 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.

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


The tests say it is Brazilian.

[tippie53]

brazilian will have a distinct aroma that is not unlike fleer bubble gum not really vanilla. The pictures are not the best , can you take a better close up in sunlight. I hope it is BRW .

[johnnparchem]

I not that good with smell, it really was a strong smell, stronger than I usually get with EIR. Here are pictures in sunlight. These colors are really close.

This first is the sample wood and the second has the sample on the left and EIR on the right. A real difference in the density of pores .

[tippie53]

it does appear BRW

[johnnparchem]

I wish it were BRW ... Any species of the rosewoods have such a variety of looks. Although I jumped to the black light test first there were other simpler tests 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 think it is cocobolo.

[B. Howard]

Cocobolo?

[johnnparchem]

Cocobolo was the only wood that I could match up all of the tests to

Very dense, it would not float in water
It smelled like cocobolo binding I have when I sand each of them
The sanding dust is orange much like the cocobolo I have when sanded.
On more careful testing it does fluoresce when it water.