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Acoustic Woods


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  • 2 weeks later...

Has anyone tried making an acoustic with Padauk sids, back and neck? Other woods I am looking to try an acoustic with is Birch and Bloodwood. Has anyone used those?

I have experience with bloodwood (refering to Brosimum rubescens ) and padauk (refering to Pterocarpus soyauxii) since both species come in a multitude of varieties. I've built an acoustic using padauk and I've been using bloodwood extensively for fingerboards in the past years.

There are two major differences between both tonewoods to consider:

- padauk has big pores as oposed to bloodwood which is very similar to west african ebony when it comes to pores.

- unlike padauk which changes colour to braun, bloodwood does not oxidize overtime, stays red and beautiful forever as long as you take care of it, reason why its been used extensively for inlay work.

Bloodwood is a remarkably dense wood (about as dense as the harder Honduran/Brazilian Rosewoods) = it will give you a very bright tap tone.

Also both woods are not easy to bend but both species are pretty much the most stable woods for building guitars, reason why they have been used extensively to reinforce necks... :D

bloodwood

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padauk

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  • 1 month later...

A note about working with Bloodwood: from my experience, it is not a router-friendly wood. Not only is it dense, but I would say it's brittle. It fights the bit a lot and has a tendency to split and send nasty chunks flying. It is very grain-sensitive to the direction you route it in. I've stopped using it for any job that might involve a router because I've had so many bad experiences in that field, but it's a beautiful wood and I have no doubt that it could make a very fine guitar if you don't mind the difficulty working with it. I used a lot of it on a banjo I'm building and I've made a lot of conducting batons from it. (You know, like for conducting orchestras.)

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