Thread: Which Ebony?

Hi Geoff,

As I said ion your pen post the Asian (PNG & Macassar) ebonies tend to have brownish streaks in the black heartwood. Most ebonies have pale creamy-white or pinkish sapwoods.

[There is often an intermediate wood (eg Australian ebony often has this pinkish with islands / spots of black heartwood, probably fungally induced or from physical damage. I have good images if anyone is interested to illustrate this if anyone is interested. May post these later if members are interested to illustrate.]

The African ebonies sold as “ebony”, eg Gabon ebony, tend to have clean (all black) heartwood and are in higher demand.
In summary, on that basis of the above, IMO I believe the block you show is more likely to be African (eg Gabon) than the Asian or PNG ebony.

Euge (for Eugene) )

I thought it was PNG Ebony. Usually a lot of stripy stuff but I scored a decent amount of solid and half half stuff from Teak & Face Timbers many moons ago that was very similar

This just gets more confusing. Personally I think its Gabon Ebony, however WoodChopper says it was purchased as Indian / Ceylon Ebony a long time back.

My reasoning for my ID mainly comes from its "workability" as I have turned reliably identified Solomon Is, PNG and Ceylon / Indian Ebonies in the past. Drilling the blanks was a slow & tedious task even with high quality Famag Bormax bits (on par with Colt). It generated considerable heat very quickly even with low speed, produced copious amounts of quite acrid fine dust even though good clean shavings were being ejected from the bit/s, and I would class it as a very hard timber, probably harder than the likes of Red Penda.

Usually I can provide images of authentic woods (IWCS reference samples) of these but all I can show presently are ebonies from different countries / continents. Black woods don't show distinctive features they are just black and figure grain etc doesnt show easily ... and so are hard to id (and photograph) visually.

Aust ebony.jpg

Above: Aust small leaf ebony (Diospyros humilis)

Afr ebony 2.jpg Afr ebony 3.jpg

Above: African ebony (as carved figures) cant say which country they were from. Indian ebony is similar I believe (not sure).

Ebony mac.jpg Asian ebony 2.jpg

Above: left Macassa Ebony (Indonesia) and on right Vietnamese (?) stripy ebony as a carved figure

PNG ebony is usually striped with brown but sections can also be pure black.
Generalisations are always dangerous as exceptions are always available

Eugene (Euge)