Thread: Fijian Mahogany for tote and knob

T. sinensis is the one that I've seen listed as being used in solid bodied guitars. it's possible that it's used in acoustics, but honduran is so inexpensive in acoustic guitar sets that there's no great reason to stray from it - lower cost usually means plywood guitars rather than less expensive woods.

At any rate, 0.6 would correspond to a 9 to 9.5 pound guitar as mine, but like I said, you can't really tell from an instrument unless it has the lightest amount of color. My guitars are both dyed and the caps are maple (the top attached to the mahogany body) - If someone told me they were honduran for a period, I'd have to believe them.

I did have a couple (three) that were for certain T.sinensis, but they were chambered, so you can't get a feel for the wood because chambering removes the weight and it changes the way the guitars sound when playing them unplugged.

All five, I think are just dandy. they don't give up anything to honduran mahogany unless there is a last little bit I can't hear. Most honduran guitars aren't cannons, so when someone shows a guitar on youtube like "the beast" - a particular resonant 1959 les paul that is loud without being plugged in - few honduran guitars are like that.

I have built, I guess, about 10 guitars now, but have owned an embarrassing number much much larger than that. I'm not sentimental or partisan about the type of wood in a guitar - a good guitar is even toned (talking about solid bodies) , intonates well, is about the right weight to have a nice tonal profile, and most important of all, holds on to its intonation without needing constant adjustment. One of the five dangelico guitars is a little out of straight after almost 20 years - I've already leveled the frets on it and sassed it back up. the other four were straight. That's a better record than gibson has during that period by a good bit.

So, I'm a fan. I used to "sass" (myself) snarky gibson owners who can't do anything but talk about honduran mahogany, when the loudest guitar that I have made is khaya with a plantation rosewood neck. Not exactly gibson-like. I would much rather have a good sample of wood of anything at all like mahogany than some of the mahogany blanks that I got sight unseen - "one piece" from a guitar supply place only to find out they were light but unstable.

Originally Posted by raffo

Recently I found out that Sargent used "Indian Mahogany" for their handles. After doing a online search, it turns out the name was used to refer to up to four different species, one of them being Toona. I looked up Fiji mahogany too, it's Macrophylla.

I just happened to find a Sargent 414C jack plane and while looking it up in the Sargent catalogs I noticed that I missed a word in my post. The wood they advertised for their handles was "East India Mahogany". As I mentioned before, wikipedia lists four species traded under that name.

Indian mahogany - Wikipedia

Sargent Tool Book : Mechanics' Tools 1911 : Sargent & Co. : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Not surprising, Raffo. As I understand it, the wood could have been sourced from several countries in that part of the world that Britain had current or former ties with. It's likely that even the importers didn't know exactly which species they were getting in each batch, so using the vague moniker of "East-Indian" would cover all possibilities.....

Cheers,

Love the link to the Sargent catalogue R.

I would bet sargent went with a seller who knew what they were selling them. A link to east indian type brings the most strikes to Pterocarpus dalbergioides

"andaman padauk".

It has hardness and density a little below indian or brazilian rosewood, but above beech.

The shrinkage figures from green are pretty good - it's not a big shrinking wood like ebony or beech.

cuban mahogany would've fit under "west indian" from the references I could find.

Kind of curious if sargent tried to choose something other than the easily-obtained rosewoods at the turn of the century to make the handles look different.

Originally Posted by D.W.

...I would bet sargent went with a seller who knew what they were selling them. A link to east indian type brings the most strikes to Pterocarpus dalbergioides

"andaman padauk".....

I think that's a bit of a "combobulation" as Wikipedia puts it. In my experience "Indian rosewood" generally means one of the Dalbergias. A specific name like "dalbergoides" means the person who named "Pterocarpus dalbergoides" found something that reminded him of the Dalbergias (it would almost certainly been a 'him' in the day), but that doesn't necessarily mean he thought the wood is similar - it could be the leaves or general growth habit or somesuch.

The genus Pterocarpus contains some important woods, which go by a number of commercial & common names. One of the more widespread is P. indicus, which goes by lots of names like "padauk", "narra" and "new guinea rosewood". It's a wood that is well-known down here, having been imported in some quantity from N.G. over the last 40 or 50 years. It is nothing like any Dalbergia I've met, a much less dense, softer wood, usually very easy to work. The grain is medium-coarse but takes a good finish:
Table NG Rosewd b.jpg

Not the best picture being a scan, but I think you can see it looks nothing like a Dalbergia from any part of the tropics. The only pic of P. dalbergoides I could find in a hurry is the one in "The wood database" which isn't terribly high resolution but it's enough to see that it is very like P. indicus in texture, a bit darker than the average of the P. inducus I've woerked with, but not that different, really. You would be very unlikely to confuse it with the sort of "rosewoods" used for tool handles, I think....

Cheers,

Just to add to the mix, here's a daylight picture of the bottom of the handle of the Sargent VBM plane I got last week. The picture is not very good, I'll try to take a new one later.

The finish, probably shellac, is still there. It has a mahogany look.

Many moons ago, I got some African Padauk for a display table I asked my dad to make. The saw dust from that wood turned his white hair orange, it was very funny, he didn't care. I don't think he had worked with that wood species before. It's been a long time, I don't have the table anymore, and don't remember what it looked like. I have a bit of moulding that he made laying around somewhere, I'll try to hunt it down and see how it has aged.

20220825_085143.jpg

hard to tell from that picture. Some of the rosewoods when sawn certain ways look a bit like mahogany in small sections.

Padauk has sort of a nondescript look between rosewood and mahogany, for certain. It was pretty heavily retailed here 15 years ago along with pau ferro - both cheaper than rosewood.

I think padauk is now protected on CITES. pau ferro looks like a white box version of rosewood if that term isn't outdated. Like 35 years ago when you could get white box cereals and they just didn't taste very good, but if you didn't have the real thing, you could live with them.

I had some pau ferro - may still actually have a blank of padauk, but I never bought much out of tool vanity - wanting a true rosewood for infills, etc.

Hi R. That grain reminds me of my handles. Have you had much of a chance to play with the Sargent? We don't get to see many of them but they are supposed to be pretty good.

Originally Posted by Mountain Ash

Hi R. That grain reminds me of my handles. Have you had much of a chance to play with the Sargent? We don't get to see many of them but they are supposed to be pretty good.

I'm going to butt in though raffo can say different - the reason I'm butting in is because raffo brought I VBM plane by my shop at one point. In the past, long ago, I had a VBM 3, but it wasn't that great because it had been beaten badly, so I parted it out and threw stuff away.

Raffo has a nice one. It has some subtle design things in the frog that lean toward boutique-like biases, like a ramp for the bevel of the iron (thicker bottom casting) to ensure the bevel of the plane lies on something solid even if the frog is set too far back.

In the end, the stuff in the plane looks like good ideas, but not practically better than stanley, and the irons are a touch softer than stanley irons of the time (maybe slightly thicker? I can't recall for sure - that's probably easily findable).

The appearance of the golden era versions, which I think is what raffo has, does make the planes look like they're more carefully designed and made than stanley's. Would be interesting to see what the cost of VBM planes were in the same year as a stanley bailey plane in the early 1900s.

For what it's worth, stanley left a little in the tank on their early irons, too - they can be rehardened and tempered to a really high hardness - stanley chose not to do that probably for purposes of not antagonizing people working by hand, but the laminated blades especially can hit very high hardnesses with ease. Unfortunately, they really can't be rehardened in a fast quench without warping beyond usefulness. Stanley must've had a process that constrained them while being quenched and I have a setup to do that, too, with aluminum plates, but it would threaten my ability to really squeeze the last bit of hardness out of irons.

Haven't rehardened a sargent iron - and given that comment, the non-laminated irons have never presented a problem with warping. Point of this, the sargent irons and union irons being a bit soft probably was by choice, but I haven't had the chance to reharden any of those.

The same isn't true for ohio tool irons. I've managed to find that ohio tool irons that aren't very good (chippy, lacking) just don't get much better when rehardened.

Given how carefully it looked like raffo's plane was made, I made another round trying to find pictures today. The old handles are all going to be finished and if they're exposed (finish worn off), the wood will be oxidized.

However, I found one listing of an absolutely cherry VBM handle on ebay from MJD tool auctions. for the princely sum of $84.50 (!!)

It doesn't look like a typical mahogany, it looks more dense and a second listing of a more darkened handle shows diffuse dense small pores. Like you'd see on rosewood, purpleheart, etc.

115486664846

That's the ebay number. I saved the picture for posterity, which is sort of rude, but this is ebay and the picture will be gone in months, which would be a shame.

I saved the picture to imgur instead of putting the data directly in the site here (somehow that seems more considerate to the site owner). I feel a little like MJD has sent me enough things with omitted issues or stacking 10 saws together and wrapping them with banding so that they all arrive and stay bent and i have to hammer them straight that they owe me the right to use a picture for fair use.

https://i.imgur.com/DNaP8w3.jpg

These pictures look like pterocarpus dalbergioides....itself not easy to find in straight wood.

The handles are rift with a mineral streak, so not perfect. But they haven't darkened too much with age.

I wonder what sargent's motivation was to use this wood.

http://www.hobbithouseinc.com/person...s100%20plh.htm
http://www.hobbithouseinc.com/person...0s50%20plh.htm

Hobbit house's museum of grain pictures are the only ones that I can find that really aren't african padauk and that show both straight grain and tiny end grain pores.

constantines apparently has a book about wood types and mentioned that the andaman padauk was available only in the andaman islands, and that the trees were 120 feet tall and often sawn and harvested by labor in penal colonies.

Vermillion was the trade name for the wood, but just as with difficulty in finding andaman now and getting flooded with african padauk search responses, the name vermillion is now used sometimes for african padauk.

In terms of penal colony time overlap, it looks like the andaman penal colony wasn't eliminated until 1947 - never heard of it. Interesting read on wikipedia. Principal purpose of the penal colony was to make demonstrators for Indian independence disappear.

Originally Posted by D.W.

The appearance of the golden era versions, which I think is what raffo has, does make the planes look like they're more carefully designed and made than stanley's. Would be interesting to see what the cost of VBM planes were in the same year as a stanley bailey plane in the early 1900s.

Sargent Tools 1910

Sargent Hardware Tools 1910 . Planes.jpg

Stanley Tools 1912

StanleyTools1912. Planes.jpg

Stanley seems to be cheaper.

Regards
Paul

Thanks, Paul - that looks to be the case. In old catalogs, listings for items more expensive than the stanley and disston equivalents are pretty rare and didn't seem to fare well. that one's close in price, though.

I've got an old wards catalogue, but don't generally leaf through catalogues for no reason. Point in this case being that I've also got three woodrough and mcparlin saws and said something to a guy here living in rhode island that I liked them (had one, he found me two more) aside from the fact that they can sometimes be borderline file killers due to hardness.

Sure enough, they show up in at least one of the wards catalogues as the only saw offering that's a solid notch more expensive than disstons. I'd hesitate to call anything better in carpenter's saws vs. something like a 1910 disston, but at least in the rip saws, they offer "like a disston but stiffer and harder".

I have yet to find a plane that's functionally better than stanley's golden era bailey planes, though.