What wood is this?

[Richard R]

Any suggestions what this lump of wood might be? Retrieved from a skip, so no provenance, but it's quite a nice piece and has clearly been planed on three sides.

 

Colour is a warm, slightly pink brown. Oyster card for scale.

 

 

No idea what I will do with it.

 

[Si600]

Tree wood?

 

 

I would hazard a guess at something in the mahogany area, or maybe walnut?  But I only know if I have a lump of any type of wood if I bought it and wrote on it what it is so my advice may not have much use.

[LowB_FTW]

32 minutes ago, Si600 said:

Tree wood?

If used for a musical instrument, tone wood?

 

Mark

[Delberthot]

That's dog wood - you can tell it by it's bark

[Hellzero]

Firewood for sure.

[BassTool]

Could be your new kitchen chopping board? 🤔

[Richard R]

Too nice for firewood, too small for a chopping board.

[snorkie635]

No idea, but love the toothless crocodile.

[Richard R]

I think it's an identifying scrawl - maybe S7.

[snorkie635]

1 minute ago, Richard R said:

I think it's an identifying scrawl - maybe S7.

Not that side. The first photo has the crocodile on it in my view.

[Si600]

13 hours ago, snorkie635 said:

Not that side. The first photo has the crocodile on it in my view.

You're not wrong Snorks.  Well, you are a wrong 'un, but not in this context

[BigRedX]

To the OP. What do you want to use it for?

[Mediocre Polymath]

On 19/01/2026 at 21:15, Richard R said:

Any suggestions what this lump of wood might be? Retrieved from a skip, so no provenance, but it's quite a nice piece and has clearly been planed on three sides.

 

Colour is a warm, slightly pink brown. Oyster card for scale.

 

 

No idea what I will do with it.

 

Depends if it's new wood (an offcut) or something recovered during some demo work (like a bit of joist from an old roof).

 

If it's new, then it's most likely Red Grandis (Eucalyptus), which is a plantation-grown hardwood. It looks a little pale for Grandis, but then phone cameras can be finicky when it comes to colour. I've not seen it used in any production guitars, but it's nice wood – dense-grained but light. I use it for the cores of multi-laminate bodies like this guitar:

 

 

If it's not new then it could be almost anything. Best guess would be – as others have suggested – some form of mahogany, probably sapele.

 

Edited 7 hours ago by Mediocre Polymath

[Hellzero]

Except firewood, it looks like cherry to me.

 

Check my Le Fay which has a crazy cherry (as called by the Dobbratz brothers) top and regular cherry for the body itself.

 

 

[Hellzero]

Look at this old Warwick with a cherry body:

 

 

[Richard R]

I think it's new wood. The skip was outside a carpenters I was parked by. They were refitting  and in the course of that were also clearing up.  I got talking and had a couple of large bits of quite decent ply that had been shelving and this random lump that looked quite nice. I should have asked!

 

I thought I might route it out for deep pen tray type thing. Or give it to someone who can make use of it. Dunno really!

[Richard R]

 

The colour still isn't right on the photo, it is redder than this, no amount of photogra-faffing on my phone seems to adjust it right. And it will look different on your phone anyway.

 

It is light. It's roughly 22.5x5x15.5cm, so  about 1,743cm³. Weight is 999.5g. So density is 1/1.743 g/cm³ which is 0.57g/cm³ or 570kg/m³.

 

Which I think favours the red  eucalyptus, as cherry is denser and walnut would be more brown?

 

Edited 53 minutes ago by Richard R
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