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 9 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 2 hours ago by Richard R
Typo

[Hellzero]

Red Eucalyptus: https://www.wood-database.com/lyptus/

 

Cherry: https://www.wood-database.com/sweet-cherry/

 

It's one of them, and you can discard walnut.

 

Red eucalyptus is denser than sweet cherry. 😉

[Richard R]

Thanks all. Sweet cherry or red eucalyptus is close enough for me.

Based on the photos it looks like the eucalyptus, but it is light so in the absence of DNA testing I'll leave it as either.

 

Eventually I'll post what I have done with it. Don't hold your breath though...

Edited 1 hour ago by Richard R