North American tonewoods like rosewoods

[Aviacs]

or Persimmon (same genus as Ebony)

A favorite of mine as a tree!
I brought back some persimmon seeds from Armenia this past spring, and have them sprouting in pots. Then a close friend sent me an envelop full of native persimmon seeds a month ago. Scarified and soaked them, they are in the fridge until early spring. Hope to get a small grove established, but we are just on the edge or maybe a little out of their natural range. Fingers crossed.

I have a flitch of the most incredible persimmon veneer - must have been a heck of a tree. The veneers are over 12" wide and IIRC at least 9' long, 1/16" thick and creamy white with about a 2" wide smoke-into-black center stripe.

[Jamiejoon]

My wife and I love Persimmon trees as well. We especially value them in our garden here in California in the fall, because their fall color is spectacular and we don't have a lot of that here. And the fruit! I would love to have a Persimmon guitar.

[Bruce Sexauer]

I once had a double bass come to me for set-up, and it had a persimmon fingerboard on it installed by the late Paul Hostetler of Santa Cruz fame. It was the gnarliest and most uncooperative fingerboard of my entire bass tech experience, and that is around 1000 bass set-ups. Paul allegedly knew what he was doing, and I have to assume he thought it was a good piece of wood, which makes me shy to consider it for delicate work.

[j. Kinnaird]

I made this for Tom. The persimmon is holding up well last I checked. ( about a year ago when I went to BIG). It made a good sounding guitar.

[Aviacs]

Gosh, that is gorgeous!
Nice to hear the sound is good, too.

Thinking about it, i had to go dig out the veneer, and my memory was bad on most counts, except that it is really wonderful looking. First off, it either never was quite as creamy white as in memory, or it has changed a bit in 15+ years of storage. Regardless, the colors are still great to my eye. A tree like that would have made some great guitar backs and sides.

At .037" it is the old standard veneer 1/28" thickness, about half what i thought. Eyeballed with a tape measure, i think it would clip to mostly 10" wide, tapering smaller at the far end. I've always imagined that just the right furniture or very small millwork project would come up that it would be perfect for. There's still hope for a few more years.

I once had a double bass come to me for set-up, and it had a persimmon fingerboard on it installed by the late Paul Hostetler of Santa Cruz fame. It was the gnarliest and most uncooperative fingerboard of my entire bass tech experience

That is kind of the reputation, but maybe big, straight trees that have some growth on them stabilize a bit? like the difference between trying to use wood from a twisted 6" diameter beech tree vs from a 30" diameter straight trunk. The biggest commercial use for persimmon used to be golf club heads: back when woods were made of wood, they were all persimmon. Maybe loom shuttles, along with dogwood.

[Aviacs]

Osage, fresh and aged.
despite the "cheap hardware store oil stain" look, there really is absolutely no finish of any kind on the oxidized Osage board.
It is one of the most difficult woods to plane smoothly.

[mercy]

Could j. Kinnaird make anything but beautiful guitars?
The extent of my knowledge of persimmon is cookies, I ate 4 yesterday

[mercy]

Aviacs suggested that the cedar chest I made was not Eastern Cedar. That may be but its my understanding that the aromatic wood used for cedar chests is Eastern where Western is used for construction (guitars too). Can someone give me an authoritative answer?
The top tier classical I had was rosewood/cedar but it dinged too easily and anyway on steel stringed guitars I prefer the zing of spruce.

[j. Kinnaird]

Originally Posted by mercy

Aviacs suggested that the cedar chest I made was not Eastern Cedar. That may be but its my understanding that the aromatic wood used for cedar chests is Eastern where Western is used for construction (guitars too). Can someone give me an authoritative answer?
The top tier classical I had was rosewood/cedar but it dinged too easily and anyway on steel stringed guitars I prefer the zing of spruce.

Eastern red cedar is not really a cedar, its a juniper. Juniperus virginiana. I dont feel secure about the spelling but there it is. It has lots of knots to work around so finding knot free pieces big enough to make a guitar out of is difficult but the one guitar i did see that was entirely made of the stuff was beautiful flashing the reds and cream varigation throughout. If you have ever cut logs of the stuff, just dropping the on the ground will tell you the there is little internal damping.

[RJVB]

Originally Posted by j. Kinnaird

I often chuckle when I see a highly figured back that no one will see when you're playing, but with this one I can understand you'd want to hug it close to your chest!

Re: apple wood: pear being closely related wouldn't its wood have the same properties? As far as I can tell from the old-growth specimens in the area they do grow considerably bigger than apple trees. Pear wood is traditionally used for wood wind instruments like recorders and I seem to recall it was used for lute bowls too.

[Aviacs]

Apple trees left wild can get pretty big. When we lived in Orrtanna there was a farmer that kept a wonderful old grove of them more or less just for "old times sake" Many fallen over and hollow, but still going on. Peaceful. The pear tree and some of the apple trees on our property tend to go hollow. And shed. and keep on living & producing. Though this year a late frost killed all the blossoms in our micro-climate.

I know where there are still several boules of swiss pear cut 8/4 & thicker, problem being that only the center board in each log would have vertical grain. & might or might not have enough width depending how the heart split or whether shoots were pruned early in growth.

I've never worked with pear, but used some apple. They look very different when new, but might age more or less to the same warm light brown tones. Apple is amazingly light for how hard it is. That is suggestive. I've just finished re-machining some for flooring borders. I don't think it is uniformly as hard as the Janka rating, though. The beech beside it is harder: running both through the lumber jointer while straightening, the gripper chain randomly marked the apple faces, there is very little marking on the beech.

Apple wood (or sometimes QS beech on the lower end saws) was famously used for handsaw handles before the 1950's. Obviously not cleaned up, but the aged appearance can be judged or might be familiar.

[Aviacs]

Apple wood, fresh and aged.

[brad4d8]

Don't know how it compares to RW, but Texas luthier Vince Pawless has used Mesquite for B&S, with some success, I might add. Lots of people like the sound of mine, even say it stands out from the rest in a group.