Help Identifying Wood

[Wilbur Tabacsko]

I salvaged a wooden pallet many years ago from where I worked. I had never seen pallets made of this wood and was drawn to it by it's clear smooth grain. I believe it came from India or that region because it held steel drums of railroad spikes made in India. I was thinking it might be luan, never seen luan lumber but have seen luan plywood. Or could it be mahogany? I am thinking about using it for head blocks and tail blocks.
This piece is 2" x 4" x 4"
End Grain, freshly sawn


Side view, freshly sawn

[billhay4]

Pallets used to be famous for being made of exotic woods and I have seen a number of mahogany or luan. Probably not true any more.
This piece is hard to identify because of the discoloration from age. A freshly sawn piece would be easier to deal with.
Some information as to its weight might also help. Are we seeing end grain in these pictures? If so, another perspective would also help.
Bill

[resophil]

There are at least 70 different species of lauan (note the spelling..., Luann is a girl from Dogpatch... :-) ) so trying to identify from internet pictures is a fool's errand.

Just call it lauan and be done with it! That is most likely what you have.

[sunburst]

Just call it 'mahogany' and be done with it! So many things are called mahogany now days, might as well call that mahogany too.
I doubt if you can positively identify the wood down to species, but you might be able to find out the genus if you get a sample to an expert.

[Bill Snyder]

Pallets used to be famous for being made of exotic woods and I have seen a number of mahogany or luan. Probably not true any more.
This piece is hard to identify because of the discoloration from age. A freshly sawn piece would be easier to deal with.
Some information as to its weight might also help. Are we seeing end grain in these pictures? If so, another perspective would also help.
Bill

His post has been edited to identify the photos as you requested.

[Paul Merlo]

I work in a high-end architectural millwork shop and showed this thread to one of our finishers. He said:

"I agree with the thread posts as this looks like Luan. Weight is the key as luan is very light and soft almost like balsa. Have a great weekend!!"

[Wilbur Tabacsko]

This wood is not that light. I just weighed a cubic inch of it with it weighing 11 grams. It is not soft, at least nothing like balsa. Just barely leaves a mark with the fingernail test.
Thanks for all the replies and the education I am getting from the forum.

[resophil]

I work in a high-end architectural millwork shop and showed this thread to one of our finishers. He said:

"I agree with the thread posts as this looks like Luan. Weight is the key as luan is very light and soft almost like balsa. Have a great weekend!!"

This is exactly the kind of slapdash, uninformed "expertise" that leads to blanket statements like the above. All lauan is not the same at all. There are species of the darker, redder varieties that are indeed quite hard, and wouldn't be deemed "light and soft, almost like balsa" at all! Most of the ones with interlocking grain serve quite well as mahogany substitutes, since they have the "ribbon grain" appearance that mahogany fans seem to love.

I once used up 10-12,00 board feet of a dark red lauan, (don't ask me what species it was, lumber dealers never trouble their heads about details like that!) for handrailing for a hospital. The stuff was so heavy that no one in their right mind would have classified it as "almost like balsa."

Only your experience will tell you if it's suitable for headblocks or tailblocks. If it's reasonably dense and crack-free, it should do well. But for the miniscule amounts required for a guitar, why not buy a small piece of some mahogany that's tried and true?

[David Newton]

Thousands of Asian guitars, mandolins, and every other string instrument are blocked, braced, backed, sided, and necked with just such a wood as this. There are many different species of "mahogany like" wood in the East, knowing exactly what you have is probably impossible.
It looks very much like Spanish Cedar to me.
Strength & stability of the wood is what you want. If you think this wood is strong & stable, use it.

[wwwilkie]

Looks a lot like some Keruing I got once from Indonesia. It was a nice reddish colour when I got it but the longer I had it the grayer it became. The stuff I had was quite brittle and was prone to splitting.

[eastmountain]

My dad used to make and restore furniture when I was a teen. One day, rather cryptically, he told me to drive around to the dumpster behind the loading dock of the local Yamaha motorcycle dealership and load up all the pallets I could find into my van. I did as I was told and brought the pallets back to my dad, who began pulling the staples and nails and taking them apart. When I asked about why he was salvaging pallet wood, he held up a piece of the wood and said, "Japanese Mahogany." He made table legs out of them on a lathe.

[Kevin Knippa]

+1 on the Japanese motorbike pallets, at least into the 80's. I haven't gone looking for hardwood in the dumpster since, but there was some really nice wood to be found in those pallets.

[Joe Mendel]

I have a large stack of black walnut & cherry from pallets that van wheels come to the GM plant I worked in when the wheel supplier ran out of their usual plastic skids. It's all really nice straight grained wood. I also have some really nice quarter-sawn cedar from a huge pallet I found behind a freind's music store.