Thanks Eric. BTW, I use this site all the time, awesome amount of very useful information. World of great information!

I don’t know a way to tell from looking at that distance at the face grain. Either way, it does look like it would be some expensive wood and not a cheaper alternative ebony type wood.

I had success gluing it to maple once by turning the Blackwood first into a piece with 1/4” dowels coming off both sides, then drilled a 1/4” hole into the maple, glued them together, and turned the whole thing into a pretty cool spoon, maple with a Blackwood stripe in the handle.

You could probably do it but not a whole axe handle. Just the part where your hand grips? I’d say yeah. If u found a piece large enough to make an entire axe handle be ready to spend like $300 on it at least :D

Hi Victoria….Do you mind posting a photo please?
Simplest explanation or way….
Sand or scrape somewhere (bottom) of the carved piece….
Expose the “fresh” wood!
If you see clear wood grain/ lines…..then its African Blackwood.
Ebony is just an odd pitch black “void” looking wood!!!

Another way: Africa is Quite big!
If bought in West Africa, then 99% of the time it will be Ebony.
If bought in Southern Africa, then it should be African Blackwood, and i presume she did..
Be advised, they do however polish these carvings with black shoe polish……might just end up with iron wood or leadwood polished to look like ebony.
So sand away! Hahaha

The bridge blanks came from a reputable dealer of luthier woods and were stored in my shop for several months. I’m pretty sure moisture and wood movement weren’t the issue. After acetone and re-gluing, all 3 bridges have stayed down. This stuff is just really waxy or oily. Clogs sandpaper like crazy. That may be why it takes such a nice polish with no finish.

Yes, the colour is soluble. I have an English horn bell which discolored when soaked overnight. The instrument’s maker claims the wood was not stained.

yes it can be but buying all that wood would be highly expensive and how would you even find it during the nighttime?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUcW1dRH2XQ

The demand for this wood for clarinets, oboes, bagpipes etc really has reached a crisis point. The largest woodwind manufacturing companies keep up with the huge demand for this wood (in the music world we usually call it grenadilla) by using it before it’s fully seasoned, pressure-treating it with oil to compensate. Unfortunately, the result is a wood that isn’t stable in the long term, so that instruments “play out” after a number of years, going so irremediably out of tune with themselves that they need to be replaced. There’s a YouTube video about oboes by the oboists of the US Marine Band, in which they matter-of-factly state that one can expect a new oboe to last all of ten years! Meanwhile, I have many older clarinets of grenadilla — the oldest made in 1888 — that are still perfectly in tune. Grenadilla is the preferred wood because it is so hard that it can be machined with absolute precision — the real reason, rather than any actual difference in musical tone, though musicians tend to believe the wood is chosen for its sound. There really needs to be an effective way to market alternative woods for musical instrument manufacture for this situation to be sustainably remedied.

Do you think the pulling was due to the oil in the wood, or could it be that the blackwood wasn’t fully dry and acclimatized to the moisture level of the surrounding environment?