So once again I find myself with an unlabeled piece of wood. To be clear, at some point it had a label because I labeled EVERY piece of wood to come into the shop, provided I knew the name when I acquired it and it is only the case that some of my domestic woods are unlabeled because they came to me as mysteries. Woods I buy at retail I am always careful to label, but ink fades, stickers don’t adhere to waxy blanks, and all of my wood was also moved from Georgia to California and moves like that can play havoc with labels.
Mystery Wood Marble Interior
At any rate, I have no idea what this wood might be. To borrow a method from my days working in microbiology, sometimes a bacteria just couldn’t be definitively identified so using a computerized database we would generate an identification that would read “most closely resembling…” In this case, I would say that the mystery wood most closely resembles Marblewood, a wood which I have covered in detail in the past.
Mystery Wood Marble Reverse
On the plus side, the hardness, the density, and the general coloration and pattern suggest Marblewood. But this wood was not as splintery as I recall Marblewood being, it didn’t destroy my cutters in the way that I reported in the past encounter, and I just can’t find a known photo of Marblewood that is a true match for the wood that I have, and that includes comparing it to a labeled piece of Marblewood I have in the shop.
For what it is worth, I think this wood is from a South American species, although long odds it could be Asian. If anyone has any ideas about what this wood happens to be, I would love to hear them.