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Look at the end grain. |||||||||||| quartersawn, looks like this \\\\\\\\\||||OO|||||///////// Not. Its okay if its close to ||||||| off 20 degrees or so. If you flip the board over, it should look close to the other side. Something else to consider, is how the strings can tear up a flatsawn fingerboard faster. Flatsawn surfaces seem to wear down faster than quartersawn. Maple don't really matter. It can depend on the stick of wood too I guess.

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Jason Moe
LaCrosse WI 54601

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Jason, have you worked with Ziricote yet...? Have you ever looked at the endgrain of Ziricote lumber?

John and his Ziricote post seems for me a bit....ironic...

Ziricote with its overlapping growrings, Inklines, Spiderwebbing can be everything...from slabsawn to quartersawn inbetween one inch or less.
Cheers, Alex

Yeah, Jason I appreciate the sincerity of your answer actually, but it was a joke. Ziricote has pretty weird grain, it's really unlike anything I've ever seen. A lot of people describe it as having a landscape look to it, strangely overlapping "plates" of grain.

It's really cool stuff though I have no idea if it's quarter sawn, flat sawn, rift sawn. Pretty dang hard though however they mill it!

Save for its price and rarity, African blackwood seems like a good candidate for fingerboards. Dark(sometimes black), hard and moves much less than any ebony.
I'm yet to try it, though - I was told it's harder to plane than ebony.

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member of the guild of professional dilettantes

I'm trying african blackwood in my Stella build. I have been able to get them cheaply by buying a big chunk of it and sawing it down to fretboard size. It hates sandpaper for sure because it ruins sanding belts/drums very quickly. I like it for its smell and it looks a lot more interesting than ebony but it's also very hard to find them without any defect... in fact it is pretty much expected.

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Cat-gut strings are made from kitten guts, stretched out to near breaking point and then hardened with grue saliva. As a result these give a feeling of Pain and anguish whenever played, and often end up playing themselves backwards as part of satanic rituals.

Typhoon Guitars
http://www.typhoon-guitars.com

lucky you... now that you mention it, i remember that thread. cheapest i got them was 20 eur/piece (plus VAT).

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member of the guild of professional dilettantes

However I have no idea what the source is and I can't help but think it's probably illegally harvested, so I'm probably contributing to its depletion by continuing to buy it.

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Cat-gut strings are made from kitten guts, stretched out to near breaking point and then hardened with grue saliva. As a result these give a feeling of Pain and anguish whenever played, and often end up playing themselves backwards as part of satanic rituals.

Typhoon Guitars
http://www.typhoon-guitars.com

Indeed, ziricote has pigment figure that doesn't always exactly follow the grain lines, but usually the darkest lines are pretty close. One sure-fire way to tell well quartered wood is that ziricote, much like maple and sycamore, shows ray fleck on the purely vertical grained face like on the right side of these fingerboard blanks:

The end grain of a Ziricote fretboard looks pretty easy to determine the way it was sawn.

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Jason Moe
LaCrosse WI 54601

The other end. I got this one from LMI. A really nice one.

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Jason Moe
LaCrosse WI 54601

Never seen ziricote before. It's a very interesting looking wood cool picture btw


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