Official Luthiers Forum!

For what we do?

Necks or back and sides?

I'm not sure if that should be a vote for yes or no.

Can be. Depends on the actual plank, same as any wood.
My first build was a Red Meranti, but there's several of that genus (Shorea) with quite widely varying properties.
It has a poor press due the the low price and coarse texture of some examples, which has tarred the whole range with the same brush.
But the better examples can make quite a good guitar, B&S certainly.
http://www.wood-database.com/lumber-identification/hardwoods/dark-red-meranti/

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The name catgut is confusing. There are two explanations for the mix up.

Catgut is an abbreviation of the word cattle gut. Gut strings are made from sheep or goat intestines, in the past even from horse, mule or donkey intestines.

Otherwise it could be from the word kitgut or kitstring. Kit meant fiddle, not kitten.

I've used red meranti for necks. It works O.K. It has a rather coarse texture and sometimes has mineral inclusions, but nothing too hard on the cutters. As stated, much depends on the individual piece of wood. Since it is commonly used on low end production guitars (similar to mahogany 30 years ago) it might be a hard sell for a custom built instrument.
A project I used it on a few years ago was an outdoor bench. It has held up fine with the annual application of an outdoor finish.

I used a good bit of meranti in this guitar and that guitar is going great. The fine grained dark red stuff worked under hand tools very much like mahogany. Meranti of the coarse grained light red type is used a lot in the necks of guitars from S.E. Asia. It works fine (they wouldn't use it if it failed all the time), but it can be brittle and snaps like the proverbial carrot. Colin pretty much said it here:



Edited to fix the link

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Trevor Gore, Luthier. Australian hand made acoustic guitars, classical guitars; custom guitar design and build; guitar design instruction.

http://www.goreguitars.com.au

Yeah, I was not sure myself.

Thanks folks!

There's a couple of old boards in the hood that maya be worth something then...