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Just curious - at my buddy's cabinet shop he is substituting flat-sawn sapele for most of his mahogany needs now - the wood is very similar but a little bit heavier.  Would this be suitable for neck material?  Its a lot less expensive...

Mitch

I've heard of some who use sapele for necks, go for it.

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Here are a couple of archived threads on neck woods, with some specific questions regarding sapele.

thread #1

thread #2

thread #3

thread #4

Lots of folks in these threads recommend sapele for necks and lots of other different nect woods, notably cherry.

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My Facebook Guitar Page

"There's really no wrong way, as long as the results are what's desired." Charles Fox

"We have to constantly remind ourselves what we're doing....No Luthier is putting a man on the moon!" Harry Fleishman

"Generosity is always different in the eye of the person who didn't receive anything, but who wanted some." Waddy Thomson

Based on my limited experience, I find sapele as good as mahogany for
necks. Carves real nice.

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Rich Smith
Issaquah, WA

My favorite.

Sure and very pretty too - now if I could just pronounce it........

S'ah-p'eh-'leah

I just did two Sapele necks.  It is a very beautiful looking wood under finish.  I did have a little splintering trouble with it, but nothing that was too difficult to work around.  

Okay Mario and others, here are two more woods I don't know how to pronounce.  Any answers out there?  Granadillo and Camatillo.  Are the l's pronounced or not?

i just went up to the WoodCraft store and got a huge piece of sapele for $23 and it's surprisingly good quality. I plan to use some of it for a neck very soon. i'll let you know how it goes 

Sapele is nice. I've got a few chunks waiting to be laminated into necks.

Sapele's lovely. Bit 'grayer'/less warm in colour than Khaya or the true mahoganies when fresh cut, but it ages very nicely, looks great, carves well, wonderfully stiff...perfect attributes in a neck.

In fact, I recently sliced up a board of flatsawn 8/4 sapele into laminates for 2-piece necks (or more, if I add contrasting veneers in the middle). Got a dozen acoustic neck blanks and four electric neck blanks out of a board I paid about 70 dollars for (that's including 19% sales tax, by the by).

Also have five sets of billets upstairs waiting to be resawn into back/side sets (quartered, ribbon-stripe) from the same lot, which will come to about 5 bucks per set (excluding consumables) if I do my cutting right. Perfect wood to practice resawing on, and great wood to build with.

David, replace the double L's with a long e. "camateeo" "granadeeo".

i realy like sapele and i think we will all be using a lot more in the future
as mahoagany gets more scarce.
It does however have two problems that should be taken into account.

1,
it is very brittle and as such it is very prone to end checks and splitting
and i think in the long term it wont holdup as well under pressure
becouse of this.

2,
it can be pretty heavy but this should not realy be much of an issue if
your making steel strings but i wouldent use sapele for a classical
becouse of this.

Apart from that i know it has been used to graet effct by many builders so
go for but avoid the slabby stuff if you can.

Joel.

Thanks Tommy.  That is exactly how I thought they were pronounced.... but I didn't want to sound like an idiot if I was wrong!