Persimmon (NA)

Botanical Name: (Disopyros spp.)

The only native American ebony. Has been used on fretboards and bridges. The common persimmon tree yields hard, creamy wood that occasionally has black streaks near the heart.  Texas persimmon has more dark heartwood. The wood is not all that common commercially. Can be dyed to assume the traditional role of ebony as a fingerboard and as peghead veneer, although the heartwood is nearly black. It polishes nicely.  Persimmon is a gorgeous yellow wood with a striking grain and it is extremely hard which gives it a characteristically clear tone.

Note that some of the jet black protions of the wood may need some attention. We did drop some Cyano glue on most spots to strengthen those areas.

Guitar sets are very rare!

Alan Carruth

"You seldom see it with any black in it at all: that's interesting stuff.

Persimmon (Dyospyros virginiana) is a true North American ebony, and works very much like Macassar ebony in my experience. It's one of the toughest woods you'll run into. I made one persimmon guitar, and if I was playing in one of those places where they put chicken wire up between you and the audience, that's the guitar I'd want. It sounded good, too! I use it for fingerboards on 'domestic wood' guitars, and usually just stain it with walnut hull tea to darken it, since it's generally light brown or gray-brown. It's a great wood for bridge plates: it's diffuse porous, so that, unlike Osage you're never going to have a ball end up on a soft piece of grain. In some testing I did it took twice as much force to split a quartered piece of persimmon as it do to split anything else I treid, and skew cut is even more split resistant. It takes a little grunt to bend it, but it's no worse than most other hard and dense woods."

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