Pecan as tone wood?

[multidon]

Does anyone have experience with either making or playing an instrument with pecan back and sides? Not just mandolins, but any acoustic instrument? Going by the wood specs it seems like it shares many characteristics with walnut. Any input would be appreciated. Thanks.

[HoGo]

Does anyone have experience with either making or playing an instrument with pecan back and sides? Not just mandolins, but any acoustic instrument? Going by the wood specs it seems like it shares many characteristics with walnut. Any input would be appreciated. Thanks.

Experience no, but, IMO, ANY properly seasoned wood of reasonable quality (knots, cracks, run-out or such) can be used for instruments.
Isn't pecan a type of hickory? I guess it would make strong necks and similarly to walnut (or mahogany) could produce warm sounding guitars or mandolins.

[Richard Mott]

I had often wondered the same thing. Pecan is beautiful and seems like it could be a close cousin to walnut, but its genus is Carya (the same as hickory) whereas walnut is Juglans. What I have heard since though is that pecan is very unstable and splits easily, unlike hickory or walnut. It’s often used in ceiling fan blades in the South, but I have not seen it on an instrument, perhaps for that reason.

[Marty Jacobson]

I've made a lot of furniture and stuff for my kids out of pecan. No instruments, though. Seems stable, but all the stuff I used was kiln dried. It dulls blades like crazy.

[tree]

Pecan (Carya Illinoinsis) is a hickory (Carya sp.). The wood is hard and heavy.

Not related to walnut (Juglans nigra). (What Richard said.)

[multidon]

I never meant to imply that I thought pecan and walnut were related. I was just saying the specifications are similar. Yes, pecan is somewhat harder than walnut, but the elasticity, modulus of rupture, and crushing strength are all in the same ballpark.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a piece of pecan without knots. Maybe that’s why it’s unsuitable? Too hard to find a large enough clear piece?

[Bill McCall]

I suspect the vast majority of pecan available is probably small boards cut from culled orchard stock, rather than large, wild trees. Orchard trees typically have been highly stressed and the lumber is often a bit different than that from a large, wild tree. Being a hickory, I would suspect that the flexibility of the wood is both a detriment and benefit of working it.

Of course there may be large individual trees harvested occasionally, but that wood might go to veneer mills.

[tree]

From my experience, hickory of any type is much harder to work than walnut. Walnut works easily, hickory not so much - it's pretty hard.

[Eric Oliver]

Related taxonomically: both are in the Juglandaceae family.

[j. condino]

Any of the fruit trees work well for instrument woods. The real challenge for me is knowing that I'll spend a similar amount of time on the build but the market will usually pay much better for known traditional materials.....

[multidon]

I really do appreciate the comments thus far. Of course I did ask this question on a mandolin forum, and I guess I should have expected mando-centric answers. I do understand that the mandolin “ marketplace”, as it has developed, precludes anything other than figured maple back and sides (with a sunburst finish thrown in for good measure). Conventional wisdom with many builders is that nothing else will sell. But there is much more in the way of open minds with other acoustic instruments. So my question about pecan as a tone wood is meant in a much more general sense. Specifically, I am considering the purchase of a high end mountain dulcimer with pecan back and sides. Dulcimer players have their own little world, just as mandolin players have theirs. In the dulcimer world, much emphasis seems to be on using woods that would have been actually available in the Appalachian mountains to those early builders. Walnut and cherry seem to be the overwhelmingly popular choices. But those early mountain builders certainly would have been open to using any wood that was available to them, pecan and hickory included. Yes, there are folks building dulcimers with rosewood bodies and using other more exotic tropical woods, but many others feel that, for the truly authentic sound, authentic woods must be used.

I would be buying the dulcimer without playing it first. I once played a dulcimer made entirely from hickory. I found its sound somewhat muted and lacking in quality. The fact that pecan is related to hickory gives me pause. So I guess what I’m really asking is, if the instrument is built by a skilled builder with a good reputation, and is therefore constructed with optimal build quality, is there any reason why using pecan as the body wood should prevent good quality volume and tone?

[oldwave maker]

Never tempted to cut down the backyard pecan. James mentioned the economics- if inexpensive classical guitars from Mexico use it, players might be reluctant to show you the $, even for an abalone encrusted F5! It burns well, and the cord price is comparatively low due to the local 45,000 acres of prunings. I suspect it would make a fine dulcimer.

[belbein]

Don: Like you, I'm curious about the sounds of other woods that are non-traditional. Who knows, there may be woods better than spruce and red cedar and mahogany. And certainly people used what they had ... the Appalachian builders didn't use mesquite because they didn't have it, and Guarnari probably didn't use rosewood. So: Please report on the sound when you buy it.

[Bill McCall]

I would think that the folks handworking lumber chose more carefully than we give them credit. I believe they were careful to choose dimensionally stable, strong for purpose, easy to work materials that had already been proven to sound good. They could easily select pecan versus walnut and typically didn’t. There’s a reason other than lack of availability. White oak is strong, plentiful, a bit more difficult to work but not prohibitive like purpleheart (unavailable in Appalachia), but wasn’t chosen.

Tradition isn’t the only reason for woods used in instrument building.

[belbein]

Well certainly availability has the advantage of making things possible right? Can't build with what you don't have. So why isn't white oak used?

[Eric Oliver]

I would question the availability of pecan in "Appalachia" in terms of actual board feet.
I don't know, but it can't be much of the percent of hardwoods.
In the Old Appalachia, I would be looking for a chestnut.
No white oak, but I made a small Torres guitar with red oak.

[belbein]

the availability of pecan in "Appalachia"

I'm not much for botany, and I can't identify a tree to save my life, but I did wonder about that. I've never heard of pecan up there. But maybe Pecan grows next to Alpine Mesquite. Which is why the Swiss drink their Mesquite Liquor with their famous pecan pie.

[moxie]

After getting more and more ill for a month this winter, I realized it was the mesquite I was burning for heat, doh. I switched to pecan and problem solved. I didn't know pecan was related to hickory, but it is real stringy to split like the hickory in Illinois where I come from. Even so, hickory is sometimes used for special purposes like ax and hammer handles I kept some mesquite to split for kindling. MMc Tucson

[Marty Jacobson]

Oak's been used a bit. Larson Brothers, Paul Hostetter, Santa Cruz, Hans Brentrup, and a bunch of other people, I'm sure. I've got some nice curly oak I'm going to use for a Larson brothers copy at some point.

The biggest (marketing) problem with oak is that it isn't "tonewood".
The only thing that makes wood "tonewood" is the marketing label, and since oak doesn't have that label, it doesn't get the love.

[Phil O'Dendron]

[QUOTE=
The biggest (marketing) problem with oak is that it isn't "tonewood".
The only thing that makes wood "tonewood" is the marketing label, and since oak doesn't have that label, it doesn't get the love.[/QUOTE]

Even timber such as Boxwood (Buxus) and Pear were used 200 yrs ago for flutes and recorders.
I guess it's a different story for woodwinds which are only asking for some subtle nuance of a resonance as compared with stringed instruments which are subjected to higher stress loading.

[multidon]

Eric- you raise a good point about pecan trees in The Appalachian region. However, the natural range of pecan tree habitat reaches into eastern Tennessee and Kentucky. And the range also covers much of the Ozarks, and although not technically Appalachia, certainly a mountainous place where dulcimer making certainly happened. Probably the largest dulcimer maker in the USA, McSpadden, is located in Arkansas. That being said, I have never heard of pecan being used before I saw this particular instrument. The old time makers invariably went for cherry or black walnut, sometimes hickory.

A search of the internet shows that Oak has been used by various guitar makers with mixed results. Some say it’s wonderful, others not so much. Many say it’s a real pain to work with, heavy with big pores that are difficult to fill, and a strong tendency to warp. Why didn’t the old time mountain instrument makers use that plentiful wood? It could be that they thought cherry and walnut were just better choices. I don’t know. Hickory is hard to work too, but they used it.

I’ve seen guitars made from silky oak, aka silver oak or lacewood, but these trees are not true oaks at all.

[Seter]

My Appalachian dulcimer has a dogwood top with dogwood flower shaped soundholes, which I like as a nod to growing up in Virginia. The builder Jack Ferguson who I got mine from specializes in them. There are some dulcimer builders here in Texas, I wouldn't be surprised if some were building pecan dulcimers as a salute to their state tree.

[Eric Oliver]

Don, and Belbein,
I don't want you to think I'm some sort of tree expert. I'm not.
I don't know what is in the water over there in the Ozarks, but the percentage of above-average fiddle players seem to be from there. So it should follow they know something about making stringed instruments...
Do you have other dulcimers?

[JRG]

Josh Carter of Pretty Little Goat plays a mandolin made from a 200 year old chestnut timber from an old house, sounds amazing.

[ptritz]

Oak's been used a bit. Larson Brothers, Paul Hostetter, Santa Cruz, Hans Brentrup, and a bunch of other people, I'm sure. I've got some nice curly oak I'm going to use for a Larson brothers copy at some point.

The biggest (marketing) problem with oak is that it isn't "tonewood".
The only thing that makes wood "tonewood" is the marketing label, and since oak doesn't have that label, it doesn't get the love.

Nick Apollonio has also used oak as a tonewood on some instruments. Here's what one of them looks and sounds like.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjgAcHZHYJA