snookelputz

Species Toona sureni - Suren or Indonesian Mahogany Well, some of the guitars I've seen made of this stuff sure smelled like toona!

Rainsong Stealth There are companies currently marketing guitars made of various wood-based (but not wood) and non-wood composites. I bought a Stealth to check out the technology. It's as heavy, depending on individual wood, as any LP, resonant, sustains well, tone is on a par with any comparable priced guitar, but I suspect this is the best this technology can do, because if they COULD make a $10,000 guitar they WOULD. Since they don't make one, I don't believe they can - or at least that it wouldn't compare in any worthwhile fashion at that level. It's made of some dry, compressed granular stuff that looks like little styrofoam pellets that are very very tiny and sort of hard. I don't know how to describe it. It's like grains of salt when you scrape at it. You can feel the stuff smush together into a bigger clump, so there's no apparent problem transferring sound from bit to bit. It vibrates against your stomach and in your hands as much as any other guitar. Eh, I have better guitars and so it sits in a box, because who would buy a used one?

I think one or the other is highly likely.

No, it is softer than alder. Grained on the surface like mahogany, but soft enough to shave with a knife, rather than splinter. It looks like any old white punk wood, but it is not brittle like the firs or spruces can be, i.e., it doesn't chunk under a blade like a lot of stuff. I think it is scrap wood of the same asian "mahogany" stuff the top and back were made out of. The outside 2 pieces and the center piece are definitely red mahogany, and even though glued together from 6 pieces of wood (not all of which are the same wood) any lawyer could say "solid mahogany body" with a straight face because there is no plywood (or MDF), and it is definitely solid and it definitely has mahogany in it!

That is what I found beneath this:

A picture is worth a thousand words, count 'em yourself: