Official Luthiers Forum!

A friend of mine just returned from a trip to Australia & Tasmania & brought back some lovely wood, including some rare Huon Pine. I'm wondering if any of you have used this wood for soundboards.
The tops she showed me have a beautiful bearclaw figure. The tap tone is glassy & clear & the wood feels harder that hard Euro spruce. (thumbnail test) Grain count is in the high fifties, right across the board. Amazing wood!

If I had that, I'd run a couple of tests to find the density, damping, and the Young's modulus along and across the grain. Then it would be easy to compare it with 'the usual suspects' in a meaningful way.

Huon is pretty nice stuff, but the real deal there is to try to find some of the ultra-rare King Billy pine. I checked out a number of samples of both when I was over in Tasmania last month, and the stuff that seemed to really have "it" with regard to tap tone was the King Billy. The Huon was a bit deader.