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Any one out there ever used North American Cherry for necks? I Scarf-join my necks together with built up heels. Without spending time trying to find my copy of Hoadly's book, I recall it as being a reasonably stable wood. Of the 12 (I think) builds under my belt, I've never used anything but Honduran Mahogany. Never had an issue with the necks moving. Other than the shrinking fret board (and the rest of the guitar) of one build which ended up in a very dry area in Colorado. The owner of that one and I had a "talk".
I figure if builders use maple, certainly Cherry would work just fine. Whaddya think?

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Yep, it's an excellent neck wood. The only bad thing is that it tends to have dark spots hidden inside, so if you want a "perfect" look then that could ruin your day.

Yes, Cherry does work fine for necks. However it is not as nice to work with as Mahogany. For carving and shaping a neck it is hard to find a nicer wood to work with than Honduran Mahogany. But you can make fine necks out of a variety of hardwoods. Remember than many of these other woods are heavier than Mahogany and so the guitar will balance differently with one of these necks.

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I've used it on about 3 guitars. I love the look of QS cherry. It kind of works a lot like maple iirc.

Qs cherry is a very good neck wood.

Hope your strong and workout at the gym. LOl the cherry grown here locally in the KC metroplex is nice and hard. as dennis mentioned black (mineral)streaks here locally or nicer curly cherry etc . Density varies, I/ve made abt 2 gtr necks and 1 uke neck I personally like the look . But frankly it is way harder to carve IMHO. I will not use it any more unless asked to , and with an upcharge, sapele , H mahog or afrikan, mahog , or spanish cedar is way easier to carve , local woods to consider depending on your access and it/s intended use sassafras , aspen, butternut. walnut sapwood etc.

Yeah with cherry you pretty much have to accept that those dark spots are part of the charm of cherry. You either love it or you don't. I love it!

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Cherry varies a lot in density, and some of it can be twisty - same as maple. A good piece of cherry can make a fine neck and I believe it has been used commercially for necks in the past.
I like black walnut for domestic wood necks. I think it is generally a little better behaved than cherry and carves more like mahogany.

Cherry Is Good , I agree that I like walnut better . Have used both

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I like cherry and I am using it for neck on a OO sized acoustic for the second time. Very easy to work but slightly heavier than mahogany.

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That is a nice piece of quarter sawn Cherry. Nice colors. I have rummaged through my local hardwood suppliers lumber stacks in search of quartered. When I asked him if he had any he just laughed and said “help yourself”. Talk about getting a work out.
Good Honduran is getting harder to find.
Years ago my then woodworking partner and I took on a job of building a six panel Mahogany door for an upscale home on a lake. We drove to a lumber yard in Milwaukee WI named Behnke Lumber. They allowed us to pick through the Honduran Mahogany. It was stacked about 16 feet high. Many stacks. Some of the planks were over 24” wide. 12 and 16 quarter thick. Deep red in color. They are long since out of business. I’d like to have several of those planks now.
“The good ole days” Walnut is sounding better!


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"It is easier to fool a man, than it is to convince him that he has been fooled"
Mark Twain

Often you are better off buying it from fellows who are intentionally quartersawing it.

Most folks sawing cherry are going for maximum grade - which means its mostly flat sawn off the faces of the logs.... And basically no quartersawn...

Luckily most neck stock is small stuff... So a local miller quarter sawing a tree service chunk can easily get you what you need... 2' and 3' long x 3" or 4" wide boards are considered "hobby wood" and aren't really what most furniture guys are aiming for.... I have gotten some good deals on this stuff as a result.

The other option is to find a fellow who slabs it and buy the center slab....

I often get 5/4 or thicker flat cut cherry seven or eight inches wide and make two-piece necks from it. You get the quartered face on the fingerboard gluing surface, and it's nice and stable because it's book matched. You may have to thumb through a stack to find it, though. There's a more-or-less local yard that regularly has decent stock in the 'shorts' bin, and I always check there first.

Cherry is more like Caribbean mahogany than Honduras, IMO; a tad denser and harder. When the Philadelphia cabinet makers wanted to copy the high-style Chippendale and Hepplewhite furniture a couple of hundred years ago, and could not get mahogany, they used cherry. Those old boys knew what they were doing....

I'm building a neck with cherry right now for the first time and I will echo mostly what others have said. It is stiffer and harder than mahogany and seems to be just as stable. I found it to be slightly more difficult to carve than mahogany but with freshly well sharpened tools it wasn't a problem. I haven't gotten to the finishing stage yet, but it appears there aren't any pores to fill, which is a nice bonus. So far I prefer cherry over mahogany for necks.

On another note, I am also building a neck with flamed red maple which has similar working properties as cherry in my experience, maybe just slightly harder. It is also a fine neck wood IMO. Now I have to try black walnut!

Curly wood does sacrifice some stiffness along the grain; the curl comes from run out, after all. Curly soft maple is generally stiff enough to work well, although I always make sure I have a good truss rod. I once succumbed to the temptation to use highly flamed curly walnut on a 12-string neck, and was sorry all the way through the re-build.

Alan, from this information would it be safe to assume that a laminated flamed wood neck would be far better than solid? I would think that as long as you aren't using TIII the resultant would be stiffer...been thinking of using some 4/4 red maple I got some 30 odd years ago and laminating a neck out of it for a neck through electric with a cap from the same board

80 years ago Stanley made their wooden level out of cherry and for a while they had a stamp on the side that said "the most stable wood for the purpose"

Ed

I usually make curly maple necks as laminates. It does seem more stable, and its also much easier to get good stock to make them from. I can almost always find a decent curly neck blank if I'm willing to thumb through the stacks for a while.

As an aside: when I was learning the terminology 'flame' referred to how pronounced the figure was, and could be applied to different kinds of figure. You could have 'highly flamed' birds eye or quilt maple, for example. I find the current practice of saying 'flamed' when 'curly' is meant to be a diminution of the language, since it deprives us of a way of easily describing the degree of figure. I know I'm 'shoveling s(and) against the tide' , as we used to say in the Navy, but being an older guy I will exercise my curmudgeon's prerogative.

You are hardly a curmudgeon... But you have certainly earned the right...

I've pretty much given up on trying to use "correct" terminology when describing woods...though I do get a very negative reaction to people calling flatsawn woods as "figured"...

curly is often used, but I intentionally used flamed since the board in question is AAA, or perhaps AAAAAAA if one wants to exaggerate, or hey let's call it "insignia grade"