You can't buy any reasonable quantity of genuine mahogany today and you can't get any reasonable sized pieces - we just harvested it out of existence. You'll hear all sorts of people's opinions about the substitutes - "african mahogany" (usually Kahaya), "phillipine mahogany" (usually Lauan) - there are many popular substitutes. The only one that I think is really pretty and comes close to the same look as the genuine Honduran mahogany is flat sawn sapele. And that's where the problem arises. Sapele has an internal structure that causes it to display a distinct "stripe banding" when quartersawn - I'll not go into it, I'm sure the internet has many references to the names for different ways to cut a log into boards. I think the bands are ugly - everybody else loves them and so, a lot of Sapele gets quartersawn.
When I bough the wood for the beam wraps in the room where the pool table will live, I was able to get enough rich, dark flat sawn sapele to do the job. When I went to buy more on Saturday - every board they had was quartersawn. I hit two other places with similar results. When I stopped driving and started letting my fingers do the walking I found huge quantities of quartersawn, but none flat sawn. Let me try to share the difference:
The picture maybe doesn't even really show how very different they are. Flat sawn on the left, quartersawn on the right. That board on the left is oriented with the center of the tree at left and has a bit of almost sapwood showing at right. A good, all heart board is even darker and prettier.
A lot of places are closed on the weekend. So, I got to calling around on Monday. I pretty much tried everyone in Northern California, then Oregon, Nevada, Washington. Gave up on maps and started just using Google to find people who claimed to have the stuff I wanted. It began to look like I was going to be paying a bit less than $8 a board foot for rough sawn lumber on the east coast. I'd be looking at a few hundred dollars freight so I'd have to buy a lot. It would take a couple of weeks. I'd be buying sight unseen, random widths (though sapele boards run wide), probably mostly 8' and under lengths to help control freight cost. And, when it got here, I'd have to surface it before I could use it. I've put huge quantities of wood through a small planer before - I suppose it's a cheaper way to burn fat and add muscle than going to the gym. It really started to look like a $4500 bill to fill my precious storage space with more sapele than I would ever be able to use.
I could just go to the store and buy a nice pool table...
But, one of the suppliers that I called put me on to a place that my Google searches had not found - Saroyan Lumber in Livermore - less than an hour away. They have 20,000 board feet of rough, flat sawn sapele in their yard in LA - can pick me out a small amount, get it here, surface and straightline it and deliver it to my house before this weekend! Oh, and it's $6.75 a board foot. Still, random widths so I have to buy a lot and sort the pieces and build other stuff with the rest of it. I'll need about 80 board feet for the pool table - I ordered 250. I have a good feeling about this, but, I did just buy ~$1700 worth of wood sight unseen...
So, running cost tally on this pool table - $200 for the old table, and what? 80/250 of the $1700 lumber bill? That will be true if I use the rest for something else, not so true if I don't.
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