My daughter and son in law own a vacation home on Cape San Juan, San Juan Island. They recently had a deck constructed of Cumaru wood. They also have a rare Junipera Maritima or seashore juniper on the property from which I was able to cut a 15 inch chunk from a stub of a limb that the previous owners had cut off. I plan on building a Cape House Ukulele for them from these two woods.
Cumaru, or Brazilian Teak is among the hardest of woods. I brought home a few scraps left over from the deck and was relieved to find that I could cut it readily on my table and band saw. Here are the necessary pieces for the sides and back of the uke. On the Janka hardness scale this wood scores 3330. Hard maple is 1500, white oak is 1360-- this is really hard dense wood. I will need to let it dry in my shop for a few months before starting in.
This is the Juniper that was butchered by the previous owner. They cut off this big limb leaving a 15 inch stub. I took the liberty of trimming that off and it will make enough tone boards for about 6 ukes. A treasure of tone-wood.
This is an unusually large juniper, maybe close to a record tree that twists and turns up as high as 60 or 70 feet in the air. The sawed off branch had 391 growth rings, That means this tree was a seedling when the first colonists landed at Jamestown. The main trunk would probably indicate that it is even older.