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Rocklite: The Latest Synthetic Ebony For Fingerboards
- Thread starter Bruce Johnson
- Start date
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- Tags
- ebony
I would be interested to hear of your experience with this product.I ordered two Blackwood Tek fretboard blanks.
They should arrive on Monday.
Bass Blackwood Tek Fingerboard Black
Blackwood Tek is a technologically modified wood that exhibits the properties and appearance of African Ebony or Indian Rosewood. It is obtained by taking Pinus radiata wood through a technological process that uses natural products, without plastics or other petroleum derivatives. Dimensions...www.madinter.com
Where in Europe are you?That's great to see it's now available over here in Europe.
Bruce- Is it safe to say that currently, there is no solid black "synthetic" or other, alternative to Ebony?
I ordered two Blackwood Tek fretboard blanks.
They should arrive on Monday.Bass Blackwood Tek Fingerboard Black
Blackwood Tek is a technologically modified wood that exhibits the properties and appearance of African Ebony or Indian Rosewood. It is obtained by taking Pinus radiata wood through a technological process that uses natural products, without plastics or other petroleum derivatives. Dimensions...
Okay, that's interesting. I hadn't heard of Blackwood Tek before. A new product in the synthetic ebony market? From their brief description, it sounds like it's technically halfway between Royal Blackwood and Rocklite; a simpler competitor to Rocklite.
Are Royal Blackwood and Blackwood Tek the same product? Different brand names for the same material? Or different products from the same company? In a brief search, I notice that there's a connection between Madinter and Stew-Mac. They apparently supply each other with products. Stew-Mac's listing of available fingerboard woods reads almost the same as Madinters'. But, Stew-Mac lists Royal Blackwood and Madinter lists Blackwood Tek. Maybe Royal Blackwood is the US Export only version?
I'm definitely interested in hearing your review of it.
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Huh? Why would you say that? This thread is all about listing, testing and evaluating the different synthetic alternatives to real ebony. There are maybe 8 of them in the market now? We have our favorites and preferences, but they are all reasonable and useable. Take your pick. My personal favorite, of the ones I've tested, is Rocklite but, sadly, they've gone out of business.
Bruce, they definitely aren't the same product/material. Royal blackwood is torrified purpleheart, whereas the blackwood tek is made out of radiata pine, pressure treated with some "natural additives". They just have confusingly similar names. The tek sounds much closer to rocklite.
Yeah, that's what I thought the difference is. But I wonder if they are two different products made by the same company?
Somewhat frustratingly, that company which is based in Spain won't ship any order under €190 to the UK (thanks again Brexit!)I ordered two Blackwood Tek fretboard blanks.
They should arrive on Monday.Bass Blackwood Tek Fingerboard Black
Blackwood Tek is a technologically modified wood that exhibits the properties and appearance of African Ebony or Indian Rosewood. It is obtained by taking Pinus radiata wood through a technological process that uses natural products, without plastics or other petroleum derivatives. Dimensions...
Looks like the search continues for me.
I spent some time on their website and they offer both Royal Blackwood and Blackwood Tex. Different but from same company. I was going to order but shipping cost is prohibitive.
Sorry- I guess I am looking for a synthetic that from a sonic point of view, performs as well as Ebony but that is solid black with very little sign of being wood, i.e. consistent color, little to no grain and certainly problem free in terms of warpage....
That being said, what is the best choice?
Sorry- I guess I am looking for a synthetic that from a sonic point of view, performs as well as Ebony but that is solid black with very little sign of being wood, i.e. consistent color, little to no grain and certainly problem free in terms of warpage....
That being said, what is the best choice?
That's one of several companies making synthetics/composite boards in dimensions for violin family instruments but not guitar family. I imagine you could ask them about bass or guitar boards.Has this been discussed?
GaiaTone — V. Richelieu
www.vrichelieu.com
Shipping from Madinter to Finland for two fretboards and some frets is 22€ which is not bad IMO.
Well, you are asking for conflicting things. A synthetic product that is closest to ebony in mechanical properties, including its contribution to the sound, needs a structure similar to ebony. That is, cells, fibers, grain and similar resin content and density to ebony. That results in similar strength, damping, machining, gluing and wear properties, as well as the sound when installed on a bass. Rocklite was the best of that type that I've tried. It was very close to ebony in all the mechanical properties, and in visual appearance. It could almost fool you for ebony, except that it was too perfect. I called it Super Ebony, because that's what it was. It was an upgrade from ebony. And it was fairly expensive.
There are other synthetics of that type, which are trying to do the same thing. Taking a cell/grain structure of an existing wood and adding things to bring it up to the density, strength and properties of ebony. I've had some Royal Blackwood here in my shop. My buddy Jeremy used one on a fretless bass to try it out. Royal Blackwood is made by processing Purpleheart, roasting it and adding some resin and dye. Overall, I liked it. Its mechanical properties were close to ebony. But it doesn't quite look like ebony. The grain and the color aren't quite right. But I recommend it as a nice tough ebony-like fingerboard material. And it's not too expensive.
This Blackwood Tek that we were talking about above sounds interesting. It sounds like it's roughly similar to Rocklite in construction, using ground-up wood fiber and "natural" (non-petroleum) resins. From the pictures, it looks like it isn't pure black and has some streaks and visible grain. Which is okay by me, But you may not accept that. I'll be looking for Marko's report on the board he ordered.
We've covered several other synthetic ebony products in this thread of this same type. Some other wood that's been cooked and treated to make it closer to ebony. Our general opinion of them has been good, that they are tough black-ish fingerboard woods that work well functionally. But they look a little different from real ebony.
The other type of synthetic ebony alternatives are high-resin products, like Richlite, Ebanol, Rockwood, and a few others. These products are variations of Bakelite, which is a stack of sheets of paper, thoroughly soaked in resin and cooked and pressed into sheets. These products all have a high content of plastic resin, with some wood-product reinforcement inside. They are effectively sheets of plastic, and their mechanical properties are different from wood. They don't look, feel or sound like any kind of wood.
Richlite is made from layers of paper, about like Bakelite. A fingerboard blank is pure black, no streaks, no grain, nothing. It looks and feels like a sheet of black plastic. Not as shiny or brittle as Acrylic (like Plexiglas), but close. It machines and glues like a sheet of plastic. When you tap on it, it sounds like......plastic. As a blank sheet, it's pure black on the surface, but when you machine down into it (like radiusing the fingerboard surface), you see some wiggly grey-ish streaks, that don't look like wood. Some people like Richlite for guitar and bass fingerboards, but I don't personally. It's not wood.
That's the conflict: Do you want it to look, feel and sound like ebony? Or be pure black with no grain or streaks?
Looks like you can order direct from Blackwood, which is based in Shandong. Prices seem odd: currently "black" is US$10.71 per board, "brown" is US$3.20 per board, both "semi-finished"; there is a "finished" version for about a buck more per board. Dimensions for bass boards are 720*75*9. The price disparity between the two is kind of extreme; I'm not sure whether that reflects demand or a difference in how each is manufactured. There's also a note of "20 pieces/pack" although since we appear to be able to order by the piece it's hard to tell what that implies.
I couldn't find a shipping cost; that step in the checkout requires creating an account first, which I don't want to do unless I'm ordering.
I'll add that since they're based in China the boards are probably also available through Taobao, which is pretty hostile to customers outside of China but there are buyer's agents that will handle the order and shipping for you for 10-15% more. Which doesn't sound so bad for a base price of eleven bucks a board. Main advantage of using Taobao even with markups is that there's a legitimate middleman handling the transaction, you won't be throwing your credit card at a random ecommerce site and hoping it's not compromised.