African Blackwood — Density, Movement, Workability & Cost

Ask a clarinet or oboe maker what wood they build with and the answer is almost never anything else — African blackwood (Dalbergia melanoxylon) machines less like timber and more like a dense engineering plastic, holding a bore to a thousandth of an inch and taking a screw thread the way brass would, not the way wood typically does.

The densest species in this entire dataset

At 79 lb/ft³ and 3,670 lbf on the Janka scale, African blackwood is the heaviest species this site tracks — denser even than lignum vitae by density alone, though lignum vitae edges it out on raw Janka hardness. Turners describe cutting it as a waxy, almost metallic feel rather than a woody one. Trees are small and characteristically crooked, so usable billets are short, and the pale sapwood makes up a substantial share of any given log, leaving a comparatively small usable heartwood core.

Barely any movement at all

Radial shrinkage of 2.9% against a tangential figure of 4.8% gives a 1.7 ratio, but the truly notable fact is how small both absolute numbers are — 7.7% total volumetric shrinkage on a wood this dense is remarkable, and it's a large part of why a clarinet bore stays round rather than going oval as a player's breath cycles it through humidity swings all winter. A 2"-wide instrument-part blank taken from 9% down to a dry 6% moves barely a hundredth of an inch, 0.01" (0.2mm), across its width — the wood movement calculator plots the trend at wider dimensions, for whatever that's worth on a wood this stable. A 1"-thick, 12"-long billet at that same width weighs about 1.1 lb on the wood weight calculator.

Gluing a wood that doesn't really want to be glued

The oil content is extreme, and no amount of acetone wiping and epoxy fully compensates — a well-designed African blackwood project relies on mechanical interlock, threads, or a tight friction fit rather than trusting a glue joint to carry meaningful load on its own. Finishing needs essentially nothing: it polishes on the lathe to a gloss finer than any film finish could achieve, using nothing but the friction of the tool itself.

Durability, cost, and a market built on very small pieces

The wood is very durable and highly insect resistant. At roughly $200 per board foot, African blackwood is the most expensive species this site tracks, priced for a market that buys it in inches, not board feet — clarinets, oboes, bagpipes, chess pieces, inlay, and knife scales round out its uses, every one of them scaled to the small, precious billets this species actually yields.

A CITES exemption built specifically for this market

African blackwood falls under the genus-wide Dalbergia listing on Appendix II, annotation #15 — but for mpingo specifically, that annotation carries real practical weight, since finished clarinets, oboes, and their fitted parts are expressly exempt from permitting even though raw billet exports need them. That's precisely the exemption structure that lets the instrument trade keep functioning while species-wide conservation controls stay in place; the species also carries an IUCN Near Threatened rating, and certified Tanzanian stock is available for buyers who want a documented supply chain.

What people actually ask about African blackwood

Do modern epoxy formulations do any better against African blackwood's oil than traditional woodworking glues? Epoxy tolerates the residual oil somewhat better than PVA does, similar to how it's the preferred adhesive on other extremely oily exotics like cocobolo, but it still doesn't fully overcome the bonding problem on this species — mechanical interlock remains the standard answer rather than trusting any adhesive chemistry alone.

Is African blackwood actually harder to source than other exotic hardwoods, given how small the trees are? Yes, genuinely — the species grows slowly, often crookedly, in a limited dry-savanna range, so usable heartwood billets are inherently scarce regardless of demand, which is a real structural constraint on supply rather than just a pricing choice.

Does the finished-instrument CITES exemption cover a clarinet being resold secondhand, or only a new instrument crossing a border for the first time? The exemption applies to the finished article regardless of how many times it changes hands or crosses a border afterward — it's the raw-versus-finished distinction that matters to the regulation, not the transaction history of a particular clarinet once it exists as a completed instrument.

African blackwood's density, Janka hardness and shrinkage figures come from The Wood Database's 12%-moisture-content testing, since this species is absent from the USDA Forest Products Laboratory's Table 4-4; at 79 lb/ft3 it is the densest species in this dataset. CITES status is read from the appendices valid 5 March 2026.