Jatoba — Density, Movement, Workability & Cost

"Brazilian cherry" is a marketing name with almost nothing accurate about it — jatoba (Hymenaea courbaril) isn't related to cherry botanically, isn't from a genus anywhere near Prunus, and runs roughly three times as hard as the wood its trade name invokes. Flooring buyers expecting cherry's soft warmth are in for a genuine surprise at the Janka scale.

Hard enough to demand real tooling discipline

At 57 lb/ft³ and 2,690 lbf on the Janka scale, jatoba cuts cleanly with carbide and turns well, but interlocked grain tears under a hand plane, and the sheer density means a standard tablesaw blade wants to be thin-kerf and the feed rate wants to be patient rather than rushed. This is not a wood that forgives an underpowered saw or a dull blade.

Movement, and how much a flooring board actually weighs

Radial shrinkage of 4.5% against a tangential figure of 8.5% gives a 1.9 ratio, just under this site's movement-prone threshold. A 5"-wide flooring board moving from a 12% moisture content to a dry 6% loses about 0.085" (2.2mm) across its width; wider boards run through the wood movement calculator. A 3/4"-thick, 5"-wide, 7-foot flooring board weighs about 10.4 lb at jatoba's milled density — the wood weight calculator covers other flooring sizes.

Gluing a dense wood, and a colour shift worth warning clients about

Gluing is adequate provided the mating surfaces are genuinely flat — density makes any gap in the joint harder for adhesive to bridge than it would be on a softer wood. The wood takes a high polish easily, but the colour shift is dramatic: jatoba photo-darkens considerably in its first year, moving from a fresh salmon-pink toward a deep red-brown. A finish sample viewed on the day of installation is genuinely misleading about the final colour — worth telling a client up front rather than letting them discover it a year later.

Durability, cost, and where it competes

The heartwood is very durable, though it doesn't resist marine borers the way ipe does, so it's not the choice for anything genuinely submerged. It goes for roughly $12 per board foot, in this site's premium range — competitively priced against other hard exotic flooring species. Flooring, furniture, stair treads, tool handles, and turnery round out its markets.

The "Brazilian cherry" name, addressed directly

Buyers should know upfront that jatoba's trade name is purely marketing — there is no botanical relationship to cherry whatsoever, and the working properties couldn't be more different: cherry is soft, easy to hand-plane, and photo-darkens gently, while jatoba is hard enough to challenge power tools and shifts colour far more dramatically. Specifying "jatoba" or its botanical name, rather than the trade name, avoids the confusion entirely.

What people actually ask about jatoba

Can the photo-darkening on a jatoba floor be slowed with a UV-blocking finish? It slows the shift somewhat but won't stop it — enough UV still reaches the wood through any clear finish that the salmon-to-red-brown transition still happens, just more gradually, so setting client expectations matters regardless of which topcoat gets specified.

Are there other tropical hardwoods that get marketed under misleading "domestic-lookalike" trade names the way jatoba does with cherry? Yes, it's a common pattern — bubinga has been sold as "African rosewood" and padauk sometimes as "vermillion," both trade names chosen to evoke a familiar or prestigious wood rather than to accurately describe the species being sold.

Does jatoba's density mean it also needs a more powerful saw motor, not just a different blade? Underpowered saws struggle with it regardless of blade choice — a thin-kerf blade reduces the load, but a saw already marginal on power for dense hardwoods will still bog down or burn on a slow feed rate through thick jatoba stock.

Is jatoba a good choice for stair treads given how hard it is? Its hardness is a genuine advantage there — treads take repeated point impact and abrasion, and jatoba's Janka rating holds up to that wear noticeably better than a softer domestic hardwood would over the same years of use.

Table 4-4 of the USDA Forest Products Laboratory's Wood Handbook (FPL-GTR-190, 2010) lists jatoba as "Courbaril" and supplies its shrinkage figures; The Wood Database's 12%-moisture-content testing gave density and Janka hardness.