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Worked my first set of Wenge sides yesterday. Sands very nice in the thickness sander. Bent in the bender at high temp at a thickness of .080". A fair bit of springback, no cracks, or grain lifting, a bit of cross grain waves. Finish bending by hand at a very high heat. Wood quite slow to relax, IRW it is not. Wonder what others are seeing with Wenge ?
Tom

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A person who has never made a mistake has never made anything!!!

Splinters...
I used it a lot for laminated braces. Worked well.

Next best thing to BRW. haha Seriously, a great tone wood. If you like tapping wood you won't find too many woods that have the gong like sound of Wenge. When you think you are done pore filling, do 2 more sessions.

The plank i resawed was prone to cracking, with internal checks, that cracked readily. Basically had to flex it to break it in the weak spots, repair the cracks, then build with it. Tonally not a noticable improvement from coco, EIR, or other rosewoods, to justify all the extra work with crack repairs, risk of future cracks, and 3x the pore filling time and effort. Nice in the end, but benefit to cost (in effort hours and risk) is not there for me.

I cut some into FB's, head plates and bindings. Pretty sure I got three splinters just reading the replies!

Alex

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"Indecision is the key to flexibility" .... Bumper sticker

My last build was a wenge 0M. Still having flashbacks about pore filling.

Oh, and the splinters. And the not nice odour.

Other than that it's great tonewood. Customer very happy with it.

No splinters yet, and have used Padauk quite a bit so I get the pore filling thing. The thing that amazed me was the amount of heat required to bend and how well the wood stood up to the heat. Sonically hope it works as well as touted,it sure taps like it should.
Tom
P.S. Lost my sense of smell so any nastiness there is not a problem.

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A person who has never made a mistake has never made anything!!!