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I have been obtaining rosewood and ebony blanks from India for many years, since the mid 1980s. In order to get a shipment from the producers, quite large quantities have to be ordered. As my needs are quite modest, over the years I have been getting other guitar makers, furniture makers and companies like Maton Guitars to join in on shipments which basically gets me a good supply for a reasonable price plus a lot of organising on my part.
As I have built up a stock in excess of my needs I have started to sell small quantities of my woods. Guitar makers buy the wood, as well as furniture makers using it for inlay, etc. This has brought a whole new set of problems in terms of handling, selling, colour matching and general perceptions of grading and quality.
Grading and colour matching is one example. All the wood I buy is sold as "A " grade. In Indian terms this means that the rosewood is quite straight grained, quarter sawn and has no loose knots or mineral deposits, and ebony is uniformly coloured. In the old days, guitar sets were taken fro the same log, backs and sides. Nowadays, however, when the wood arrives, the rosewood is most often from different logs, backs from the wider ones, sides from the narrower ones and often the colours and grain are quite different. You need to have quite a large stock to match backs and sides well, and this can be very time consuming. I have about ten colour categories for rosewood now and I select backs and sides from similar categories and then match them as best I can for colour and grain.
Ebony is another example. Most makers want it black, straight and quartersawn. About 10% of ebony is all of these things at once. The very black wood may not be fully on the quarter, often it has little dips or curls in the grain, oily black spots slight cupping, etc. Some makers prefer the slightly striped wood because they like the way it looks or simply because they can tell it is quartersawn. Some don't care about quartersawing at all, as long as it is black. Almost all fingerboards taper from 67 - 70mm down to 58-60mm. I have longer, wider boards for bass (4,5 and 6 string) as well.
Fortunately, most of the variations in colour and grain don't matter as much as it first seems. Most Indian rosewood settles after finishing to a uniform dark brown, and as long as the colours and grain are close, they always look and sound wonderful. In any event, I always supply the best match possible. Cupped or curved rosewood panels often straighten out after thickness sanding and always do when joined and braced. Similarly, if you mill ebony boards with a thickness sander and use a scraper, scraper plane or a very good block plane finishing with sanding blocks, most grain irregularities don't give trouble. If there is some grain tearout, a sanding block with 180 paper, and drops of superglue, rubbing dust into any pits, produces a perfect result. Minor cupping or lengthwise curves are usually removed during thickness sanding ( thicknesses ex India are usually quite generous) and any bend is usally irrelevant once fret slots are cut and the board is glued on. Lighter coloured (it can look greenish, brown or grey) or striped boards also end up very black with frets in and with some oiling and subsequent use.
With all the above considerd I try to avoid sending badly warped boards out. I often use the worst myself with a few work around techniques as I have mentioned. This is an ever decreasing resource. Rosewood and especially ebony will just not be available soon at the rate the big companies are using it. If you're just starting to collect wood, don't expect to use the best wood on your first guitars. Get used to working with what is available and you'll get better results in the long term. If you make only masterpieces and have been doing so a long time you'll have been through all of this already. If you want premium perfect wood, it becomes available from time to time but you must expect to pay for it.
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