Enjoy the benefits of a premium membership!
Upgrade Account
-
TalkBass has been independent since 1998. Add your voice.
Create a free account to reply to discussions, view embedded media, and browse with fewer display ads.
Join free Log in
Want zero display ads or expanded classifieds tools? Compare plans.
Bamboo or eucalyptus basses or fingerboards
- Thread starter moon-bass
- Start date
There's also the possibility that a range of quality in bamboo floors is out there, and I picked a soft one inadvertently. It was just me, a couple weekends, and the Floor & Decor store. I had no coaching.
- Jan 5, 2017
- 253
- 430
- Disclosures
- No one in their right mind would pay me to endorse them....
Fretboard and flooring have overlap to my thinking (not me, by the way...I'm not this talented):
It depends on the material. Like another poster said, bamboo's sold in basically untreated and treated forms, and some treated forms are considerably harder. Whatever is used as binder (I assume epoxy) probably helps with that.
I have some bamboo furniture that I can't dent with a hammer. It would probably chip first. But I also have a bamboo desktop that dented just by leaning a chair against it.
Also there have likely been advances in the treatment/preparation of the material in the past 10 years.
A buddy of mine made an electric 'cello with a solid body made from pressure-treated lumber. I guess for an instrument that rests on the ground with an endpin the weight doesn't really matter.
These are my impressions from building the neck for my EUB project, linked elsewhere in this thread. The bamboo flooring I used is not the same as the one you linked, so your mileage may vary.
- It’s hard, but the bending strength was comparable to a softwood. I ended up reinforcing the bamboo with a maple core.
- Splintery, but otherwise not hard to work.
- No idea what glue they used to laminate the bamboo strips together and whether it might eventually creep under load.
- Lots of voids between the laminations.
- The individual pieces of bamboo are attractive, but angled surfaces that cut across laminations look “plywood-ish” and not great.
There are a lot of species of both bamboo and "eucalyptus", and none of them top around 2500 on the Janka scale, so I'm guessing the 5000 hardness of the engineered stuff is accounting for the hardness of the impregnating resins. If it's hard, then I'd probably give it a shot in a build if I had some, but from a builder perspective, there are many other sustainable woods available that aren't so heavy in the manufacturing process, and which look more attractive naturally. Someone source some and build a bass so we can comment. 
Eucalyptus should be fine to use for a fingerboard, so long as you choose the right variety.
Take a look at SHEOAK, a West Aussie native. The right piece can be beautiful. I've seen whole acoustic guitars made with Sheoak, they're stunning!
The oils in Eucalyptus does mean weight tho, so a bass body or neck might be a bit heavy.
And yeah, planting a eucalyptus in your garden isn't great. The oils over time will turn your soil hydrophobic, kills your lawn no matter what you do.
Take a look at SHEOAK, a West Aussie native. The right piece can be beautiful. I've seen whole acoustic guitars made with Sheoak, they're stunning!
The oils in Eucalyptus does mean weight tho, so a bass body or neck might be a bit heavy.
And yeah, planting a eucalyptus in your garden isn't great. The oils over time will turn your soil hydrophobic, kills your lawn no matter what you do.
Boris voice; clever plot to get foolish Americans to plant these, Then many years later, we conquer whole country with just match. /Boris voice.
Floors, furniture, fretboards and I've even seen necks made with it. There are lots of varieties.
It's the bears you have to worry about dropping out of them.
My home is in the bush and all I can see are eucalypts and melaleucas. Get used to it and prepare, and have a great local fire service.
Yeah, unfortunately, there was no fire service in the world that could have brought the Oakland firestorm under control before it totally decimated everything. Closely packed homes on hillsides covered in eucalyptus trees and twisty two lane roads, was a disaster waiting to happen.
Watching those trees explode is a stunning site.
There might be stuff being made now, and perhaps some varieties are different, but all the ones near San Francisco are useless and an invasive species.
They smell nice and look good though.
I'm only sort of laughing because I've been in several fires as a volunteer FF and it's the most
I believe it.
Indoors is scary because you’re in a burning building. Outdoors can be scary because you could literally have a wall of flame the size of a building sweep over you.
We get stupid winds where I live now, but thankfully not a lot of trees or overgrown vegetation to fuel a big fire…plus, it doesn’t really seem to get too dry.
The compressed stuff is compressed to 3x the density of normal bamboo - it has 3x the fibers, so the stiffness is gonna be higher than regular bamboo - mostly from the fiber density. Given that much compression, I can't imagine there's much space for glue.
Eucalyptus was one of the greatest cons in US history.
Basically, in the early 20th century, someone convinced everyone in the SF Bay Area that it’d be a great tree to import and plant because of how fast it grows and all the uses of the wood.
What ended up happening is that the trees did grow fast…but the wood was useless for anything.
The trees spread everywhere in the area, which…I mean, they smell nice and all that, but…
They drop a ton of bark at the base, and the trees have a ton of oil on them. Basically, the perfect tree if you want to take a fire prone area and make it much worse.
I remember during the Oakland firestorm back in 1991 watching the trees explode on TV, sending flaming oil in all directions.
Always liked the look and smell of them, but after that I regretted convincing my dad to plant one on the hill in our backyard.
What you're referring to in the generic sense as *Eucalyptus* is actually a single species - E globulus.
It is endemic to the forests of Victoria and Tasmania, one of the fastest growing and most flammable of all the eucalypts, and in California's case, a prime example of why a fast growing tree should never be transplanted from its native habitat into a foreign environment where it can thrive.
Last edited:
Sooo,....should we be worried about the bass exploding in a fire?
A few small points of clarification:
1) Sheoak is an Allocasuarina.
2) Eucalyptus oil is primarily found in the leaves, buds, soft twigs and (depending on species) sometimes bark of the tree, not the wood, so it has no bearing on the weight.
3) The oil does not turn the soil hydrophobic. The tree does - by sucking all the moisture out of the soil
It would make for a great stage effect.
