Reviews for Granadillo 4/4 Lumber

Narrow widths means that you will need to join many pieces, so you will need the best router bits for this very dense wood. Color varies from walnut to mahogany shades, which makes joining similarly colored pieces problematic. Weight makes this not ideal for large furniture pieces. I built a butler tray table with this. It is a small tablet but quite heavy. The heads of the supplied brass screws would snap off when attaching the 8 brass butler tray hinges. I found some #8, star-drive, brass-colored screws at Lowe's that worked much better, but if the pilot hole was too narrow, the wood would crack and if too large the screws would not fully tighten. I could not drill the perfect screw hole for them. Applying finish to the main table top has been an on-going nightmare, which could be due to my climate, technique and materials. I used Minwax Special Walnut stain, then Gemini semi-gloss pre-cat lacquer. That finish had many defects, especially over the many joined edges of the main table top. Re-spraying never helped and each time I would have to sand off the tough lacquer down to the bare wood and re-stain it. After half a dozen times, the table top is now less than 3/4", which requires shorter hinge screws! It seems that the narrow table pieces finished better with less defects (such as the table base, legs and the narrow leaves). The sprayed lacquer tended to not adhere that well. I finally discovered that sprayed Zinsser shellac as an undercoating to the lacquer worked great. But when I moved the table from my hot and humid shop to my air conditioned house, the lacquer eventually developed many deep fissures, looking like cracked glass. I read that spraying it with plain lacquer thinner would fix this but it did nothing (the thinner evaporated in seconds). I tried re-spraying it yesterday with thinned lacquer with retarder but at 90 degrees ambient temperature, that didn't turn out well. I will try poly on top of shellac next. I am hesitant to recommend this heavy, brittle wood. If you only plan to use tongue-and-groove joints, glue joints and dovetail joints, you might do okay with granadillo. Overall, I have had better success using sapele wood (from Woodworkers Source) for more substantial furniture pieces. Sapele looks like genuine mahogany with beautiful stripes and with just an initial coat of clear shellac, it looks gorgeous and it has enough "give" to put wood screws into it.