Two unrelated thoughts a propos of the above:

- there was a chap in Newcastle who worked for Rediffusion (an early cable TV company in the 1980s.) He made mandolas out of the wooden cases of the old TV sets - for those of us who can remember when they weren't made of plastic!! They played but not so easily.

- I have been on a journey to learn how to identify different woods, starting with a conservation course on the same. Believe me when it comes to tropical hardwoods it's a very long journey and many species can only be postively identified using a microscope. However there are one or two good books around and as mentioned above some good Internet sources. And I guess the fact that there are several woods in the "Mahogany" family and in the "Rosewood family" means that instruments described as "Mahogany" could be from a number of different trees. On old intruments it's perhaps a bit easier to tell as wood was being imported from different sources at different times. So as someone said above, Cuban mahogany was almost logged out by the end of the 18th Century so anything later than this would be almost certainly not Cuban mahogany.

Fasctinating subject though!
Helen