u/VinnieIDC

I’ve done a lot of research on maple and what constitutes soft and hard maple etc… what I found interesting is that the soft maple category includes a variety of different species such as red, silver, bigleaf and boxelder maple (north american market) but what’s even more interesting is that the janka hardness between these soft maple species actually vary quite significantly. For example red maple is much harder than silver maple and can be used for guitar necks, even hardwood flooring. Silver maple is way too soft. According to my research 80% of soft maple on the market is red maple and a large minority is west coast bigleaf. Silver and Boxelder are not specifically targeted, they are only harvested if they’re mixed with red maple stands so they’re constitute a very small percentage of soft maple.

The question is that if you buy soft maple, how do you make sure you’re getting red maple rather than silver or bigleaf? Because red maple is much harder can be used in far more applications and why don’t they create a specific category for red maple since it’s much more desirable for a wide variety of reasons compared to their softer counterparts?

The other question I have is I would love to use Boxelder maple with the red stain to build a solid body electric guitar body and I’m not sure how I could find this because boxelder is not highly sought after.