What are you calling mahogany? Commercial "mahogany" currently available in the US can be any of 1500 to 2000 species called collectively "Luan" and comes mostly from SE Asia and the Phillipines.
True Mahogany grows in Central and South America and in Africa. Again, nearly 1000 species of tropical and sub tropical hard wood trees with similar appearing wood. True mahoganies are "Precious" woods and are often sold by the pound. I think the Mountain Mahogany which grows in the Southwest American high desert, may be a true mahogany, but the trees too scarce and/or too small to be commercially useful.
I have used many tens of thousands of board feet of apitong and found it useful for deck grating on commercial fish and crab boats and for firewood. It smells perfumey or incence like while burning. I used to bring home a lot of offcuts to burn in my fireplace, causing the neighborhood to smell like a Chinese Cat House.
Apitong has a nasty, sticky pitch evenly distributed through the wood, is splintery and unstable in sunlight and the splinters are excruciatingly painful. I immediately dug out all the splinters (dozens) that I got even if all I had to use for a scalpel was a rusted off ship spike, so I don't know about toxicity. It swells and shrinks alarmingly according to ambient air humidity and precipitation. We used to say it came and went with the tide. Some, including me are sensitive to it. I would probably gnaw off a limb if need be to stop the pain of a severe splinter. Contact with sawdust and planer shavings made me itch horribly and sanding dust caused uncrollable fits of sneezing. Worse, even, than that horror of woods, Iroko. The pitch in Apitong exudes constantly and forces it's way through paint, varnish and even urethane and epoxy coatings. All in all those are it's good points.
My suggestion is to leave poisonous tropical woods in the tropics where they belong, with the venomous snakes, frogs, aboriginals, and spiders.
Three Hawks
Topic: Wood (Mahogany) (Read 831 times)