CITES Relief for Musical Instruments - Padauk Ban
david weaver
On august 28, CITES removed the restrictions for appendix II rosewoods if those rosewoods appear in finished musical instruments or musical instrument parts.
North Indian Rosewood was removed in its entirety.
All other items under appendix II under 500g in wood weight are also now allowed to be shipped internationally without paperwork (though it will be a risk to do this until the doofus staff at shipping services has caught up - this decision is only two days old).
What this doesn't relieve, unfortunately, is vintage tools with brazilian rosewood parts, nor guitars with brazilian rosewood fingerboards but with significant age.
Also, as a surprise, African Padauk has been added to appendix II of Cites and has no musical instrument exemption. I'm not sure if many people use Padauk, but I'm sure that the chinese furniture industry has probably found favor in it when rosewood became harder to get. So, it's off the menu now.
Bubinga and Palisander also get the musical instrument and small weight exemption. You or I could ship lee valley plane handles now, but my understanding is that they will still be required to do paperwork to get the stock to use bubinga.
This is not a big deal to most on here, I'm sure, but I nearly lost $2,000 last year on a guitar that did not run afoul of cites because I owned it already and shipped it to myself from Japan to here. The proxy shipper that I used would not ship the guitar to the united states, and informed me that they would destroy it if I didn't find a domestic recipient once they'd packed it. Stu Tierney bailed me out, shipped the guitar here and of course, our customs, didn't care about it at all (they did inspect it, but it came through without delay or charge). This will also allow makers like Fender and Gibson to put rosewood parts on guitars (they have gone to pau ferro and granadillo or compressed artificial wood products for some models), and the rule that exempted me did not exempt any commercial transaction between two parties. It only applied to shipping items that you owned as a private individual.
) but all too soon it oxidizes to a rather boring Van Dyke brown. Further, I've never seen a specimen saved by spectacular figure or chatoyance.