Who wants a guitar made with this back? Should we use wood with wormholes? Obviously it is ecologically more advisable to use it than to discard it or burn it. My teacher used 3 and 4-piece backs and wood with wormholes to make some fantastic guitars. No one seemed to mind. I don’t buy endangered rosewoods since the ban on D. nigra and since I heard about the situation in Madagascar. The other question is: Should the holes be filled and “hidden” or should we proudly show that we are creating beauty using flawed materials? Filling the holes is probably better for structural integrity and acoustics but it can be done in such a way that draws attention to the holes or not. There is a danger too that filling a hole will create a super-hard foreign object which can cause a crack when the wood shrinks around it. One of the old guys here used to take the wood and cut vertically where the holes or defects were and then glue it together again. I saw some of the results of this on his spruce tops and it was invisible. Maybe the question should be: Do you prefer something like this or alternative non-tropical woods?
It is worth noting that any holes you see in rosewood were likely made while the tree was living so if you buy wood or a guitar with wormholes you are probably not importing bugs or eggs into your shop.
