Millettia laurentii

Millettia laurentii is a legume tree from Africa and native to the Republic of Congo, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Cameroon, Gabon and Equatorial Guinea. The species is listed as "endangered" in the IUCN Red List, principally due to destruction of its habitat and over-exploitation for timber.Wenge, a dark colored wood, is the product of Millettia laurentii. Other names sometimes used for wenge include African rosewood (ambiguous), faux ebony, dikela, mibotu, bokonge, and awong. The wood's distinctive color is standardized as a "wenge" color in many systems.

Wood

Wenge (/ˈwɛŋɡeɪ/ WENG-gay) is a tropical timber, very dark in color with a distinctive figure and a strong partridge wood pattern. The wood is heavy and hard, suitable for flooring and staircases.

Several musical instrument makers employ wenge in their products. Alembic Guitars have used this wood on numerous occasions for custom instruments. Mosrite used it for bodies of their Brass Rail models. Ibanez and Cort use it for the five-piece necks of some of their electric basses. Warwick electric basses use FSC sourced wenge for fingerboards and necks as of 2013. Conklin Guitars and Basses makes use of wenge for bodies, fingerboards and necks. Crush drums use it on their limited reserve wenge drum kit. It is also used by Yamaha as the center ply of their Absolute Hybrid Maple drums.

Shades of brown

Brown is a composite color which can be produced by combining red, yellow and black, or by a combination of orange and black—as can be seen in the color box at right. The color brown shown at right has a hue code of 30, signifying that is a shade of orange. In the RGB color model used to create all the colors on computer and television screens, brown is made by combining red and green light at different intensities. Brown color names are often not very precise, and some shades, such as beige, can refer to a wide variety of colors, including shades of yellow or red. Browns are usually described as light or dark, reddish, yellowish, or gray-brown. There are no standardized names for shades of brown; the same shade may have different names on different color lists, and sometimes the one name (such as beige or puce) can refer to several very different colors. The X11 color list of web colors lists seventeen different shades of brown, but the complete list of browns is much longer.