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Peltogyne, commonly known as purpleheart, violet wood, amaranth and other local names (often referencing the colour of the wood) is a genus of 23 species of in the family Fabaceae; native to tropical rainforests of Central America and South America; from Guerrero, through Central America, and as far as south-eastern Brazil.
They are medium-sized to large growing to tall, with trunk diameters of up to . The leaf are alternate, divided into a symmetrical pair of large leaflets long and broad. The are small, with five white petals, produced in . The fruit is a legume containing a single seed. The timber is desirable, but difficult to work.
The dry timber is very hard, stiff, and dense with a specific gravity of 0.86 (). Purpleheart is correspondingly difficult to work with. It is very durable and water-resistant.
Due to its stiffness, the wood is used as a Tonewood in instruments, especially guitar fretboards and reinforcing strips in the neck of guitars and basses. Some Neck-Through-Body guitars are reinforced with Purpleheart to aid structural and tuning stability as well as for its resonant tonal properties.
Purpleheart presents a number of challenges in the woodshop. Its hard-to-detect interlocking grain makes hand-planing, chiseling and working with carving tools a challenge. However, woodturners can note that with sharp tools, it turns clean, and sands well.
Exposure to the dust generated by cutting and sanding purpleheart can cause skin, eye, and respiratory irritation and nausea, possibly because of the presence of Dalbergiones (neoflavonoid) compounds in the wood. This also makes purpleheart wood unsuitable to most people for use in jewelry. Peltogyne in BoDD – Botanical Dermatology Database Purpleheart is also a fairly expensive wood, which is why it is usually used in smaller-scale projects.
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