These beautiful drums are made from the same trees as our Jack Costanzo Signature model of bongos. This wood is the high grade Koa used throughout the world for fine furniture, guitars, yacht interiors and architectural designing. Hawaiian Koa only grows here in Hawaii and is a renewable resource. It is a wonderful tone wood and makes a superior and original one of a kind set of professional bongos.
Our Hawaiian Koa Bongos can be ordered in Premium Koa Wood or Partial Curly Koa Wood.
About Koa Wood: Mature Koa trees are either scarce, or in hard-to-access mountainous locations, and the price of Koa is likely to only increase further in the future. With the tree endemic to Hawaii only, and with supplies dwindling, Koa is likely to be rather expensive. Also, boards of highly figured and/or curly Koa can command fantastic prices.
Koa is widely considered to be the most beautiful and useful of Hawaii's native hardwoods, and along with Monkey Pod and Mango, it is the most common Hawaiian species to be imported into the lower 48 United States. The word "koa" means "warrior" or brave or bold in Hawaiian.
Visually, Koa has been compared to Mahogany, while in terms of working and mechanical properties, it has been compared to Walnut. Because of its nearly equal tangential and radial shrinkage, (its T/R Ratio is only 1.1), Koa tends to be quite stable regarding environmental changes in humidity.
