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In a Mk2, I think that it's usually mahogany, but may be walnut (straight grain rather than burr) or boxwood. If you are very careful with staining, it's possible to make it lighter or redder than the walnut.
I agree the larger areas are covered in maple burl wood. Just don't know what the narrow banding wood is. Here is picture of the veneer I'm looking for. I need to repair a few small areas.
The main areas that are burl (burr in the UK) is walnut. The narrow edge strips have a straight grain (they don't come from a knotty part of the tree). I'm not an expert on wood, but the edge in your photo looks to me like walnut. As I understand it, curly means the wood has a ripply, wave like quality where the ripple lines are generally roughly at right angles to the grain direction. There does seem to be some pattern in the edge piece that might qualify it as curly. I think many Mk2 have the edges in walnut (of a non burl pattern). In so e cars, the edge looks more red suggesting that it's mahogany. I've seen a few that are more pale yellow and might well be boxwood. However, it's difficult to be absolutely certain about the edges because they are narrow. For all the wood, it has half a century of sun bleaching, repairs, replacement and re-staining.
For the walnut, a cabinet maker told me that, in his opinion, burr walnut was at its peak after about twenty years when (or if) it reached a golden honey colour.
my guess is that the thicker and and lighter wood that serves to produce the rounded edge to the bookmatched walnut veneer pieces on the face and top of the dashboard is probably maple. it's a closed grain wood. i suspect the vertical striations on it in the picture are produced by a previous owner or restorer that sanded it, producing the vertical scratches, and then attempted to stain or fill it to match the color of the walnut veneer.
BTW, veneers are extremely thin and making a 90 deg edge produces something that is very, very fragile and so, unsuitable for an interior of an automobile. if a rounded edge (of less than, say, 1/2 inch radius) is needed a solid piece of wood must be used to join two pieces of veneer. i suspect to get the book-matched look they were looking for, Jaguar went for the veneer on the face and top of the dash and mostly solid pieces elsewhere. but i've always wondered why they chose a lighter wood to round the edges of the face and top of the dashboard. rather than using a solid but rounded piece of walnut.
the restorer that did the woodwork on my mk2 (before my purchase) did a pretty good job of darkening the lighter wood on my car in an attempt to match the color of the veneer, but it's still very noticeable. maybe the designers at jaguar thought the contrasting wood colors were attractive. after all, they look pretty good on all the wooden walnut and maple chessboards the boys made in 8th grade wood-working class, right?
JB is absolutely correct. What I've assumed to be other wood is mahogany that's severely bleached by sun and damp. I didn't imagine mahogany could suffer so much more loss of colour than the walnut next to it.
JB is absolutely correct. What I've assumed to be other wood is mahogany that's severely bleached by sun and damp. I didn't imagine mahogany could suffer so much more loss of colour than the walnut next to it.
The grain structure is classic mahogany, it's very distinct. Sort of like oak, someone experienced in wood identification only needs a quick glance, to know what species it is.
Maple is a very different grain structure, those marks are not caused by sanding. It's also on every car. They carried on doing it this way for a very long time, my 1990 Daimler limousine has the same style walnut with mahogany edging on the dash fascia piece, similar to a Mark 2, and like the Mark X the limousine is based on.
Daimler dash:
Last edited by Jagboi64; Jan 16, 2025 at 06:14 PM.
What about staining? I've noticed some pieces were stained like the blocks holding the interior lights above the B Pillar as well as the ones over the windshield under the visors. Was all the wood stained including the walnut burl? I just seems that the mahogany pieces that are solid wood are stained and not the veneer.
Most of the woodwork I have restored in MK1, MK2, XJ6s, MK5, has required some degree of staining to get it back to the original finish. That includes veneers.
This really shows up on XJ6cars where areas of wood which were shielded by fittings such as the centre main air vents and the finishing pieces at the ends of the dash panel were much darker. This really stands out as to how far the original finish has been bleached by exposure to the harsh elements of the Australian climate.
I have "played" with a number of different stains and I find the most useful on MK1/2 cars is teak. Walnut stain is just far too dark even when diluted severely.
