Across thousands of years of shipbuilding, the ultimate test of craftsmanship was surviving the absolute brutality of the ocean. While saltwater, rot, and intense sun warped and destroyed ordinary timbers, ancient shipwrights discovered one undisputed king of the sea: Teak.
It became the legendary backbone of historic fleets because nature packed it with a dense grain, rich oils, and built-in silica that repel water and marine parasites from the inside out. The British Royal Navy used it. Portuguese traders used it. The greatest vessels of the age of sail were planked in it — not because it looked good, but because it survived when everything else failed.
That ancient maritime secret is exactly why we build with it today.
What the Wood Actually Does
Because of its unmatched dimensional stability, teak doesn't warp, twist, or split when moving from a baking-hot boat deck to the cold depths of the ocean. The natural oils in the grain act as a built-in preservative — it doesn't need to be sealed, coated, or babied. Left bare, it weathers to a silver-grey. Oiled, it holds deep amber for years.
For a speargun, this translates directly. A straight blank stays straight. The track stays true. The mechanism seats correctly every time because the wood around it hasn't moved. That means a perfectly straight, true track every single shot.
Why Burmese Teak Specifically
Not all teak is equal. Plantation teak, grown fast in monocultures, lacks the density and oil content of old-growth Burmese stock. The slow-grown grain is tighter, the natural oils more concentrated, the wood heavier and harder. It's the difference between a piece of furniture and a tool built to outlast its owner.
Our supply of Burmese teak is limited and will not be replenished. When it's gone, it's gone — and what gets built from it will be the last of its kind. That's not marketing. That's the reality of a timber that the world stopped harvesting decades ago.
I was taught from the start that this wood is in a different category. Every gun we build from it carries five thousand years of seafaring history.
Why We Also Build With Guam Mahogany
Teak isn't the only wood in the shop. A good number of our guns are shaped from salvaged Guam mahogany — old-growth lumber pulled from houses that are coming down, not cut fresh from any tree standing today. The color runs deeper than anything you'd find at a lumberyard, the grain tighter, the weight different in your hand. It pairs with teak the way it should: one wood built for the ocean, the other carrying the island's history in it.
That mahogany isn't lumberyard stock and it never will be again. What we have is what gets salvaged, one house at a time.
What About Ifit?
This is the question I get most after people learn we build with teak and mahogany: what about ifit? It's a fair one. Ifit is Guam's territorial tree, and for good reason — it's about as tough as wood gets. Intsia bijuga runs roughly 830 kg/m³ in density, termite-resistant, and actually hardens after it's cut. For thousands of years it built canoes, house posts, and tools across the Pacific. It earned its reputation the hard way.
But two things work against it in a speargun. First, supply: mature ifit is genuinely scarce on Guam today. It's slow-growing, it's been logged for generations, and what's left standing is mostly young second-growth — there isn't a real harvestable stock of old ifit the way there once was. Second, and just as important: the density that makes ifit nearly indestructible as a house post works against it as a speargun blank. A gun needs to flex slightly under load and absorb shock through the barrel without fracturing. Ifit's extreme hardness makes it brittle and unforgiving when you mill it down that thin — it doesn't want to bend, it wants to crack. The same density that survives a typhoon doesn't survive being shaped into a 3-foot blank designed to flex.
Ifit is the right wood for plenty of things. It's just not the right wood for this.
The Truth About "Guam Mahogany"
Here's the part most people don't know: the old-growth "mahogany" sitting in Guam's older homes isn't actually a Guam native tree, and it isn't true mahogany either. It's Philippine mahogany — a loose trade name for several Southeast Asian hardwood species (lauan among them) that were shipped out to places like Guam decades ago as a construction and plantation timber, the same way it was sent to Hawaii, Fiji, and beyond. It went into the building boom that put up homes across the island through the 1950s, '60s, '70s, and '80s, which is exactly where most of what we salvage comes from — beams, joists, and framing pulled out of houses from that era as they're torn down.
The reason that wood matters now is that the original supply is gone. The old-growth lauan stock that earned the "Philippine mahogany" name was logged out across the Philippines and Southeast Asia decades ago. What gets sold under that name today is a different, lesser wood entirely. So the only real old-growth Philippine mahogany left in our hands is literally what's still standing inside houses built two, three, four generations ago. Once those come down, that's it.