Fingerboard wood, possible alternatives

[Thomas Erickson]

Seeing as ebony is already becoming hard to find in the size and desirable quality for DB fingerboards, not to mention expensive and with questionable issues, maybe we can speculate on alternative woods and other materials.

I for one am interested in hearing about recent experiences with carbon/graphite boards in particular, and also I'm curious about some of the different stabilized/impregnated wood-based materials or whatever else might be an option.

It seems to me like the key issues when looking for a fingerboard are hardness, density, stiffness, ease of dressing, and color. These are all well understood qualities that should be simple enough to find in materials other than ebony, unlike the more mysterious qualities and the dimensional variables involved with other parts of the bass and their materials, no?