Hi everyone,
it's my turn to ask support to identify this new material I acquired as a late birthday self gift.
The stones are 8 mm snow quality, they came with their goke, but I don't know which wood they are made of.

As you can see, the wood is quite used and stained and I will try to restore it to its original beauty, as for the stones, that have some dirt and yellow trace (possibly nicotine).
Thank you in advance for your support,
Galation

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When you play Weiqi you are joining millions of people across four thousand years of time.
Jonathan Hop - So You Want to Play Go?

About the stones, I fell in love with the light stripes.
The seller claimed that these are snow suwabute.
It is not really something that bothers me: I bought these to enjoy and because I love japanese made material.
Still I am curious: anyone can say if it is possibly a suwabute set?

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When you play Weiqi you are joining millions of people across four thousand years of time.
Jonathan Hop - So You Want to Play Go?

Last but not least, I put here some comparison between the new set and my KurokiGoishi Moon grade Mexican shell set.
Hope it helps.

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When you play Weiqi you are joining millions of people across four thousand years of time.
Jonathan Hop - So You Want to Play Go?

My guess is the bowls are keyaki. There are a lot of vintage bowls sold in online Japanese auctions that look like yours, which are described as keyaki.

I cannot help, sorry, but wished to say congratulations on the additions to your collection. Wish you many happy games.

If Solomon from baduk.club doesn't chime in soon, there is a dealer in the Salt Lake City area who could likely help you identify the clam species. "Erythen" or some such. You should be able to find him on ebay (search for go stones) or the trading post folder here.

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David Bogie, Boise ID
I play go, I ride a recumbent, of course I use Macintosh.

Hi, Thank you very much!

About Solomon and Erythen, starting this tread, I secretely wished for their advice about this set, because it is easy to see that they have a deep competence in the field of japanese Go sets.

I plan to clean the stones with hydrogen peroxyde according to Solomon's recipe (that also Erythen suggested in the past) and all I know about suwabute stones is from Erythen's interventions on this same forum.

You can successfully play Go with just some paper and many round buttons, but I deeply enjoy the feeling of softwood and a nice set of stones.
It both motivates me and often helped to involve people passing by into learning the basis of this wonderful neverending game.

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When you play Weiqi you are joining millions of people across four thousand years of time.
Jonathan Hop - So You Want to Play Go?

Oh, hi!

The bowls are probably Keyaki, but I think they could be Shiochi (ash). I have cleanup instructions here:
https://store.baduk.club/pages/care

The density of the lines in the clamshell points to Suwabute stones, yes.

The only thing that gives me pause is the comparison photos. Japanese clamshell is generally denser than Mexican clamshell, which is why the lines are packed together more tightly. The result is that under a backlight Suwabute stones should be a darker color (towards orange) than Mexican stones (pale yellow). This may just have been an inconsistent set of photos, of course - having a half-dozen of each set side-by-side on a lightbox might yield a better comparison.

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Solomon (he/him/his)
Colorado USA
My Vintage Shop for Go Equipment