Members knockwood Posted July 10, 2010 Members Share Posted July 10, 2010 Approximately how old must a spruce tree be in order to yield pieces large enough to make 2-piece guitar tops? Cedar - same question. Anyone know? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members kwakatak Posted July 10, 2010 Members Share Posted July 10, 2010 Have you ever counted the grains on your guitars? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members fastblueheeler Posted July 10, 2010 Members Share Posted July 10, 2010 250 years to make a high end sitka spruce guitar top says Bob Taylor. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members gitnoob Posted July 10, 2010 Members Share Posted July 10, 2010 This study says most species in the PacNW, including Sitka Spruce, grow (in terms of diameter) at about 0.3cm per year. So for a 16" diameter tree, that would mean 135 years. I figure 16" is the minimum diameter you'd need for a quarter-sawn log. http://www.fish.washington.edu/people/naiman/queets/balian.html Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members knockwood Posted July 10, 2010 Author Members Share Posted July 10, 2010 Thanks, fellers!Kwak, I try, but keep losing count and having to start over. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members kwakatak Posted July 10, 2010 Members Share Posted July 10, 2010 Thanks, fellers! Kwak, I try, but keep losing count and having to start over. Have you tried ginko biloba? It's supposed to help with that. I keep meaning to pick some up too. I'm sorry, what were we talking about again? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members knockwood Posted July 10, 2010 Author Members Share Posted July 10, 2010 Have you tried ginko biloba? What's it called again? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members riffmeister Posted July 10, 2010 Members Share Posted July 10, 2010 What's it called again? Rocky Balboa. You snort it and then run up a lot of stairs in your sweat pants. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members knockwood Posted July 10, 2010 Author Members Share Posted July 10, 2010 Rocky Balboa. You snort it and then run up a lot of stairs in your sweat pants. A friend of mine tried that once. He tripped and landed wrong against a stair. You can probably guess what happened... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Gary Palmer Posted July 10, 2010 Members Share Posted July 10, 2010 250 years to make a high end sitka spruce guitar top says Bob Taylor. That's pretty much the average once you figure in the variable number of growth rings (15 - 25) per inch and allowance for waste during book matching and trimming. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Queequeg Posted July 10, 2010 Members Share Posted July 10, 2010 Knock. Waste no time. Plant today if you wish to harvest before your chain saw goes out of warranty.Try Apis Mellifica. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members kujozilla Posted July 10, 2010 Members Share Posted July 10, 2010 A friend of mine tried that once. He tripped and landed wrong against a stair. You can probably guess what happened... I knew that guy... blind... you know until he tried that whole stair thing again. He can see now, but you know there is the whole paraplegic thing... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members guitarcapo Posted July 10, 2010 Members Share Posted July 10, 2010 Most of the spruce logs that are used to make guitar tops are way huge compared to the size of a guitar...It's not like they are felling trees that are 20" in diameter, obtaining 10" billets from that and making 8" bookmatched tops.... Wiki lists the trunk diameter of sitka trees to be as high a 5-7 METERS....Given that a meter is 39" that's a lot of wood...it's not like rosewood and rare hardwoods where you are skirting the sapwood to get usable tonewood. Which actually lends to the question: Why do we bookmatch tops at all? If 20" wide spruce billets are easily available, why not avoid all this hassle of joining tops? I think it's partially due to tradition from Martin and other manufacturers who did it when dealing with red spruce...that's smaller...and also for reasons of storage/processing and maybe the stability that a bookmatched top might have by evening out any warps or imperfections in tops. Also, it's probably a lot more difficult to find a sitka log that has evenly spaced and tight grain over an entire 16 inches with no defects. At 15 lines per inch and 8 inches that's 120 years of growth with exactly the same rainfall, no fires or other problems to vary the grain in funny ways or cause defects...A lot of wood would have to be rejected for cosmetic reasons. When you bookmatch a top, even if the grain width varies...you can have it widen out in the periphery and it still looks symmetrical and nice. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members gitnoob Posted July 10, 2010 Members Share Posted July 10, 2010 That's pretty much the average once you figure in the variable number of growth rings (15 - 25) per inch and allowance for waste during book matching and trimming.I just measured the number of rings per inch on one of my wider-grain spruce tops. It was about 14 per inch.The paper that indicated growth of .3cm/year would imply about 8 rings per inch.So the growth of riparian trees appears to be almost twice as fast as non-riparian trees.I revise my 135 year estimate to 270 years. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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