Wood porn

[Freeman Keller]

I am an absolute slut for pretty wood...

 

Bearclaw Sitka spruce

 

Adirondack “red” spruce

 

Honduras mahogany

 

Koa

 

Figured koa

 

Spruce

 

Flamed maple

 

Lutz spruce

 

Figured mahogany

 

Flamed maple

 

Flamed Spanish cedar

 

[guitarcapo]

When it comes to wood porn I'm a real deviant.

 

 

There's this wood that they dig up out of tar/peat bogs in New Zealand called "ancient kauri wood". The wood comes from trees that lived for a thousand years or more....then fell into these oxygen-free bogs for another 50,000 years or so. They didn't rot because they were hermetically sealed in the tar. They also didn't "petrify"

 

 

I was able to score a bookmatched top of this wood to make a guitar out of. I used it for the top. I used burl mesquite for the back and regular quartersawn mesquite for the sides. A sort of 000 guitar. The set was too small to make a dred or jumbo.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some of the stuff shimmers like spun gold:

 

 

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The stuff is technically a soft wood but it has been compressed and aged over time to be a lot denser than any spruce. It's really more like a soft hardwood like mahogany or koa in density....but it's hard and crystaline. It doesn't work like wood at all. When you rout it you don't get shavings....more like crumbs. It's got very little damping with a metallic or glass feel when it's tapped. It has a sound that reminds me of a carbon fiber top. Very stable to humidity changes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Grant Harding]

Yeah - swamp kauri is amazing!! Check out Laurie's guitars: http://www.lwilliamsguitars.com/

 

My house is made of around 50% kauri. It turns 100 in 7 years. I have a whole bunch of pieces from when we last renovated. Ukulele tops is on my long range plans.

[Grant Harding]

BTW - there are quite a few sources for swamp kauri that would never be found online, so if you're seriously looking for some fire me a PM and I'll try to hook you up with a supplier.

[thankyou]

I've always liked my cedar topped Yamaha classic, both visually and sonically. I have a broken necked Ovation from the seventies with a beautiful straight grained top, probably some kind of spruce. It also has a nice ebony fretboard.

 

A luthier I know said it was a fairly common break on the old Ovations, as the head was tilted pretty far back. That, combined with a guitar that doesn't take to being stood against a wall, and lots of necks got broken.

[katopp]

I have to admit, I am a sucker for Koa - figured and plain -, Maple as in flamed or bird's eyed and Ovangkol, especially the figured stuff.

Spruce - even though the acoustic properties are best - does not look interesting. Binh' has built me a spruce-topped dread with spruce so uniform and finely grained that you literally need a magnifier/thread counter to actually make out the grain - it sounds great, but it is visually boring.

[kwakatak]

I seem to be drawn to red lately. Madagascar rosewood has lived up to its hype with me and the color pairs very well with flamed maple binding and Adirondack spruce. There's a guitar made with that combination on tge Martin custom shop web page that makes me drool. Getting closer to my budget though, pauduk has a really nice color that looks like it would go well with Ebony and a light woods like Engelmann or lutz.

[guitarcapo]

Back in the late 1980's/early 1990's when Brazilian rosewood was set to go on the CITES treaty, I found a supplier who was selling back/side sets relatively cheap. Basically he would sell me 50 sets for about $4,000 or around $80 a set. I did this deal about 3 times with him and had about 150 sets. I then sold about half of these sets on Ebay for around $200 to $300 a set (keeping the best ones for myself) so I basically now have about 70 Brazilian AAA quality rosewood guitar sets for free.

 

 

I mainly did this so that I would have a lifetime supply for my personal use.

 

 

The best Brazilian is boring looking. It's quartersawn with straight grain. No figure. No pin knots, wormholes, sapwood, red to black color, and bookmatched well.

 

 

Fortunately there was a huge market for the slab cut stuff with sapwood. People were buying it up liking the "figure"

 

 

.....but for my money the BEST Brazilian looks like this:

 

 

 

 

Good luck finding it.

 

Everything today for sale is either slab-cut, full of holes/knots, stump wood, plantation wood....or priced outrageously. I'm glad I got this stuff when I could.

 

 

BTW I've planted a few Brazilian rosewood and African blackwood trees here in SW Florida where I live. If they take off I'm thinking that I've discovered a cool environmental coup. They're about a year old and about 3 feet tall. We'll see if they survive the winter.

[Idunno]

Good luck with the trees. I think it's a great experiment. I also think the fact that it has not been taken up by our own forestry department asks some important questions regarding its dedication to such responsibility. Probably mired in its own paperwork and can't fight its way out to actually effect the proper replanting and farming measures needed. If I had to make a very wild guess, the dirt huggers are ready to pitch a bitch about non-indigenous species and all that crap.

 

Edit: I like your taste in grain. The so-called high figuring is like a circus Barnum & Baily look to me. I prefer the tight, straight grain appearance.