Posted on June 1, 2020May 20, 2025 by Dale Phillips Indian Import and Export Indian Import and Export by Gulab Gidwani from his 1986 GAL Convention lecture Originally published in American Lutherie #11, 1987 and Big Red Book of American Lutherie Volume One, 2000 The reason I’m up here talking about importing and exporting woods is that I’m one of the few people who have had the fortune, or you could say misfortune, of being on both sides. I have been an exporter in India, I have been an importer over here. So I can give you some idea of the problems involved. This whole thing started when I was living in the USA and I went to India on a vacation from my regular job. My younger brother sent me a cable telling me that the Gibson Company over here had problems getting a reliable supply of ebony. I said to myself, “That’s no big deal. I’ll go to the market and tell them please send some wood to the Gibson Company. Ebony is just like any other wood.” Become A Member to Continue Reading This Article This article is part of our premium web content offered to Guild members. To view this and other web articles, join the Guild of American Luthiers. Members also receive 4 annual issues of American Lutherie and get discounts on products. For details, visit the membership page. If you are already a member, login for access or contact us to setup your account.
Posted on November 14, 2019May 22, 2025 by Dale Phillips North American Softwoods North American Softwoods by Ted Davis, Bruce Harvie, Steve McMinn, Byron Will, and Dave Wilson, moderated by Joseph Johnson from their 1990 GAL Convention panel discussion Previously published in American Lutherie #31, 1992 and The Big Red Book of American Lutherie, Volume Three, 2004 Why don’t each of you tell us who you are, where you’re from, and a little bit of what you’ve done. Ted: My name is Ted Davis and I live in Tennessee near the Smokey Mountains. The Smokeys have red spruce in them and when I found out this wood was useful, I started pursuing it. In the last two years, after a ten-year search, I have managed to find and cut a small amount of red spruce. It was the wood that was used by Martin and Gibson around the turn of the century, up into the 1940s. Bruce: My name is Bruce Harvie and I have a company called Orcas Island Tonewoods in the San Juan Islands of Washington. I have spread myself very thin cutting all the Northwest species — western red cedar, Port Orford cedar, Sitka spruce, Engelmann spruce — and I’ve just returned from cutting some red spruce. Byron: I’m Byron Will and my interest is more from an instrument maker’s point of view. I started building harpsichords in 1975 when I moved to the Pacific Northwest from Wisconsin. I wasn’t very satisfied with the woods I had been using. After seeing these gorgeous Northwest trees I started wondering about their physical and acoustical properties and how useful they’d be in my work. I decided to try some of the local softwoods and learned quite a bit through the years. Become A Member to Continue Reading This Article This article is part of our premium web content offered to Guild members. To view this and other web articles, join the Guild of American Luthiers. Members also receive 4 annual issues of American Lutherie and get discounts on products. For details, visit the membership page. If you are already a member, login for access or contact us to setup your account.
Posted on November 13, 2019May 20, 2025 by Dale Phillips H.L. Wild H.L. Wild by Paul Wyszkowski Originally published in American Lutherie #7, 1986 and The Big Red Book of American Lutherie, Volume 1, 2000 See also, “Out of the Basement” by Richard Bingham “A Scene from Dickens” by Steve Curtin H.L. Wild: A curiosity shop, a preserved bit of the past still alive in Manhattan. Not a museum display, not a movie set, but a place where the antiques on the shelves are for sale not as such, but as current merchandise. A real time trip. See it while it is still here. Buy some hundred-year-old veneer. Or pull together a guitar or a mandolin set from the stock of vintage woods and parts. Or you may find that this is the only place in the whole world which still has a supply of a particular fret-saw blade. Who knows what you may find here? Come on down! Betty Wild, who has recently celebrated her sixty-second birthday, is the third generation of the Wild dynasty. Her grandfather, William Wild, founded H.L. Wild (just “H.L. Wild,” no “Company”) at its present address in Manhattan in 1876. (Where the initials “H.L.” came from is not clear, but apparently at least part of the reason for choosing them was aesthetic: “H.L. Wild” fits the mouth nicely.) The original business manufactured and sold intricate wooden fretwork construction sets for models of buildings, churches, towers, and various decorative objects. Jigsaw puzzles were another major product. A copy of the 1876 catalog depicting the many different designs then available leans against the glass of a display case behind the counter. Betty shows it with obvious pride. Become A Member to Continue Reading This Article This article is part of our premium web content offered to Guild members. To view this and other web articles, join the Guild of American Luthiers. Members also receive 4 annual issues of American Lutherie and get discounts on products. For details, visit the membership page. If you are already a member, login for access or contact us to setup your account.
Posted on July 1, 2019May 27, 2025 by Dale Phillips Woodchopper’s Ball Woodchopper’s Ball by Bruce Harvie from his 2004 GAL Convention Lecture previously published in American Lutherie #90, 2007 How many people are here because they are thinking about processing their own wood? I highly encourage it. It’s very satisfying to build instruments from wood that you’ve cut. You can get a spruce on a firewood permit. It’s a great feeling to be out in the forest. When the Guild was first starting out over thirty years ago, the word “tonewood” was not in common usage. Back then there were maybe only three or four suppliers. Now you can Google “tonewoods” and get a hundred suppliers. There’s still a lot to be explored in the world of tonewoods. Englemann spruce didn’t really come on the market until 1978, and Red spruce not until ’89 or so. I can think of four or five species that are virtually untapped in the world of tonewoods: Noble fir, California red fir, and true white fir are all great woods. In Europe, you have places like the Ukraine opening up right now. They have beautiful spruce. I’ve seen quite a bit of it. We have wood here at this convention from the Balkans. That’s nice to see. It’s amazing how much wood is here. It’s just great to see all the guitar tops and woods for sale. And don’t miss the auction. If you look at the woods that were used in guitars in the first part of the 20th century, you see some scuzzy looking wood. On some of the best-sounding prewar Martins, the tops are mismatched and the grain is running every which way. You see tons of runout because that wood was supplied in the form of lumber, not split billets. I see some wonderful-sounding old guitars that were built with wood that people would throw away nowadays. But a typical guitar store today has walls full of Breedloves or Martins with tops that were milled correctly, probably by Pacific Rim Tonewoods up in Concrete, Washington. They do an incredible job of milling guitar wood. Become A Member to Continue Reading This Article This article is part of our premium web content offered to Guild members. To view this and other web articles, join the Guild of American Luthiers. Members also receive 4 annual issues of American Lutherie and get discounts on products. For details, visit the membership page. If you are already a member, login for access or contact us to setup your account.
Posted on January 6, 2010May 20, 2025 by Dale Phillips Review: The Luthier’s Mercantile Catalog for Stringed Instrument Makers Review: The Luthier’s Mercantile Catalog for Stringed Instrument Makers Reviewed by Frederick Battershell Originally published in American Lutherie #4, 1985 and Big Red Book of American Lutherie Volume One, 2000 The Luthier’s Mercantile Catalog for Stringed Instrument Makers The Luthier’s Mercantile P.O. Box 774, 412 Moore Lane Healdsburg, CA 95448 $19.50 + $3.50 (1999) If confession is good for one’s soul, then I must come forward and confess: I am an unabashed bibliophile! Yup! My library/bedroom is piled from floor to ceiling with books, catalogs, brochures, broadsides... anything at all connected (even remotely) with instrument making, music theory, cooking, philosophy, woodworking, boat building, toolmaking, and on and on. These are read and reread; each time they yield small portions of knowledge, personal insight, and genuine enjoyment. While I’m on the subject of genuine enjoyment, let me tell you about The Luthier’s Mercantile Catalog for Stringed Instrument Makers. Here is either a book that wants to be a catalog, or a catalog that wants to be a book. The staff at TLM deserve a loud bravo! for their combined efforts at getting this catalog together in a thoroughly enjoyable and readable format. Become A Member to Continue Reading This Article This article is part of our premium web content offered to Guild members. To view this and other web articles, join the Guild of American Luthiers. Members also receive 4 annual issues of American Lutherie and get discounts on products. For details, visit the membership page. If you are already a member, login for access or contact us to setup your account.
