Posted on June 27, 2019May 26, 2025 by Dale Phillips Top 40 Wood List Top 40 Wood List by Nicholas Von Robison previously published in Lutherie Woods and Steel String Guitars, 1994 See also, “Taxonomy and Nomenclature” by Nicholas Von Robison “Glossary of Basic Wood Terms” by Nicholas Von Robison The contemporary luthier can be said to be either in a bind or in a unique evolutionary position, depending on one’s point of view. In the following list of lutherie woods, many will be noted as banned, extinct, prohibited, embargoed, unavailable, and/or expensive. In many cases I have listed viable alternative woods to replace the traditional species based on my own knowledge, education, experience, and on the advice, suggestions, and experience of respected, reputable wood specialists, dealers, and luthiers. While many species can be freely exchanged or adopted in place of the traditional woods of beauty and adornment, those that fall into the category of replacements for traditional resonant woods must be tried without any assurance or guarantee that musicians will accept these alternative woods. The acceptability of a wood species for the production of stringed musical instruments is largely dictated by the traditional practices and materials handed down through centuries. Many of the favored wood species are those that were available in commerce not only to the luthier but to the European furniture craftsmen as well. It can be very difficult for the luthier to obtain acceptance of new materials by the end user, the musician. The musician expects to hear a certain sound from an instrument, and any variation from that sound, as well as any variation in physical appearance, is suspect. In view of this, the chances of obtaining musical acceptance for instruments built with nontraditional woods has been slim in the past. 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 June 24, 2019May 23, 2025 by Dale Phillips Grading and Resawing Lutherie Wood Resawing Lutherie Wood by Bruce Creps previously published in American Lutherie #91, 2007 See also, “Sharpening the Stellite Teeth on the 3" Hitachi Blade” by Bruce Creps “Grading and Curing Lumber” by Bruce Creps Harvesting, milling, and processing tonewood can be a wasteful business. Much of the wood used by luthiers comes from large, older trees, elders worthy of respect. As someone fortunate enough to work with these rare, high-grade woods, one of my top goals is to minimize waste by processing this valuable resource efficiently. This article concerns the Hitachi CB75F resaw, though much of what follows is general enough to be applicable to other resaws. Luthiers who buy resawn sets might glean information about how their wood is processed and what to request or avoid when ordering. A note on nomenclature: A resaw is an upright or horizontal bandsaw set up to make uniform rip cuts. The front of the saw is where you start feeding a cut. The face of a board is its wide, longitudinal surface; the edge is its narrow longitudinal surface; the end is its crosscut surface. The resaw blade is made up of its band and its teeth (terms not necessarily interchangeable). I refer to vertical-grain wood in place of quartersawn wood to avoid confusion, since a sawyer can get vertical-grain cuts without quartering a log. 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 June 20, 2019May 30, 2025 by Dale Phillips Glossary of Basic Wood Terms Glossary of Basic Wood Terms by Hart Huttig (1975), updated and expanded by Nicholas Von Robison (1994) previously published in Lutherie Woods and Steel String Guitars, 1994 See also, “Taxonomy and Nomenclature” by Nicholas Von Robison “Top 40 Wood List” by Nicholas Von Robison Guitarmaking of necessity requires not only a supply of various woods but also knowledge of their origins and methods of cutting and storing. A good luthier should have a considerable fund of information about the history of wood procurement. Lutherie is an ancient craft, and it is a requirement that the luthier should be well conversant in the entire spectrum of wood cutting and classifying. To this end I have made excerpts in the form of glossaries and explanations. This information has been compiled from several sources which will be listed in the “Wood Bibliography” (pp. 23–29). Some of the terms are now archaic but should be of interest from a historical standpoint. Trees used to be felled with axes and the logs snaked to a work area and cut into baulks with adzes and broad axes. Planks and boards were made by the sawpit method. They were also rived from the logs, that is, split from straight-grained pieces with froes (or frows) or sometimes with power wedges or go-devils. Rails were split with oak wedges or gluts, driven by a beetle or burl maul. Trees were cut into logs and rafted to mills in remote locations when rivers or streams were near enough. Until the 15th century, lumber was sawed by two men equipped with a large hand saw. The log was mounted over a great pit. One man stood below it and was showered with saw dust. The other man stood on top and had the heavier task of lifting the weight of the saw with each cut. Around 1420, near Breslau in Germany, the first saws were driven by water power in mills on river banks. These saws were made to move up and down the same as hand-operated saws. In 1781 Walter Taylor, a saw miller in Southampton, England, began to saw wood with a circular saw, the blade being driven by a water wheel by the River Itchen. In 1808 William Newberry of London patented a saw with teeth formed on an endless metal band revolving around two wheels. He was unable to make a satisfactory commercial bandsaw because the steel available for the blades at that time would not stand the strain. Practical bandsaws were first made by Perin of Paris in about 1855 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 16, 2010June 9, 2025 by Dale Phillips In Memoriam: Ray Tunquist In Memoriam: Ray Tunquist August 25, 1917 – November 7, 2010 by Tom Bednark Originally published in American Lutherie #130, 2017 A man of great importance to the art of guitar making passed away six years ago at the age of ninety-three. Raymond Elwood Tunquist of New York was a sawyer of excellence, a WWII pilot, and wonderful gentleman. Perfection of cut was his mission. For over fifty years he cut guitar-making materials of Brazilian and Indian rosewood, mahogany, and ebony for C.F. Martin, Fender, Gibson, and other makers. If you have a Martin from the 1940s, ’50s, ’60s, or ’70s, chances are Ray and his 72"-diameter bulbous-back veneer saw cut the wood. The mill yard often had stacks of rosewood and mahogany logs of great size and quality waiting to be cut by the master of sawyers. Doll Lumber and Veneer was started by Ray’s father-in-law. Mr. Doll was a German immigrant who lived in Brooklyn, New York, with his family. He started the saw mill in Brooklyn in the 1920s. Exotic wood logs came into the USA from all around the world and were cut by Mr. Doll into lumber and veneers. Ray married into the family and learned his craft in the late 1930s. Clients were log buyers and importers and Doll was known for quality of cut and better-than-average yield. J.H. Montheath, Albert Constantine, and Martin Guitar were on the client list. Two saws were used in the mill: a 60" bandsaw and the 72" circular saw, each using a carriage-and-rail system to carry the logs to be cut. The big saw had sixteen fine-tooth blade sections attached to the back so that the face was dead flat. It was powered by a 150 hp diesel engine and could cut 1/16" × 16" veneers 12' long. Ray Tunquist prepares to make a first cut. All photos by Tom Bednark. Jesse, a workman at the Doll Lumber and Veneer Company mill, rolls in a small Brazilian rosewood log. James Boyce inspects the bulbous-back veneer saw. Jim was one of the GAL’s earliest members and one of our first advertisers. He passed away in September 2015. Ray had a pilot’s license, and when he was called to service in 1942 he became a flying instructor at Brooklyn’s Floyd Bennet field for about eighteen months. Then in 1944 he was assigned to transport aircraft manufactured on the East Coast to the west. He was qualified to fly Hellcats, Bearcats, Corsairs, and other aircraft. Altogether his service lasted over four years. Back to work at the mill, Ray cut thousands of logs of all species: teak, mahoganies, rosewoods, zebrawood, ebony, lignum vitae, oaks, pines, poplar, and more. The quartersawn white oak in the Frank Lloyd Wright Room at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art was cut and dried by Ray. Brazilian rosewood logs were purchased by the mill to be resawn and sold to Martin and other guitar makers. The bulbous-back veneer saw would produce flitches of veneers 5/32" thick, 5"–11" wide and 8'–10' long. Those swirl patterns you see inside old Martins tell you it came off the big circular saw. In the late 1940s the mill was moved to upstate New York for more mill space and a rural lifestyle. A kiln was also built to dry the lumber. After the 1966 Brazilian log embargo, Indian rosewood was processed. Most Indian logs were 8'–10' long and were 30" or more in diameter, ranging up to about 46". The largest log cut at Doll that I saw was mahogany, 40' long by 64" diameter. We cut the log into 10' lengths, scored the center of one end with a chainsaw, and spilt it using a giant forklift. Thousands of quartered sets came out of this log. I still have a small flitch of twenty or so sheets, 14" wide and 10' long. The sawn guitar wood was stickered for air drying. When it was dry it was restacked into flitches and shipped. The Doll and Tunquist families were most likely the only families in the country to heat their homes with rosewood and other exotic wood waste! They were thrifty old timers. Ray was a great, wonderful, very smart man who worked at the mill until the age of ninety-one. He was short on words and opinion, but a true craftsman and teacher. May Ray rest in peace and may the music produced by his wood-cutting efforts sound sweetly to all.
Posted on January 11, 2010May 27, 2025 by Dale Phillips Review: Acoustics of Wood by Voichita Buchur Review: Acoustics of Wood by Voichita Buchur reviewed by Nicholas Von Robison Originally published in American Lutherie #57, 1999 and Big Red Book of American Lutherie Volume Five, 2008 Acoustics of Wood Voichita Buchur CRC Press, 1995 ISBN 0849348013 Voichita Buchur’s book Acoustics of Wood is a synthesis of over fifty years of work by the scientific community into the physics of how this complex material responds to vibrational wave stimuli. With almost 800 references into the literature and about ten years from inception to its being published in 1995, it is a tremendous resource for the luthier’s understanding of his/her main material. I don’t get the feel from the text that the author is a maker herself, even though she is a member of the Catgut Acoustical Society. The book is heavily weighted towards violin family instruments, but this doesn’t make the book any less valuable to guitar makers. After a short, well written, general discussion on the anatomical structure of wood (macro, micro, and molecular), a brief outline is presented dividing the book into three major sections. Part One explores the physical phenomena associated with the effects of acoustic waves in forests (windbreaks to attenuate noise) and architectural acoustics (concert halls, office buildings, restaurants) with wood being used as a construction material and insulator in conjunction with other nonwood materials. A survey of six European concert halls and their geometrical, acoustical, and construction data is pretty interesting. 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.
