Posted on March 4, 2022May 28, 2025 by Dale Phillips Adirondack Spruce Growth Rates and Accessibility Adirondack Spruce Growth Rates and Accessibility by Ralph S. Charles III Originally published in American Lutherie #81, 2005 and Big Red Book of American Lutherie Volume Seven, 2015 With a day job in the forestry and logging industry, I know a little something about wood. After thirty years of selling saw logs and pulpwood for a living, I thought that a move into the tonewood business would be a natural transition into retirement. Membership in the GAL, however, has uncovered a realization that some luthiers may appreciate my perspective on tree growth rates in general, and Adirondack spruce in particular. The grading of wood for instrument tops takes into account at least the following considerations: evenness of grain, straightness of grain, tightness of grain, color or discoloration, location or lack of knots, figure, heavy grain lines, pitch pockets, foreign objects (bullets and barbed wire), closeness to quarter and runout, and stiffness. The following discussion is directed at the evenness and tightness of grain which are a direct result of the laying down of the annual growth ring. 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 March 4, 2022May 28, 2025 by Dale Phillips They Eat Linseed Oil, Don’t They? They Eat Linseed Oil, Don’t They? An Adventure in Austrian Lutherie and Gastronomy by Stephen Frith Originally published in American Lutherie #77, 2004 and Big Red Book of American Lutherie Volume Seven, 2015 Last year my wife Sherrie and I took a working holiday in Austria. We met up with a small group of guitar makers to harvest some of the best European spruce available. The excursion to the sawmill of Christoph Kolbl in Aigen was organized by Tobias Braun. The picturesque town of Neufelden (Photo 1) could inspire many peghead designs. We began by gathering at the Hotel Mühltalhof for dinner, a nightly experience lasting two or three hours. 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 April 29, 2021May 30, 2025 by Dale Phillips Sturgill on Wood Sturgill on Wood by David Sturgill Originally published in Guild of American Luthiers Data Sheet #2, #6, #9, 1974, 1975 and Guild of American Luthiers Newsletter Vol. 2 #2, 1974 See also, The David Sturgill Story by David Sturgill Wood for Instrument Making I consider myself to be extremely fortunate to have had an opportunity to become intimately acquainted with one of the greatest of the American luthiers, Herman Weaver of Baltimore, MD and Washington, D.C. Our friendship grew from the time I first met him in 1940 until his death twenty-five years later. Aside from our warm personal relationship, he took a great interest in my own work and taught me many things from his own background of fifty years experience as a luthier. Many of these things I would have been years discovering for myself or may never have learned. Herman Weaver, like most luthiers I have known, was also a philosopher, and even this was reflected in his work. He was often unorthodox in his approach to many problems which confront the would-be luthier. While he was a strong supporter of proven traditions, he did not hesitate to experiment and to discard tradition if it was not supported by his own discoveries. Early in our friendship I started asking him about woods for musical instruments, especially violins. He answered my questions as I asked them, but one day he summed it all up in one paragraph when he said, “wood is something you can learn about, but it is almost impossible to teach anyone else except in generalities. The luthier must have an instinct about woods, he must be able to hold it in his hands and hear in his mind the tones it will produce in an instrument. He must sense the texture and the grain and the character of a piece of wood and I do not know how to teach anyone these things.” 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 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.
