A Classical Backyard Build

[cooltouch]

Well, I was browsing through the various areas here and came across this one, then quickly realized I might just have something to contribute. Here's a guitar I built from locally obtained wood -- redwood top and padauk back and sides, ceder neck. I made the bridge out of padauk as well. The only wood I used that I had to source in was the ebony fingerboard and the spruce for the braces.


My "Ruby Concert" build #3 by Michael McBroom, on Flickr

Ruby Concert back by Michael McBroom, on Flickr

Shortly after I began building guitars, I became interested in local resources for wood. Houston has two hardwood suppliers, so I quickly visited each to see what they had to offer, if anything. At one location, I came across some interesting wood for back and sides -- striped padauk. As you probably know already, padauk has a bright orangish-red color when it is first cut. Well this stripd padauk is white and red striped. I'd never seen striped padauk before and I've never seen any since, so I suspect this stuff is pretty rare. I built one guitar with it, and I still have enough back and sides material for another three or four guitars. You're probably aware that padauk's color will change to a light walnut sort of hue, but this only occurs if the wood is exposed to sunlight. The guitar I built from the striped padauk hasn't seen the sun, so it is still red and white.

I located some more padauk -- this was just the regular orange variety -- from one of the two sellers. Don't recall which one anymore. So I resawed the planks I found into more wood for probably another half dozen or so guitars. I built one guitar from this stock and it too has never seen the sun, so it is still a bright red color.

One of the hardwood sellers also had a very large stash of Westernred cedar and redwood. These were planks, about 8" wide and 2" thick. A 16" wide top may seem narrow for dreadnaught builders, but this is a perfect width for classical builders, and I'm a classical builder. Lengths of these planks varied, from as little as 6 feet to as long as 16 feet. Many of the planks were perfetly quartersawn and had a very tight grain structure. Over the period of about a year, I bought several large planks of cedar and redwood. I was determined to resaw this stuff, so I bought a set of riser blocks for my bandsaw, which give me the necessary throat depth where I could resaw wood. So anyway, I cut the planks up into about 20" long billets and resawed them. I now have somewhere around 200 top sets of cedar and redwood, so I think I'm pretty well set for life, when it comes to these two species of wood.

After resawing the top sets, I went through them all and evaluated the tap tone of each set, then recorded my observations on the wood with a pencil. I used a star system, with 4 stars being best. After going through all the top sets, I was happy to find that most of the top sets had tap tones of 3 stars or better. Oh, and just in case you're curious about redwood -- its tap tone is somewhere between cedar and spruce. Not quite as bright as a good spruce top set, but brighter than cedar. I like redwood; I think it makes for an interesting sounding top.

I also found some nice cocobolo at one of the hardwood sellers. Some of it was quartersawn and some was flatsawn. I built one guitar using a quartersawn back set but I ended up using a flatsawn side set on the guitar. The flatsawn grain was really wild and crazy and the sides bent in bumps, which eventually smoothed out as the wood relaxed over time. So I can't really recommend flatsawn wood for sides. Heh. This guitar has a sitka top that I bought off eBay for dirt cheap. Good sounding wood though.

One seller also had a very large stash of 1x4 by various lengths of Honduran mahogany. Perfect for neck wood. But very few of the planks were quartersawn. Those that were, I bought. This same seller also had a good stash of Spanish ceder -- a traditional neck wood for classicals and flamencos -- and I bought several quartersawn planks of it, as well.

Unfortunately, it was about this same time that I sorted through my wood that I started running into health issues, which forced me to step away from building, so I've only built a couple of guitars that are 100% from this wood that I scavenged and resawed. Quite a few of the other guitars I've built have one or another of the woods I found, just not all. My health situation improved but then we moved and I lost my shop. So I've been wanting to get back into building -- I just don't have anywhere to build for now.

So, to sum things up, if you have a hardwood seller in your neck of the woods, it might be worth the time spent to go look around. I saved a ton of money by buying from these local sellers, so hey, it's worth a shot, methinks.

[Dennis Leahy]

Thanks for sharing it's story. Beautiful guitar, Michael! Do you still have this one? How do you like the sound?

[bftobin]

If you talk to any pattern-maker, they'll tell you not to worry about grain direction on Central American mahogany or good quality Spanish Cedar, because it's completely stable in all directions. With other woods it's a different story.

Brent

[cooltouch]

Hey Dennis, yes I still have it. It was only my third build, so it shows its share of newbie mistakes and I've had no real interest in selling it. As far as its sound goes -- well, its top gives it a sound somewhere between cedar and spruce, I guess I'd have to say. In this guitar's case, it has the traditional Torres-style seven fan pattern and was thicknessed to about what most Spaniards thickness their tops to, so it's no surprise that it has that Spanish guitar sound. Padauk makes for interesting back/sides wood. It is real PITA bending padauk, but the wood is so musical sounding -- almost chime like -- it's worth it, IMO. I've found that classicals benefit very much from bright clear sounding back wood. They need all the help they can get in that department, unlike steel string guitars.

Brent, I wasn't aware of this stability factor with these woods. Certainly good to know. Still, I think I'll try to stick with QS wood, if for no other reason than the grain looks more pleasing that way. One thing I've done is, when I wasn't able to find perfectly quartersawn neck wood, I'd laminate it to make up for this lack. Say the wood had a slant to the grain, when looking at it end-on, like //// . What I did was make a three piece neck, two pieces of mahogany and an ebony center strip, so it would look like this ////|\\\\. Triangulation is always an extremely rigid structural design element, so I saw no reason why it wouldn't be with guitar necks as well. So far so good.