Formica guit AR-7

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Alan Carruth
Posts: 1264
Joined: Sun Jan 15, 2012 1:11 pm

Re: Formica guit AR-7

Post by Alan Carruth »

The redwood I've seen generally has the low damping of cedar with the density, Young's modulus, and surface hardness of spruce. It does have a tendency to split, though, for sure. It seems to be quite stable under humidity changes, like cedar, so it's more of an 'impact' issue than one of low humidity.

Once in a while I've run into redwood that had relatively low long-grain stiffness and high damping; an almost 'cardboardy' tap tone. The quartered face tends to have a sort of 'crushed velvet' look. Archer, in his 'Growth stresses and stains in trees', points out that the combination of normal built-in compression stress near the center of the tree, plus the weight can cause microscopic compression failures near the heart at the bottom of a large tree. The stress simply exceeds the compression strength of the wood, and it gets crushed. Unlike the compression failures in 'wind shake' which are actually the result of the tree falling on something like another trunk or a rock, these microscopic fractures don't show, but the wood is still broken. It can 'brash fracture'; snapping off cleanly across the grain if you try to bend it. I think this is what happens sometimes with 'stump' wood, and may the the issue with the problem redwood I've seen.

Back when I was getting started I picked up a bunch of redwood at a local place that sold overstock, insurance salvage, and such like stuff, known as 'Building #19". In this case it was stock from a manufacturer of planters that had gone out of business; pallet loads of redwood about 24" long, 8" wide and 5/8" thick, at $.50 @. I spent a couple of hours sorting out the best quartered pieces with the nicest tap tones, and got quite a stash. Most of it made really nice guitars and other things, and a bit just cracked sitting on the shelf, but at fifty cents a top plus the time to resaw it was still a good deal.
John LaCroix
Posts: 8
Joined: Fri Feb 17, 2012 5:12 pm
Location: Essex Junction, VT
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Re: Formica guit AR-7

Post by John LaCroix »

I like redwood as for me tonally it is warm like cedar, but is harder and not as much of a PIA to work with as it doesn't take marks as easily just sitting around. My joint failure story with Redwood came about on the first 7 string classical I made - I didn't make the bridge footprint bigger than I would have for a 6 string and the tension from the extra bass string just pulled it clean off. Fortunately, it was an easy fix.

John L
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