Official Luthiers Forum!

Does anyone use Western red cedar for bracing the soundboard?

I love red cedar for many reasons, but wouldn't use it for any bracing job except perhaps fan bracing on a classical guitar. It just splits too readily.
I read a post by Mario Proulx a couple of years ago & he said he has used it successfully for steel string guitar bracing.

Too weak, prone to splitting too easily in case of shock or movement. It would work if used as laminations Larson style, but it's not like there's an availability problem on spruce.

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Laurent Brondel
West Paris, Maine - USA
http://www.laurentbrondel.com/

Western red cedar top would do better with spruce bracing, as the others mentioned for a host of reasons. Because WRC is lighter than a spruce top, one correspondingly needs to add at least 1 extra mm of height to the bracing. I have a lot of WRC it also varies widely in density, so you might want to adjust your fan/transverse bracing to get at least 3 different tones when you are completing the final ramping of your transverse an fan braces , top upper bout, center below soundhole and lower bout.

I build my Torres braces classical's with the three center fans spruce and the outer fans WRC. There's an idea behind it, maybe its a dumb idea but so far no problems and I've got one going on 15 years old.