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Just received yet another piece of garbage redwood from a supplier. I think that by the time I send this one back, I'll have spent nearly 600$ on shipping crap wood unfit for guitar building back to where it came from.

I got one, beautiful, stiff, excellent tap tone piece from a supplier after sending back bits to four separate places, thinking I finally found a quality source. So I ordered a second one one, and it was absolute bunk.

I'm really surprised that people who theoretically know what good wood should be like would send this crap out with their blessing.

Ok, rant over. Off to find something inanimate to kick.

Last time I was at ExoticWoods, they had a stack of Redwood tops. I only looked at the set on top of the pile, but it was straight grained and light red in colour. IIRC, they were $40cnd. The staff there are very accommodating, so maybe they could send you a couple of pictures.

Alex

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"Indecision is the key to flexibility" .... Bumper sticker

Thanks for the tip!

Sorry to hear that. Brings back memories of some Red Cedar I ordered from ebay. Turns out it was pretty good for cooking salmon .........but not much else.

Expense dinners

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Joe Beaver
Maker of Sawdust

Call me predictable, but whenever I see the bundles of WRC salmon planks at Costco, I check to see if there are any QS pieces.

Alex

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"Indecision is the key to flexibility" .... Bumper sticker

There's something funky about redwood.

I have resawn 2 billets.... Both from the same lumberyard, out of the same stack. One light colored and very wide grained, the other more conventional looking and tight grained. The light colored, wide grain billet made light and stiff tops with resonant tap tones. The close grained one that looks more like redwood is more dense, but it's not as stiff and it taps just like wet cardboard.

Seems to me like there must be a lot of variation within redwood and it's not really all that predictable.

I too have received WRC that's not any good except for cooking salmon.....

Sorry to hear it. I've had good luck with redwood from various sources, even peeling it off the side of my house where it's been suffering the humid heat and freezing cold for 60+ years

If you haven't tried Dave Maize yet, I highly recommend him.

Dave Maize doesn't have an internet presence anymore. I'm not sure he is selling tonewood or guitars anymore. It's a shame - he had good stuff - redwood, walnur and PO cedar.

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John Lewis
Wannabe builder owned by 2 crazy dachshunds

Inspiration for my first acoustic guitar. I brought some tops in but did not want to screw them up on my first build and was looking for some practice wood. Windsor Plywood has some planks sawn up for cooking with and this piece caught my eye. Drew up a shape to fit its length and width. In the end never did use it, found some fence boards that had tighter grain and was more quartered. Not really sure where this piece went.

Have you actually tried emailing him lately? I know his site was down for a while, but it's back now, which I assume means he's still in business.

I just got several redwood tops in today from LMI and I couldn't be happier with them. If you don't want to publicly state where you got them I'd be curios to know via PM if you don't mind. I have only built two guitars from redwood one about a decade ago (from paneling in a house) and one last year( from LMI purchased many years ago) and they have both been spectacular so I'm starting to collect it.

I don't want to say, but suffice to say I've been around the block to all the usual suspects and been wildly disappointed. It just bugs me to spend useless money on shipping. I barely scrape by building guitars as a living, wasting money sending back wood that is clearly useless really grates on me, cause it's money used for literally nothing. The shipping on a top there and back is literally 10 days worth of food tossed to the wind.

I purchased a redwood set from LMI last spring. It was perfectly quartered, straight tight grain, and beautiful. Highly recommend them.

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Brad Hall
Mystic Dawg Guitars

We buy our redwood tops from Mr. David Maize, who specializes in salvaged woods. While he has elected to take a bit of a break from building, Mr. Maize is still providing tonewood.

http://www.maizeguitars.com

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A constellation only takes shape when one maps the whole.
- Beth Brower

As far as redwood goes I have had great luck buying from Vince at Pacific Coast Woods

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Joe Beaver
Maker of Sawdust

I buy my WRC tops from the lumberyard. If I used redwood I would probably do the same. You do have to pick through the stack to find good pieces, and also resaw it for tops, but it is much cheaper. Definitely save on shipping! If the board you select turns out to be a dud at least you didn't break the bank.

+1 for Dave Maize.

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Tim Allen
"Never hurry, never rest."

Several years ago I got a book about growth stresses and strains in trees. Pretty technical. One interesting thing I learned was that each new layer of wood a tree puts on is in tension relative to the wood under it. This benefits the tree because green wood tends to fail first in compression, and pre-stressing it in tension helps avoid compression on the down wind side. The drawback is that wood further in is put into compression. That's not a problem for the tree, since the wood in the middle is under much less stress than the stuff at the surface. It may be another matter for us, though.

The author pointed out that between the weight of the tree and the built in stress it's possible for the wood near the center of the bole at the bottom to exceed it's compressive limit. This leads to micro-fracturing of the cell walls, similar to 'wind shake' in some respects, but not visible. As with wind shake, if you try to bend such wood it can 'brash fracture'; break off more or less cleanly across the grain.

I sometimes see redwood that has a sort of 'crushed' look. It's a little hard to describe, but you know it when you see it. There are more or less random areas of the quartered surface show run out. Such wood lacks long-grain stiffness, and has high damping. These are all things I would expect to see in wood that was over loaded in compression. The last batch of redwood I got from a supplier looked and acted like that, as nearly as I could tell: I didn't want to smooth off the surface as I was going to send it back, since it was dense, and had low stiffness and very high dampng. It was billed as 'salvage' wood, harvested from old stumps, which fits.

Obviously this in not always the case. The 'LS' log that Craig Carter got was a stump, and that is wonderful wood. I've gotten other redwood that was nearly as good; mechanically and acoustically the equal of LS if not as cosmetically clean. Craig was right; that was a Lucky Strike. Not every stump will work as well, apparently, more's the pity.

I stopped by Dave's shop a few months ago on my way down to California. He seemed like a heck of a guy. I bought a few choice tops. His stock at that time was fairly limited. It didn't seem as though his business was very active. But I think it's worth calling him for Redwood or POC.


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