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I just received some Sitka bracewood from LMI, and it appears it is cut on a 10 degree angle, not quartered??? Whats up with this? This is on the tall cut so it will be an issue to get it cut on my bandsaw. The Adi bracewood is also a weird cut, they need to get this stuff cut near thickness dimension and quartered, grrrrrrrr

This is for a top voicing class I'm taking in May, so structure is not that critical, but Im used to getting vertical grain about 1/2 inch thick. Grrrrr....

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Here is what a Parlor Guitar is for!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEa8PkjO6_I

Why are you telling us ? You need to be talking to LMI. LMI is a quality outfit, I am sure they will take care of you.

Rich

People buy bracewood???

It takes a long time to grow it yourself...

I was looking for: " off quarter is normal, no problems, or 'no send that back'. kind of thing. The top they sent is exellent, no problems there.

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Here is what a Parlor Guitar is for!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEa8PkjO6_I

Let's see: perfectly quartered wood has a higher cross grain stiffness than wood from the same log that is not quartered. Ten degees off quarter often won't make a lot of difference in the cross grain stiffness. It makes no difference as far as I can tell in the stiffness along the grain.

Why is the cross grain stiffness of a brace important?

Glue sometimes does not stick as well to the hard latewood grain in a softwood as it does to the earlywood. Bracing with a flat cut gluing surface is likely to have stretches of hard latewood that would not glue well. Tha'ts a good reason to avoid flat cut. Ten degrees off quarter is nowhere near that. BTW, lute were usually braces with wood that was split off the edges of the top blank. The braces were tall and narrow, and had the flat cut side glued to the top. So maybe it's not all that bad after all.

Just trying to think the problem through.....

Not only that, but some people even SELL it.....even the well quartered stuff.......

As incredible as that even sounds......

Shane

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Canada

Yeah, I buy it. Spruce doesnt grow in Florida.

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Reguards,

Ken H

The only testing I ever read about for brace wood found no correlation between quartersawn grain and stiffness and based on my own experience, I believe it.

There is nothing inherently wrong with 10 degrees off quarter...unless it's the "conventional wisdom" that there is.

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http://www.chassonguitars.com

Kent,

What you say is probably quite true, especially when you consider that stiffness is really variable from one piece of wood to another. So, with that knowledge one would/should brace shave considering the particular piece of wood you have. In timber framing when using spruce you want to ensure that the heart is either 'boxed' or absent and all joints should be housed. This guidance acknowledges spruce's inherent propensity to twist. It is likely that braces are so small that this may not matter but still in my books braces are probably the most important part of the guitar, they are the structure! So I take HUGE care when producing bracewood to ensure that the run out is minimized and the stock is bang on quarter. But, it may not be truly necessary.

Shane

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Canada

I'm not at all surprised. So do I. But I mainly worry about quartering because I have the luxury of lots of good wood to work with and for consistency within my own instruments. And because of perceptions As you implied, the original quality of the wood is more important than whether it's 10 degrees off quarter.

The study I read was done by Somogyi and he found, in short, that the more dense the wood, the less the grain direction related to stiffness. In medium and lighter samples, the wood was actually stiffer flat sawn (grain parallel to the glue surface). This was just relative stiffness by the way, not stiffness/weight ratio.

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http://www.chassonguitars.com

Okay, back to seriousness...

10° off is more than I'd like to see, but all you have to do is cut with your blade or table titled the same 10° and you have trued it all up as you went. Or split it, which is my preferred method. And that was my point about buying bracewood; are they selling pre-trimmed and planed bracewood? I'd not want that; I want to see a split billet.

But I also see bracewood everywhere. Literally. Picked up an old wooden stepladder at the dump one day; nicely quartered Sitka throughout... Window and door frames? Old WRC or Douglas fir, most likely. Old solid doors? Yup, more quartered spruce... Old framing timbers of all sizes? Once you know how to tell spruce from the others, there's a lifetime's supply of excellent quality, aged and seasoned to perfection spruce, all for the taking.

I put more stock and importance into my bracewood than even my tops.

Tonewood is what we make of it, not what it is.

Hey Grumpy...down here in Florida I have heard my brother in law refer to white pine, the stuff you can buy in 2x4 dimensional lumber, as spruce.

Same thing?...or not? I can buy a white pine (spruce?) 2x4 that's 8 feet long for 4 bucks after uncle sam...the neighbor that don't work...and whomever else decides they need a hand out.

??

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There is no difference between the man that thinks he can....and the man that thinks he cannot.

White pine is NOT spruce. It's not dry enough either even if it did do a few laps in the kiln. Heck, last week it was still in the ground.

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Jim Womack

"Be thankful we're not getting all the government we're paying for. "
Will Rogers

I'm much less picky about quartersawn for bracewood. The one thing I want to see is straight grain. I've used rift sawn spruce for lower back braces. No problem, I don't think it affects anything.
10º off-quarter? You won't lose a lot of wood if you plane back one side to perfectly quartered if you wish, and then slice your braces on the band or table saw.
If you don't want to waste wood or your time, use it as is.

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

I thought Framing lumber ( 2x4's) were either (the good stuff )doug fir ( hard to find any more , borg sometimes has it green) or ( the only crap you can find these days )hem fir , i have never heard of red spruce being used , for any part of a home . Jody

But one man's "pine" can be another's "spruce"...

Dimensional lumber can be pine, spruce, or fir. That's why the rating says "SPF"(spruce/pine/fir). For general lumber uses, they're all the same.. What you need to know is how to tell one from the other, and then how to tell potential bracewood/tonewood from firewood/junk. This is where experience comes into play, but it doesn't take decades to learn.

Hey Grumps, can you give us some pointers on how to tell the two apart?

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http://www.PeakeGuitars.com

I guess the only way is to study the spruce you have on hand. Look at it, feel it, smell it. Get to know it....

Hold on while I light the candles...

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http://www.PeakeGuitars.com

I've gotten some really nice spruce at the lumber yard: a friend and I picked up a half dozen nice clear Englemann 2x3s a few years back, and they were cheap.

Most of the triple-deckers in the Boston area were framed with Red spruce, cut in Maine or the Whites of New Hampshire. Major renovations or demolitions would yield a lot of good brace stock when I lived down there. I also got some nice big pieces from the old Cornish-Windsor bridge that corsses the Connecticut river between NH and Vermont. The stuff was cut on Mt. Ascutney in 1869, and it's light, stiff, and was treated with the luthier's secret ingredient; horse piss.

As Mario says, it's not too hard to learn to recognize useable brace wood. If you're in doubt you could learn to test the stiffness, either by deflection or vibration. since all of the 'usual suspect' top and brace woods fall on the same line in terms of stiffness vs density, it almost doesn't matter what species you get, just so it's got the right numbers and it's tough enough.

Alan -

Any pointers on deflection testing ? I guess just split the wood, then cut a 20" section, support it on both ends - then hang a weight in the middle and see how much it bends ? That simple ? How do I know i am starting with a strong piece as a baseline ?

Thanks
John


Todd - I am pretty close to you in Laurel - reading your post - are you saying most of the 2x6's and 2x4 at HD and Lowes are spruce ? Funny I passed some grading stakes the other day at HD, and I think they were actually labled spruce...

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It's this new idea from recent decades that everyone gets a participation award. - MUX

I've built with a 10 deg off top and while it sounded just fine, it felt rubbery across the grain. I have a thicknessed Sitka top that at 10 deg is plain scary.

But for braces, I don't think it is a real problem. Your more valid issue would be figuring out how much runout you have in there. You need to split the wood not cut it. Some trees simply grow with twists and when cutting straight billets you get waves, no matter how good the cutter is. When you split you can at least average the wave out by selective planing and positioning as to at least not have the wave in a critical area of the X or UTB.

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Build log

Shane, I, for one, really appreciate that you do this, and I will continue to consider the price I pay for your top quality bracewood a bargain. Time is the thing in shortest supply in my life. Using your bracewood is very time efficient, because you've done so much of the work already, and with such great care. That and the fact that I know I can't get better bracewood anywhere makes it a no-brainer for me.

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Todd Rose
Ithaca, NY

https://www.dreamingrosesecobnb.com/todds-art-music

https://www.facebook.com/ToddRoseGuitars/

The Lowes in my area had some 1x2 and 1x4 stock that were labeled European spruce. I went through the stack on another trip and found absolutely nothing of use.( I mean for anything) I think they cut up bushes, not trees...
I am still using bracing that I reclaimed from a door frame that I found in a dumpster >20 years ago.

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In Markham,Virginia