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i've never bought the wood for guitar material... but i want to ask you something... can you list the price of the wood from the most expensive to the cheapest one... of course the wood that commonly used for guitar... thank you for ur answer... sorry 4 m poor english...

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Twitter : @martinbandung
www.martinbandung.blogspot.com

Anywhere from nothing (lucky dumpster find) to first born child.

Why not cruise to the top of the page and spend some time looking at our sponsors' offerings. That will get you into the ballpark with numbers.

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Jim Kirby
kirby@udel.edu

Anywhere from more than most of us are prepared to spend, to almost nothing. For backs and sides, for instance, grades of Indian rosewood comparable to that used by the larger factories can be quite inexpensive. Top woods are commonly graded according to cosmetic criteria; decent guitars can be built with lower grades of spruce if consistent colour and evenness and straightness of grain aren't assigned critical importance.

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Cheers
Pete

the price of the wood isn't really the true cost. What good is a cheap piece of wood if it cracks or warps ? What you need to do first is to learn about wood used in luthiery.
To help here are things you need to know
Quartered
slab
rift

Then you need to learn to identify them , next is to know what flaws you can and cannot work with. Learning to see wind break , pin knots, and compression grain. Learn to see run out.

Finding a good supplier is paramount to the success of the instrument. If this is early in your building experience , learn from the mistakes. That is the best advice I can give you. Also learn joinery and use of hand tools . If a plane iron won't shave , it isn't sharp.

I think you will get a lot more information here from many . I will tell you that RC Tonewoods is very reliable and the wood is top notch. Be aware that most wood on ebay is not what it is presented as. If you are not experienced in Tonewood , Ebay for many is a drop off for the lower end stuff.
Good luck and enjoy the journey.

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John Hall
blues creek guitars
Authorized CF Martin Repair
Co President of ASIA
You Don't know what you don't know until you know it

Hi Martin,
You might try finding local sources for your guitar wood. Many of the Indonesian wood species should work fine for guitar construction. You might check with the Australian/New Zealand luthiers forum for woods they use that are more local to you.

There are two drivers of high price in wood: scarcity, and labor. A fair amount of the labor cost of wood you get from suppliers is spent in grading it, and getting it to the sizes you'll need.

Some wood species are simply scarce, and this drives the price up no matter what the grade. Brazilian rosewood is the poster child for that. I donated a set of BRW to the GAL back in '92 for their benefit auction. Dana Bourgeios looked at it the day before and thought it was worth $100 or so. The next day we found out that it had been listed on CITES as an endangered species, and it went at the auction the day after at $350. One result of this sort of 'species bump' is that there's a lot of the BRW on the market is not really useful as guitar wood, but has been resawn for the purpose and offered at high prices. Most of the 'stump wood' I've seen, spectacular though it looks, would have been far better used to make coffee tables, IMO.

Some common woods, such as maple, can command a high price if they have spectacular figure. So-called 'flamed' (which we used to call 'curly') figure occurs pretty commonly in all the species of maple, but the really highly flamed (pronounced figure) stuff is not to common, and requires special treatment in cutting and aging if it's to be really useful. Birdseye maple is even scarcer. Some highly figured woods are difficult to work with (again, birdseye maple is a good example), and they can be unstable in use. In extreme cases high figure can be quite detrimental to the acoustic properties: I have a burl mesquite back that is probably somewhat less desirable acoustically than Masonite, but it sure will look cool under finish!

The way the wood is cut and seasoned can make the difference between a fine set of tone wood and kindling for the stove. Construction lumber is usually produced in a highly automated way: big machines can, in some cases, almost literally 'pick' the trees as you would a flower, and the rest of the journey of the log is seldom graced by the touch of a human hand. Tonewood requires more care. For one thing, we tend to prefer 'quartered' wood: pieces cut so that the annual ring lines are perpendicular to the broad face of the piece. This gives the greatest stability, in general, and also contributes cross grain stiffness in soft woods. To get wood like this requires more labor; you can't simply run a log through a gang of closely spaced saws. In the case of softwoods for tops, the best sets are produced from 'split billets': hand split wedges from the log. This helps minimize 'runout': grain that emerges from the face of the piece at an angle, rather than fibers that run along parallel to the surface. Runout reduces stiffness, for one thing.

Tone wood suppliers spend years developing skills both to spot likely good pieces of wood in the log, and to process those logs into the most useful sets of wood for building with. Spruce lumber that you might see at a builder's supply store is the same stuff the tonewood suppliers sell, but they've spared you the need to sort through the rack of useless (from our standpoint) pieces to find the one or two good ones. Once you learn what you are looking at, you can trade time for money in that way, spotting useful boards that you can saw up to make your own guitars. This, of course, presupposes you have the machinery to do the work, which is not a negligible consideration.

I know several tonewood suppliers, and I can tell you that all of them work hard, and none of them are rich. The price of tone wood may seem high, but it's generally money well spent. That said, I do have the wherewithal to re-saw my own sets, and go on regular scouting expeditions to the local hardwood dealers in search of likely wood. It is possible to save a fair amount of money by sawing your own, but you do have to know what you're looking at. I have has students come in with 'curly' maple that turned out merely to be showing the marks of the planer used to smooth the board. Another time I showed a new student a plank of well-quartered Brazilian rosewood, and he thought it looked like an old railroad tie. 'Reading' wood is a skill you'll gain over time.

I strongly encourage my students to start out on a set of Indian rosewood B&S, and a spruce top. Don't get the highest grade: usually the middle-priced stuff is perfectly useful, but not as cosmetically fine, and the price difference can be pretty large. Remember that fancy woods can be very hard to work with, and often don't make an instrument that is all that much better than 'common' IRW and spruce. If tone wood suppliers are not as easy to get in touch with where you are, you might try some 'local' wood. Maple, cherry, and walnut give good results when cut properly, and one or another of them should be available locally in almost any temperate climate area. I've seen some really nice guitars made from pretty plain looking locally sourced wood that did not cost much at all.

What Al said, really.

I resaw some stuff because it's fun, and it is a good bit cheaper if you can get the right lumber, and if you don't run into nasty surprises (cracks, worm damage and so forth) or experience a tools and/or skill malfunction while sawing. Resawing my own stuff has helped me better appreciate the value added to a sawn set, and most of the sets I have I've purchased cut. Had someone else take the 'risk'.

I like indian rosewood (which also grows in Indonesia, in fact I currently have a very large stash of indonesian 'East Indian Rosewood' in my attic) for backs/sides; I like the town, it looks good, it's easy to work and it's relatively affordable even in higher grades (but middle grade woods are just as good tonally and can sometimes be more interesting visually. Win-win as far as I'm concerned). Spruce tops are mostly graded visually, so getting an A or AA grade top from a reliable supplier will get you - again - a top that's just as good tonally and perhaps a little more interesting visually. Price depends on location. I can get good european spruce cheaper than good Sitka since I'm in the EU, the opposite is true for folks in the US of A. Lucky for me, I prefer European spruce anyway. I pay between 35 and 60 euros for my tops, on average, with a few pricier and a few cheaper ones in the arsenal.

My 'most used' woods in guitar making are, more or less cheapest to most expensive:
- Spruce (brace wood cheap, tops more expensive)
- African mahogany (Khaya, Sipo or Sapele, all work, all affordable)
- Maple (mostly use it for trim and decoration)
- Genuine mahogany (Swetenia species, more expensive, finer grain)
- Rosewoods/ebonies (generally get pre-milled, smaller pieces for bridges, fretboards and so forth)

I got my first guitar backs and sides from the scrap pile at a local hardwood lumber importer. I payed $1 per board foot and got enough pieces to make 3 back and side sets. I also got some narrow mahogany boards from the same pile for $1 per board foot and use it to make my kerfed linnings.

Hi,... Martin,.. for the wood prices take your time to searching on the web, especially on the top of this forum page,... I bought some from stewmac for Top wood...
My experienced in Indonesia many sawmill just saw in flat sawn for house building and many of them don't know about quartered sawn, so when I visited them for sawed to quarter sawn they feel strange and asked me: Why do you want to cut like that...??? (quarter sawn) , they feel that's difficult to do... , so Martin I had some quartered sawn wood (just mahogany) for back and side...
Indonesia have many good tone wood but I knew that just for export needs, sent to other countries,.. do you know Macassar Ebony, here I've difficult to buy, just a little dia, just enough for fingerboard or bridge and you can buy at Poso (online) Sulawesi Tengah. unfortunately they sell and they don't know about quarter sawn, they just know to cut for produce the line (grain) so if you buy Pray for that.... to get what you want...

Harry,
Sawyers looking to get the most yield from a log do not like to quarter the wood because it creates a lot of waste. They make money producing the most board feet possible from a given log. Every bit of waste is lost money. It is simply an economic decision from their standpoint.

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http://www.CostaGuitars.com
PMoMC

John, your assesment of ebay suppliers may be correct for many cases, but not for myself (A.Hix Tonewoods), or for RC Tonewoods (the Zootman) both of us are "top notch" in quality.
http://stores.ebay.com/A-Hix-Tonewood-a ... ies?_rdc=1
http://stores.ebay.com/THE-ZOOTMANS-TON ... 7675.l2563

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Guitar Maker and Purveyor of the World's Finest Tonewoods
http://www.aaronhixguitars.com/
http://stores.ebay.com/A-Hix-Tonewood-a ... r-Supplies

I'd like to add my name (Adirondack Tonewood) to A.Hix Tonewoods and RC Tonewoods as a quality ebay seller. While I'm much newer to the tonewood business than they are, like them I try to put out the best possible product, whether on ebay or through my website. Like any other product, you're going to find all ranges of quality. Education and common sense are your best resources when shopping on ebay.

just recently found Aaron on eBay and have purchased several sets from him and they are top notch. His stuff is excellent quality and quick delivery too!