Official Luthiers Forum!

I just stumbled across this article and found it interesting--as much for the bibliography as for the article itself. http://www.woodculther.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/bremaud.pdf

thanks for the link!

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Thanks for that: I'll spend some more time with it later. A quick skim turned up one statement I'll disagree with:
"The distribution of properties on 395 species confirmed that very high specific gravity and Young’s modulus can only be found in tropical hardwoods, and gave some statistical evidence that very low damping is also associated to this category of woods."

They must have missed Osage Orange, Pomifera maclura, a North American hardwood that has acoustic properties very much like Brazilian Rosewood. Some samples I've tested have been denser, and had higher stiffness and lower damping than is typical of BRW. I know it's been used as a 'practice' wood for people learning to make violin bows, and one on it's trade names, 'Bodark' (bois d'arc) attests to it's use in pre-Columbian times. It makes a very nice sounding guitar indeed.

I've heard nothing but good things about Osage orange (it has a resonant reputation for resonance), but I've never worked with it. Figure 3 in this paper http://hal.cirad.fr/docs/00/80/83/98/PDF/Mechanical_damping_wood_Bremaud_al.pdf shows some ranges of measured damping for various botanical families. They show Moraceae as overlapping the range for rosewoods, but not reaching the lowest damping levels that rosewoods are capable of. I have no idea whether they included Osage orange in their Moraceae sample. Alan, the authors might enjoy hearing from you.

great to see a relevant professional paper

I'd like to find more papers

There are several places you can get OO here locally, where the boards are wide enough , but there must be places closer to you in va.There is a luthier in tenn that runs a convenience store uses it for steel strings forgot his name??

This guy must be pretty smart because he used Roman numerals for dates.
That's just N.V.T.S. (nuts)

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