Official Luthiers Forum!

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Lol......."The Godfather"....leave the gun, take the cannoli

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"After forty-nine years of violin building, I have decided that the search for a varnish is similar to the fox hunt. The fun is in the hunt."
Jack Batts Maker and Repairer of Fine Violins

My suggestion would be to buy a couple dozen modest priced soundboard sets. If you buy them 12 at a time you usually get a price break. These will last you through your college years and as you use them you will gain a better understanding of the wood. At some point you may want to add to them so you have some ageing as you are using the others.
For B&S wood you might do well to buy half a dozen sets of EIR and try some less expensive alternative species to give you a feel for working with different woods.
At this point in your budding career I wouldn't invest too heavily in wood. After the blush is off the rose your life goals may change and guitarmaking may become more of a hobby interest. And as Burton pointed out there may be some question of which woods we are allowed to "traffic" in.

When I started collecting wood I would have killed for great sets of Brazilian rosewood,macassar ebony, ziricote cocobolo ,etc.etc.etc.

I was a tonewood dealer for around five years so a lot of gorgeous sets passed through my hot little hands.

I particularly remember two sets of "brain" quilt sapele that I sold for$ 200 a set

I was fortunate enough to stumble onto a great stash of Cuban mahogany from St. Croix-I sold around 100 sets and only kept 4 or 5 sets-wish I kept more!!

So fast forward 35 years of collecting wood -and what am I "lusting" after now (drum roll please)...........

Birch,Oak,soft maple (to paint black) and poplar................................Go Figure (pun intended)

Brad - when you say soft maple - which species are you meaning? Lots of silver maple around here. What do you use it for?

Solid advice, thanks I think my life goals are always going to be guitar-playing related, and almost certainly guitar-building related. It is most likely going to start off as a part-time/ hobby thing and hopefully become a bigger and bigger part of my life It seems to me that laws regarding wood 'trafficking' are much less stringent or enforced here in Britain, or am I wrong?

Corky,
I don't Know which species-I buy it a M.L. Condons in White Plains-they just sell it as "soft maple" perfectly clear(flatsawn) and cheap.

I am going to use it for backs and sides to paint black.

Brad

Ha - I'm a local, too. That's my favorite spot for checking out odds and ends.

I have been building off and on for about 40 years and over the years have always ended up buying what ever the best quality I could afford at the time and with any extra cash stocking up on extra sets. Because I started out building classical guitars with Brazilian Rosewood, that is what I have the largest "unconfirmed, alleged, supposedly, maybe" (that may not be enough to stave off "the gibson swat team") stockpile of Brazilian Rosewood. Back before Todd and Tom bought out Bill Lewis and formed Luthiers Merchantile, tight grained quartersawn Brazilian Rosewood sets could be had for $75.00 and in LMI's first catalog that was the going price. While I still have a few dozen sets, the fact is that regardless of price I could not buy the quality I have if I wanted to as the reality is that the grade of most of the wood you will get 10 years from now will be no where it is today and that situation will not get any better.

Mahogany is the same and the color of East Indian Rosewood sets today is just this side of cardboard compared to the quality that standard sets used to be. Same with Mediterranean Cypress... the quality today would have been rejected 10 years ago and the price of Cypress is now almost the same or more as Rosewood. If you can afford to buy a better grade today and save them, do so as the future grades will most likely be no where close.

Thank god for Lutz Spruce and guys like John Arnold who with Ted Davis worked to harvest Adirondack Spruce because the quality of most top woods is also in decline and great guitars come from great tops. I have a stash of hand picked German, Swiss and Italian Spruce tops of which some of the sets are as old as 80 years but acid rain and declining forests in Europe have resulted in lesser quality Spruce as well.

If I were to stock up on more guitar wood today I would stockpile native hardwoods that are getting harder to source in great quality namely Port Orford Cedar (Lawson Cypress), Myrtle, Alaskan Yellow Cedar, Monterey Cypress and for tops the best quality Lutz Spruce, Englemann Spruce, Sitka Spruce (already getting harder to get good quality) and Redwood. Western Red Cedar is still okay in quantity but the general quality is declining as younger trees are now being harvested. Really good Adirondack Spruce is worth every penny if you are building steel strings so that makes sense to stockpile.

As laws like the Lacey Act get tougher and make it harder to impossible to source some of the woods guitars have always been made of, alternate woods will be adopted which means more walnut, cherry and non-figured maple than in the past.

With the current climate around Lacey Act and CITES making things so uncertain around owning and building with tropical woods like rosewoods, those of us who have stockpiled BRW, Ebonies and other valuable woods will have to wait to see how legislation shakes out in regards to stockpiles. I can tell you that it is probably definitely not safe to stockpile BRW that has been freshly cut from "old house beams"

How to store your stockpiled wood? Always best when possible to stock evenly and sticker between each layer so air can circulate evenly to minimize movement, warping and cracking. The stickers do not have to be large, mine are 10mm by 10mm by slightly wider than any of the widths of the pieces in the stack.

So last, why do I stockpile as much wood as I do? When I build a guitar I go through my tops and rate them as to what I hear, flex and lastly see and stack rank the top relative to the others I have. I usually will pick close to the best available and then when I get more tops (when I find deals or a quality that is better than usual) I regrade them so I always am using close to the best of what I have. That way for the uncertain future I will always be able to build the best possible with the best wood available, all because I stocked up.