jd;

I should be more clear. What I've found is that the better the wooden instrument the more fragile it seems to be.

A village friend purchased an expensive new Martin and took it with him to a beach in California, then went to a mountain area, and his guitar cracked.

I know that some wooden guitars last a long time, even without obsessive care. I suspect those guitars are not designed to the same level of finesse as the better instruments.

That was one of my confoundments as I worked toward better and better guitars--and one of the reasons that I moved toward carbon fiber.