Years ago I was very impressed when I first heard about the Ford Rouge Falls Plant. It was a gigantic facility that in it's prime employed 100,000 people.
What particularly impressed me was how it was set up to directly import the raw materials and coal for their on-site power station.
Basically, raw materials like iron ore and coal came in one side and automobiles came out the other!
So in my comparably minuscule way I thought I'd show what I can do.
The raw materials such as these logs come in the big door, right into where I mill the wood:
The wood then works it way through my studio and guitars come out this little door on the side
:
Easy peasy, right?
The thing of it is there are some advantages of doing my own milling. I pick the cuts I want for instance, when planning it out I might have the opportunity to get two really great woods sets as opposed to four OK ones.
If I am cutting a fretboard, bridge, binding and a headplate all from the same log there isn't much trouble making them match.
I like the treasure hunt feel of cutting into a log.
Here are what these four logs are:
Desert Ironwood makes awesome fretboards, bridges, bindings, overlays, rosettes. It is very comparable to Snakewood as far as color, lack of pores and hardness but it has nice black grain lines and a golden fleck that shines when the light is right. It doesn't have Snakewoods' check figure.
Hollis Applewood, I'm going to cut into this one and then decide. It came from an apple orchard a couple towns over from me here in New Hampshire. They were clearing out some of their old trees and this was the largest log I could fit in my Mini. An interesting feature of this log is you can see where the tree was originally grafted to the root set.
Gabon Ebony, I bought this locally but it comes from Africa. Everyone knows what you do with Gabon Black Ebony.
Sugar Hard Maple, this came from a huge old tree that I took down next to my firewood crib. It was old and hollow. I am hoping to find some nice figure and spalting in this log. If not I'll keep chopping and throw it into that wood crib.
Thanks for viewing!
Mark