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  #16  
Old 06-16-2019, 05:37 PM
Floridapicker Floridapicker is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Paraclete View Post
There’s a video out there of the Larrivée company and a particular dead spruce tree that was carefully observed and harvested. It was massive, so I’d guess many hundreds of years.
can you post the link?
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  #17  
Old 06-16-2019, 10:41 PM
robj144 robj144 is offline
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Well if you count the grain lines on one half of your guitar, that's the lower bound.

One of my guitars has nearly 250 lines for half the top, so it's at least 250 years old.
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  #18  
Old 06-17-2019, 07:37 AM
Shades of Blue Shades of Blue is offline
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I wonder if Martin or Taylor would freely give out this information for there guitars if they knew? Maybe give your serial number to Martin and see if they can track down that information, or at least give you a ballpark on the average age of the trees they were using at the time.

Worth a shot maybe?
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  #19  
Old 06-17-2019, 09:44 AM
Alan Carruth Alan Carruth is offline
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The AMS method in the link will tell you the approximate age of the average grain line in the sample you give them. Usually for a top that would be the wood in at the join line, and you'd need to be careful not to include any glue or finish. What you get is the year when those lines were deposited. It was probably not the wood right under the bark, and you can't know how much wood they cut off the outside of the tree before they got to that top. Since some trees can get really big it's possible they cut a piece wide enough for tops outside the one your top came from.

If the piece they cut your top from was 10" wide, and had 20 grain lines to the inch then the tree had been standing at least 200 years (and probably closer to 300, since you can't use the wood right in the middle, and don't usually use the wood right under the bark). If you got an inside billet, make that around 500. That's usually what people mean when they say that the wood is '300 years old' or whatever. I've seen wood with 50 grain lines to the inch.

It only takes a few months to safely take a piece of wood from dead green to 'air dry'; at equilibrium with the air around it. You might think it would be ready to use at that point, but we don't usually consider that to be the case. The reason is that there are changes in the wood that require time, and particularly moisture cycling, to happen. All wood has at least some built-in stress, and this works it's way out over time as the wood moves with changes in relative humidity. It's slow: I've got a sample of spruce that has a lot of 'reaction wood' that was part of a Swiss barn for over 200 years, and maybe much longer. When I cut a slice out of it, it warped a bit, indicating that there is still stress in the wood. That's an extreme example, but shows what's possible.

The general rule of thumb is to season wood for at least 10 years for every inch of thickness. 'Seasoning' is best done in a covered shed exposed to all the variations of the weather. The wood is kept dry but the moisture changes often, which helps to work out the built in stress. Longer seasoning is usually considered better, at least up to a point. Most of the change happens in that first few years, and the rate of improvement is slower the longer you go. Stuff happens; the shed could burn down, or the roof could leak, and you'd get rot setting in; you could lose the whole lot. I've seen a stack of beautiful maple double bass back stock that was riddled with worm holes from being 'stored' on a dirt floor for a while. Degrade can happen fast once it gets started. So there's a balance between holding the wood for a long time to stabilize it, and the risk of having it spoiled. Since the rate of improvement slows and the risk accumulates over time it's probably not worthwhile to store most wood more than a few decades before using it. Storing at a uniform low humidity is safer, but probably doesn't help with the seasoning process as much.
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