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Old 04-22-2021, 04:53 AM
Tannin Tannin is offline
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Default New build in local timbers

This week I ordered my first made-to-order instrument. It wil be at leat a year, more likely two before I have it, but the process is now underway.

How did I get to this point? Well, we have a small house and in the interest of domestic peace (and taking into account what is fair and reasonable) there is room for one more guitar and probably not two more, at least not for the time being. Longer-term we will build another room or two on. Meanwhile, only one more guitar unless I sell one, and I'm not going to do that.

So I've been having a real struggle making up my mind which one to get. I've nearly, nearly bought about ten.

First it was a Maton Vera May - 808 body, Lutz Spruce on Blackwood, limited edition to celebrate Vera May's 100th birthday. (Vera is the wife of Bill May, the "May" in "May-Tone", later "Maton". Vera and Bill built the business together and she is now 101 and still going strong.) I noticed that a Melbourne shop I've dealt with happily before had a Vera May at the pre-pandemic price. Luckily (?) they sold it one day before I arrived in Melbourne to try it out.

Along the way I tried a Maton Artist in Launceston - another 808 in spruce and Blackwood. It was a bit of an eye-opener; Played it side by side with my Messiah 808 (Maton's top-of-the-range spruce and rosewood model) it measured up very well indeed. A different, dryer, more woody sound, but in no way outclassed. They would make an excellent matched pair. Very tempted.

Then on to Melbourne and a long drive to Mornington (of all places) where the local music shop has a range of guitars in very interesting local timbers made by a chap called Eborall. https://nepeanmusic.com.au/collections/acoustic-guitars I particularly liked the look of the Huon Pine jumbo but in the event, I didn't especially care for that one. (It wasn't a patch on my little Huon Pine Cole Clark Angel.) I played all the others too and several were very nice, but none really rang my bell. He likes a Gibson sound and (very unusually) fits extra-light .11 strings as standard, so close but no cigar.

After that, three beauties in South Melbourne: the one I particularly went to look at was Huss and Dalton maple-back jumbo, three years old and in perfect condition: $5000 where a new one is about $7300. I actually decided to buy that one, but changed my mind at the last moment. I was also very taken with a pair of Martin 000s, a 000-18, and a CEO-7 (which is essentially the same thing with a Red Spruce top and a horrible Gibson-style sunburst).

And then there is the prospect of Maton's 75th Anniversary model: Sitka Spruce and Blackwood on a new body style for them. They have for many years made three bodies, the concert-size 808, a jumbo, and a dreadnought. The new body style, which they have trialled with a series of custom shop models these last couple of years, is similar to the 808 but a little larger and deeper, say about Martin OM size. Being new, they have named it the "Traditional" body. (Duh!) But the guitars will be lovely, no doubt about that. Probably the only thing that stopped me ordering one is the finish: a subtle sunburst. Subtle or not, I dislike sunbursts. Silly reason, but there you go.

And then I walked into the second-hand shop here in Hobart where I bought the Thunderhawk baritone six months ago. They remembered me. Did I want to sell the Thunderhawk? No. They have a buyer in the States offering top dollar. Nope. Not for sale. OK.

So they showed me a truly wonderful old Guild, a GF-60 spruce and rosewood mini-jumbo from the late 1980s, one of only about 300 ever made. The "G" stands for the designer, George Gruhn (as in the Gruhn Guitars), and it is unique in my experience in that it seems to combine the depth and bass punch of a good jumbo (say that lovely Huss and Dalton) with the delicacy and clear, fine trebles of a good orchestra model (like my Messiah). That is an incredibly rare combination. I really, really liked that one - but it was only a quick look and I didn't have one of my own guitars there with me to provide a known standard as a baseline. (Several times now my habit of bringing one of my own guitars into a shop has saved me from buying something.) To make things worse, they also had a 2009 Martin HD-28. I've played D-28s and a new HD-28 before and quite liked them (I had a new D-28 on my shortlist before I bought the Messiah this time last year) but this one was on another level. It just took me by the scruff of the neck and said "Play bluegrass on me! Now!" Other stuff too, but especially country-folk and bluegrass and fast blues-rock. A specialist guitar - and if you have five or six instruments already, that's exactly what you want, something different.

In short, I've been wandering around the guitar shops of southern Australia eyeing off beauties like a drunken sailor at a nurses' ball.
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Tacoma Thunderhawk baritone, spruce & maple.
Maton SRS60C, cedar & Queensland Maple.
Maton Messiah 808, spruce & rosewood.
Cole Clark Angel 3, Huon Pine & silkwood.
Cole Clark Fat Lady 2 12-string, Bunya & Blackwood.
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Old 04-22-2021, 04:54 AM
Tannin Tannin is offline
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But I have finally decided to do something else completely: order something you can't buy new. So the other day, I took the Thunderhawk into my local Hobart luthier. Paul has done three or four small set-up jobs for me and is a nice chap, very down-to-earth. So I took him the Thunderhawk and said "This is my favourite guitar - well, one of my favourites - tell me what you think of it and can you build something along the same sort of theme?" He looked at it, we talked about the aspects of it I particularly liked (notably the 730mm scale length and that cello-like tone on the bass notes) and he agreed with me that it is something special.

As luck would have it, he has recently been thinking about building a baritone as it would be something different for him. His typical guitars are small body concert types with falcate bracing - i.e., small body big sound - but he agrees with me that a big body is probably necessary for those low tones. He says it looks like an interesting project he'll enjoy working on.

It is going to take a long time: given his existing commissions, Paul is unlikely to start work on mine this year. I'm comfortable with that. And who can say? Maybe knowing that I have a guitar on order, even if it's not going to be finished for another year or more, will help me resist the temptation to buy one of every other instrument I see. (Or maybe not.)
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Tacoma Thunderhawk baritone, spruce & maple.
Maton SRS60C, cedar & Queensland Maple.
Maton Messiah 808, spruce & rosewood.
Cole Clark Angel 3, Huon Pine & silkwood.
Cole Clark Fat Lady 2 12-string, Bunya & Blackwood.
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Old 04-22-2021, 04:57 AM
Tannin Tannin is offline
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The plans are subject to change as we refine our ideas, but currently we have penciled in:

BODY: A big jumbo, no cutaway. Dimensions similar to those of the Thunderhawk - 450mm across the lower bout. (That's 18 inches.)

SCALE LENGTH: 730mm, give or take. (Same as the Thunderhawk: most baritones are much shorter at around 690-700mm. Compare with a standard six-string at 650mm and most Gibsons at around 630mm, or a Precision bass at 860mm.)

TUNING: B to B or possibly C to C. I'm still experimenting with strings and tunings on the Thunderhawk.

NUT WIDTH: 48mm.

TOP: King Billy Pine (Athrotaxis selaginoides). This is a scarce Tasmanian conifer found only at mid-to-high altitudes in high rainfall districts. It is one of the famous Tasmanian rainforest conifer trio: Huon Pine, King Billy Pine, and Celery Top. It is a fairly light, very slow-growing timber, stiff and strong along the grain, weaker across the grain. Figuring varies, but like most softwoods is not so obvious. I'm thinking that it might be sensible to go for a fine, straight-grained piece rather than a figured one, especially as we are looking at a very large top. I'm assuming that would be stronger (and cheaper), but I'll take Paul's advice. Despite its rarity, King Billy is a well-known tonewood, said to be similar to Western Red Cedar but a little stiffer. See https://www.tasmanianspecialtimbers....ng-billy-pine/ King Billy Pine is not logged anymore, it is illegal to cut down a living tree, and most supplies of it come from dwindling caches or are recycled from wasteful past uses such as construction timber.

BACK AND SIDES: Myrtle Beech (Nothofagus cunninghamii, also known as Tasmanian myrtle or tiger myrtle). As so often with botanical common names, this species isn't a myrtle, it's a Nothofagus - one of the southern beeches, a family of Gondwanian trees which grow all around the southern part of the globe, nearly always in colder, more mountainous districts. They are related to the birch, beech, casuarina (she-oak), and walnut families. Fifty million years ago, Nothofagus covered vast areas of what is now New Zealand, Australia, South America, and Antarctica. That was before the continents drifted north and slowly warmed and dried (or froze solid in the case of Antarctica), and newfangled tree families like the wattles (acacias) and the gums (eucalypts) and the she-oaks (casurinas) took over. Today, Nothofagus species are only found in cold wet places. Myrtle Beech is a hard, quite heavy wood, surprisingly easy to work with and well known as a guitar timber, though uncommon because it is fairly rare and expensive, very expensive in the case of "tiger myrtle" (which is simply the same species when infected by a fungus which gives it a spectacular streaky appearance much prized by wood fanciers). I'll see what Paul can find and how much they are asking for it before deciding. See http://www.gladstoneluthiers.com/tiger-myrtle.html Plain Myrtle Beech has the exact same tonal qualities after all, and I want to play it, not look at it. On the other hand, in the context of spending maybe $5000 for a guitar, what's another few hundred? Finding a piece of tiger myrtle is difficult: finding it in a size suitable for a 450mm guitar back might be impossible. For this reason, and also because we think it will look nice, we anticipate making a three-piece back. We have it in mind to use a contrasting centre strip, possibly Southern Sassafras (Atherosperma moschatum).

NECK: A 14-fret neck-body join. I'd be happy with a 12-fret but with a scale this long that would be impractical. Happy for Paul to choose whatever timber he prefers to work with. He says something relatively light, as Myrtle Beech is too heavy and unbalanced. The way I see it, necks are all about strength and stability, decorative timber is for bodies and headstocks. So probably Queensland Maple or Blackwood: both are well understood, workable, stable, and readily available. But he may have a better idea.

FINERBOARD: Probably Drooping She-oak (Casurina stricta), though we might look at something more exotic like Mulga or Gidgee (both desert acacias) and I'll ask him about Spotted Gum (Corymbia maculata), a very hard,fine-grained, heavy timber used for decking and specialist high-wear tasks like axle bearings for wooden carts.
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Tacoma Thunderhawk baritone, spruce & maple.
Maton SRS60C, cedar & Queensland Maple.
Maton Messiah 808, spruce & rosewood.
Cole Clark Angel 3, Huon Pine & silkwood.
Cole Clark Fat Lady 2 12-string, Bunya & Blackwood.
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Old 04-22-2021, 09:35 AM
Jamiejoon Jamiejoon is offline
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Very cool build, and very entertaining story. I always thought casuarina was a legume, but now I see it is its own family. Thank you for enlightening me. If you are looking for votes on fingerboard, here is a vote for gidgee!
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Old 04-22-2021, 10:22 AM
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nacluth nacluth is offline
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I built a 14 fret 000 some years back with King Billy Pine/Australian Blackwood. It had a Mulga fretboard and a Tasmanian Myrtle bridge. It was a great instrument. In retrospect, I would probably put a slightly heavier bridge on it if I did it again. The response was almost too immediate.

I have also built a larger guitar with Tasmanian Myrtle back and sides and it was a great sounding big guitar. I expect that you will love it. And I am jealous that so many good woods are now so hard to find in the states. Treasure this local build!
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Old 04-22-2021, 10:38 AM
perttime perttime is offline
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That is a huge guitar. I hope you have determined that it is a good size for you to play.
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Old 04-22-2021, 10:51 AM
Jamiejoon Jamiejoon is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by perttime View Post
That is a huge guitar. I hope you have determined that it is a good size for you to play.
I echo that. I have several SJ's that don't get played enough because they irritate my injured shoulder. A Jumbo would never work for me.
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Old 04-22-2021, 05:27 PM
Tannin Tannin is offline
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Cheers all.

Jamie, yes, there are close to 100 species of Casurina and its close relatives in the family. Most are large shrubs or small trees, several (River she-oak, Buloak, Belah) grow pretty big. You have used Gidgee in the past then?

Ryan, that's good to hear. Those timbers are hard to find here too, and will only get more difficult to get as time goes by. But there is no hurry to find them. Paul won't be free to start building for a year or so yet.

Jamie and Pertime, no worries on that front. We are looking at the same dimensions as my Thunderhawk for body and scale length, and I play that one happily. Perhaps being a reformed bass player helps.

Thanks for all the good wishes. I'll update when there is news, which is likely to be some time in 2022.
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Tacoma Thunderhawk baritone, spruce & maple.
Maton SRS60C, cedar & Queensland Maple.
Maton Messiah 808, spruce & rosewood.
Cole Clark Angel 3, Huon Pine & silkwood.
Cole Clark Fat Lady 2 12-string, Bunya & Blackwood.
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Old 04-22-2021, 05:37 PM
Jamiejoon Jamiejoon is offline
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Tannin, I have not used Gidgee, but I think it is gorgeous (and very hard) wood and have a build using it for back and sides coming relatively soon. That luthier likes gidgee very much. Happy to connect you with the luthier if you want to ask his opinion.

Jamie
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Old 04-22-2021, 08:03 PM
The Bard Rocks The Bard Rocks is offline
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Should be mucho fun. I have one being made of Tiger Myrtle. It's a wood that has commanded my respect ever since I first heard of it; its aura just grows and grows.
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Fay OM Sinker Redwood/Tiger Myrtle
Sexauer L00 Adk/Magnolia For Sale
Hatcher Jumbo Bearclaw/"Bacon" Padauk
Goodall Jumbo POC/flamed Mahogany
Appollonio 12 POC/Myrtle
MJ Franks Resonator, all Australian Blackwood
Goodman J45 Lutz/fiddleback Mahogany
Blackbird "Lucky 13" - carbon fiber
'31 National Duolian
+ many other stringed instruments.
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Old 04-22-2021, 08:58 PM
Wade Hampton Wade Hampton is online now
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Tannin - first, your post cracked me up when it mentioned “Myrtle Beech.” I have South Carolina roots, and Myrtle Beach is a major resort town in the state, probably the single most popular and important.

Also, I had a baritone built for me in 1999. You’re wise to get the long scale, as it definitely has a positive impact on the projection. Long scale acoustic baritone guitars cut through better than short scale examples, pure and simple.

Anyway, it’s a worthy project and I’ll be interested to follow its progress here.


Wade Hampton Miller
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Old 04-23-2021, 02:53 AM
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Hi Tannin, thanks for starting the build thread…it promises to be a beauty.

I’ve was lucky to have a build in Aussie and Kiwi woods a few years ago with Laurie Williams - the thread is here. FYI we sourced the Tassie blackwood from Distinctive Timbers in Devonport and at the time they had some very fine tiger myrtle. The Aussie desert timbers (the old man wodjil and red morrel burl) came from a great little company in Western Oz called Djarilmari who I would happily deal with again. They might both be worth a look as you contemplate interesting woods for various parts of the guitar.

And a repost of what I mentioned recently to Zandit for bari strings – Newtone baritone strings are great (IMHO at least) and easily bought online direct from the makers in the UK at A$17 per set plus very reasonable postage.

Finally, a question for you and the others – what characteristics do you attribute to myrtle as a tonewood?

Col
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Old 04-23-2021, 06:47 PM
Tannin Tannin is offline
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Cheers all.

Jamie, thank you for that kind thought. We are a long way away from making a fretboard - at least a year given Paul's existing orders - so I'll come back to this question when the time comes. Gidgee should make a very interesting back and sides wood. Be sure to post about it when you have progress.

My other passion (apart from playing guitar) is wildlife photography. I've travelled hundreds of thousands of kilometres across and around the continent photographing wildlife (birds in particular, but all sorts) and learning how to read country. A big part of that is getting to know the flora. Here is an old 2008 snapshot of a stand of Gidgee shortly after rain in semi-arid Queensland, not far from Cunnamulla. That's fairly typical Gidgee country, though the lush green grasses are of course seasonal.



I know the dry country flora much better than the flora of Tasmania or the wet south-east of Australia. One day, I'll look into using some of those outback timbers for a guitar: I have several special favourites in mind - but one thing at a time.

Here is a King Billy Pine growing on the edge of a lake in the Hartz Mountains, south-west of Hobart. As you can see from the standing dead timber in the background, there has been a fire some years prior: the eucalypts (most likely Snow Gums) have recovered but fire destroys King Billy Pines unless they are protected by (for example) rock and water.




The Bard: I've only played one Myrtle Beech (tiger myrtle) guitar, they are scarce. The one I tried was here: https://nepeanmusic.com.au/collectio...35750761857174 - I mentioned it in my first post above. I didn't care for it. It is a big, lightly built guitar and I'm not sure that Huon Pine was a good choice for the top. (Huon Pine is said to be best on small guitars: my little Angel certainly works with it.) Nor did I care for the overly light strings fitted. That aside, my Myrtle Beech experience is limited to reputation, to You-tube, and to listening to the striking bell-like ring it makes when you tap an off-cut the size of a paperback book. None of these are very meaningful! But Paul is happy to use it and I trust him to make it work. I like his approach: he said he could guaranteee that the guitar would be well-built and very playable, and that it would have a good sound, but he couldn't guarantee that I would like the sound. I said "fair enough, happy to go ahead on that basis".

Wade: you made me chuckle.

Col: that's a fantastic-looking guitar, and I read the thread with considerable interest. It sparks a thought, and a story, which half-belongs in that thread, half in this one. Maybe I'll put in a new post underneath this one.
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Tacoma Thunderhawk baritone, spruce & maple.
Maton SRS60C, cedar & Queensland Maple.
Maton Messiah 808, spruce & rosewood.
Cole Clark Angel 3, Huon Pine & silkwood.
Cole Clark Fat Lady 2 12-string, Bunya & Blackwood.
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Old 04-25-2021, 04:49 AM
Tannin Tannin is offline
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More than 50 years ago my family moved to a big, run-down old house in the mountains 40 miles from Melbourne. When it was built in the 1890s, it had been rather grand. No such thing as air conditioning back then: only very posh people could afford to build a big house in the mountains just to get away from the oppressive heat of an Australian summer. Little by little over the next ten years or so, my parents did it up. Among the many tasks they took on was renovating what we called "the big room", a huge room with 14-foot ceilings which had once been a ball room. They removed quite a number of the original vertical lining boards. These were 14 feet long, 6 inches or so wide, and the best part of an inch thick - that's a crazily wasteful thickness for boards to line internal walls, but in the 1890s there was a whole untouched continent full of wildlife and trees to pillage: horrendous waste of resources was a perfectly normal thing.

I gave very little thought to all this at the time. I was a child, then a teenager leaving home to live and work in the Big Smoke 40 miles down the road. Meanwhile my father kept the leftover timber to one side, and took it with him when they sold the house around 1980. In 1983, the Ash Wednesday bushfires burned the old house to the ground (along with more than 3000 others). All that remains of the house today is the pile of timber in my father's garage.

Now it obviously won't be quarter sawn, but there is quite a lot of it and something like 20% of the planks will have been cut on the correct angle anyway. It's 130 years old, and it is all old-growth Queensland Kauri.

Let's back up a little: there are 22 kauri (Agathis) species, one from the north of New Zealand, three from Queensland, one from Patagonia, with the others scattered generously across the south-west Pacific and as far north as the Malay Peninsula. By far the best-known one is New Zealand Kauri (Agathis robusta), often just called "Kauri", but most of the others are quite similar. This timber of my father's is probably Queensland Kauri (Agathis robusta) but could be Bull Kauri (A. microstachya) or Blue Kauri (A. atropurpurea). Queensland Kauri is pretty much unobtainable these days: all the big stands were cut down 100 years ago and the country where it grows turned into farmland or housing estates. There is a little in national parks (obviously and rightfully protected against logging), not much else.

Anyway, I have it in mind to fish the old boards out and have a look at them next time I'm over there (later on this year). I'm welcome to take it if I want it and make space in his garage. Some years ago I was planning to make bookshelves out of it one day, but seeing what the Kiwis do with Kauri as a tonewood, well, let's explore those options first, at least for the quarter-sawn boards. I'll have to have it shipped over here, which means paying for a truck to pick it up, load it on a ship, and another truck to bring it here - maybe $1000, maybe double that amount. I can't take 14 foot planks on a roof rack or a trailer, and I'm reluctant to cut them just for transport. So I'll look first and figure out what to do later.
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Tacoma Thunderhawk baritone, spruce & maple.
Maton SRS60C, cedar & Queensland Maple.
Maton Messiah 808, spruce & rosewood.
Cole Clark Angel 3, Huon Pine & silkwood.
Cole Clark Fat Lady 2 12-string, Bunya & Blackwood.
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Old 04-25-2021, 06:04 AM
perttime perttime is offline
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Queensland Kauri
https://www.wood-database.com/queensland-kauri/
At a quick look, weight and hardness are in the same ballpark as many species of Spruce and Pine
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