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  #1  
Old 02-06-2018, 08:10 AM
Carl1Mayer Carl1Mayer is offline
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Default Hand Splitting Soundboard Wood

Do any of you all split your own wood from rounds for guitar tops? Ive been considering trying it out given how much they charge for arch top billets and in theory it should give better results with respect to the runout.

If so what tools and techniques have you found to work the best? Froes, wedges, etc. Do you split it green and then dry or dry the whole round first? Also how much excess material do you usually allow for, both in thickness for planing it flat after the split and in length for any end-grain checking from the drying process?
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Old 02-06-2018, 01:07 PM
Alan Carruth Alan Carruth is offline
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I've never had a froe, and so have done all of my splitting with wedges. A froe would be better, though.

You'll get less drying degrade if you can process the wood right off the stump. Split out billets that are not much bigger than you'll want. They will dry quicker so there will be less discoloration and fungus trouble, for one thing. Also, the more curvature there is in the annual ring lines as seen on the end grain the more likely you are to have checking, so you want the included angle of the splits to be as small as possible. Get rid of the very center of the tree; keeping it is asking for trouble.

My biggest project on that line was salvaging a spruce tree that was getting too big in somebody's yard. My friend and I split the rounds up, removed the bark, and painted the ends with some cheap latex paint. You don't need to totally stop moisture leaving the end grain if you've split the wood small, and removed the bark; the goal is to even out the moisture loss through all surfaces. Paint works fine for that.

Find a good place to stack the wood. It should be in the open for good air movement, but not in the sun. The faster you can dry the wood the better.

Stack the pieces up 'square': a layer running 'sideways' and a layer running 'up and down' across those, starting on something that will boost the wood off the ground. You want minimal contact between pieces and maximal air flow through the pile.

Once you've stacked it up, cover the top of the pile with a tarp or something that will keep the rain off. Don't cover the sides.

Turn the pile over in a week or so, checking for mildew and signs of checks. Wash off mildew with a 10% bleach solution. If there are end checks cut them off and put on another coat of paint. Move the wood that was on the bottom of the pile to the top.

We turned our piles three or four times over a couple of months. We had very little drying degrade; much less than 10%, I'd say.
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Old 02-06-2018, 01:20 PM
LouieAtienza LouieAtienza is offline
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I have a froe somewhere... a long while back I had to split cedar shingles for a repair job, and cedar splits rather easily, to the point that you can actually control the taper of the shingle just by how you use the froe - push the handle away from you, the split piece thins, pull it toward you, the piece thickens IIRC the taper was from about 3/4" to 1/4", but this was done purely by eye. Then it was just a matter of spinning the billet around splitting the other side, then turning the billet over, and repeating.

Coincidentally I do have a nice cedar billet, about 24" x 10" x 8", that I considered hand-splitting. However since the billet was split to begin with and straight-as-an-arrow grain, I'm pretty confident in having it resawn, just to maximize my yield.
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Old 02-06-2018, 02:09 PM
arie arie is offline
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have not split top wood but i do split spruce brace wood with a chisel.
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Old 02-06-2018, 03:06 PM
Halcyon/Tinker Halcyon/Tinker is offline
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When we got rounds at my old job, it was important to keep them wet. They were blocked and billeted as fast as possible. The billets were stored under a tarp with a sprinkler hose.

Billets were resawn wet, then stickered on pallets and put immediately into the kiln for a few days, then pulled out and placed in a hold area with fans constantly running.

The idea was to get it from round to sawn top in the fastest time possible. So a lot of teamwork, one to block, one to billet, one to stack billets and bring em to the sawyer, the sawyer, the guy that the sawyer passed the fresh cut tops to for stickering on the pallets. Move move move! It's amazing how much got done so fast.

Most top billets were 22-23" long, no painting of the ends to prevent checking occurred. It got processed so fast, it wasn't needed...
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Old 02-06-2018, 03:29 PM
redir redir is offline
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Where do you buy spruce drums?
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Old 02-06-2018, 07:15 PM
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Bruce Sexauer Bruce Sexauer is offline
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I built a house on Vancouver island a few years ago, and split all of the shakes which covered it with a froe and a mall. I have built a number of guitars from wood I split with those same tools. Somewhere I recently read that western red cedar doesn’t show run out because the trees have no spiral. This is not true as virtually all of my shakes had some twist in them. A split top has to be made thick enough that it can be resawn if one is to get a matched top out of the deal. Not only will the split billet have some twist (in my experience) but it will also get less flat as the split proceeds. It is quite wasteful to split pieces just thin enough to get one top from each piece. Much more efficient is splitting billets big enough to get 4 to 8 tops, typically. This is what I do, and to the best of my knowledge what any of the more serious millwrights would do when making high end guitar tops.
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Old 02-06-2018, 10:01 PM
LouieAtienza LouieAtienza is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Bruce Sexauer View Post
I built a house on Vancouver island a few years ago, and split all of the shakes which covered it with a froe and a mall. I have built a number of guitars from wood I split with those same tools. Somewhere I recently read that western red cedar doesn’t show run out because the trees have no spiral. This is not true as virtually all of my shakes had some twist in them. A split top has to be made thick enough that it can be resawn if one is to get a matched top out of the deal. Not only will the split billet have some twist (in my experience) but it will also get less flat as the split proceeds. It is quite wasteful to split pieces just thin enough to get one top from each piece. Much more efficient is splitting billets big enough to get 4 to 8 tops, typically. This is what I do, and to the best of my knowledge what any of the more serious millwrights would do when making high end guitar tops.
I believe it's the way Godin does it, as well as most other shops that mill their own top woods.

I do theorize that there is probably an optimal area in which the "twist" is less pronounced, maybe the first section or ring from the pith. But if one were to split a billet from said ring, both sides of the billet would be more or less parallel, and thus, when resawn, should yield plates with very little to no run out.
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Old 02-07-2018, 10:44 AM
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Bruce Sexauer Bruce Sexauer is offline
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A good sawyer can saw a top from a small spilt billet so that the run out is greater at one end than the other. Actually eliminating the run out is not an option, generally. When buying a top that was cut this intelligently, it is still usually up to the luthier to figure out which end is more ideal for the lower bout. Surprisingly, no top I’ve ever acquired was marked up to let me know what the sawyer intended. Even after fifty years of playing this game, the degree of run out in a given top is rarely obvious, and I am ocassionaly wrong in my initial assessment.
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Old 02-07-2018, 12:36 PM
Alan Carruth Alan Carruth is offline
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I wrote:
"Split out billets that are not much bigger than you'll want. "

Bruce Sexauer wrote:
"It is quite wasteful to split pieces just thin enough to get one top from each piece."

Absolutely. When I've done this I've made billets about 2" thick on the wide side of the wedge. Given the taper and depending on the diameter of the log there can still be a fair amount of waste in that.

Note that the guideline for seasoning wood is at least a year for every inch of thickness with hardwoods, and a bit less for softwoods. That's another reason to cut them thin. There are lots of such things pulling in opposite directions, and it's a matter of some judgment to find the 'best' way for a particular log.

Michael Gurian gave a talk at a GAL convention about running his saw mill here in NH. He would actually hang resawn tops out on a clothesline when they were dripping wet to get the 'free' moisture out of them as fast as possible. Once that's done things like mildew and discoloration are less of an issue.
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Old 02-07-2018, 03:16 PM
redir redir is offline
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I think I remmebr reading that John Arnold suggested you cut the split quarters into soundboard wood right away and let them dry quickly. In other words skip the billets and bandsaw off 3/16 - 1/4th inch thick book matched sets in the green.

The thing is though as far as saving money on such an endevor you are going to need a pretty nice band saw. Of course the OP is talking about arched top wood too so that's a bit different.
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Old 02-07-2018, 11:29 PM
tadol tadol is offline
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Larrivee used to (and probably still does) split all their tops out of rounds - they would get in Sitka rounds about 6’ dia and 30ish inches tall, that they would roll out into their yard and mark a rough layout on, working around any obvious defects. Then they’d start with wedges and sledges, and start splitting it down into smaller billets, then out came the froes and mallets, and they would carefully split them down into a size just larger than needed. Those would get a face and edge jointed, ripped to width, then go wet into the large resaw they had set up on the first floor machine shop - they even had misters running to keep everything moist - they’d resaw as many matched pairs out of each billet as they could. Smaller billets and cutoffs were run thru a special walking saw they had that could gang resaw many pieces of matched brace stock at once. It was quite an amazing set-up, and they would process quite a few of those rounds all at once, then have quite a large inventory of tops to work with for quite some time. I think the tops got stickered and run thru a kiln setup they had, but I got so involved talking machines and blade sharpening with the guys in the shop I missed the very next part of the tour and didn’t catch up until later - We had a bunch of great pictures, but I’m not sure where they ended up -
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Old 02-08-2018, 09:04 AM
printer2 printer2 is offline
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Took me a while but I found John Arnold's photo series on his cutting tops.

https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/theu...pruce#p1873144
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Old 02-08-2018, 11:15 AM
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Bruce Sexauer Bruce Sexauer is offline
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Those quarter rounds in the John Arnold sequence are too small to yield many guitar tops. Maybe 4 per 1/4 round plus another parlor or two. Then 2 violins or mandolins and some bracewood. Looks like a 20” diameter tree. The outcome would be much rosier with a 30” tree.
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Old 02-08-2018, 12:18 PM
printer2 printer2 is offline
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So size does matter. Sorry, couldn't help it.
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