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chemicaly soaked timbers
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Tom Blackshear
Posts: 2304
Joined: Apr. 15 2008
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 RE: chemicaly soaked timbers (in reply to Kevin James Shanahan)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Kevin James Shanahan
Thought you guys might like this article I found interesting .
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/03/130325135302.htm
The retired Texas A&M professor has himself made violins that included carefully crafted woods soaked in a variety of chemicals.........
In the mid 80's I was under a 5 year contract with Joseph to build guitars with his top wood treatment. The PhD professor Dr. Philpott was the instigator of this coming together between us and it lasted one year due to the good Dr. not being able to secure the $250,000 grant we were suppose to get for this venture.
I built 4-5 guitars with Joseph's wood treatment and experienced the differences the treatment made for the top's tone. My finding was that guitars and violins are different for the creation of tone and voicing. They are not the same when it comes to washing out the pectin in wood pores, as the guitar needs the pectin to have a ringing sensation, while the violin needs to get rid of it.
But one interesting thing was that the over-all process stiffened the wood and allowed certain sound to escape through the top more easily. However, directing tone in a guitar's top is done more efficiently by the way you place fan bracing with its finely tuned aspects, which follows top graduation technique. All of this is in the hands of the Guitar Maker.
I might add that perhaps Joseph would have done better to have contracted a violin master builder to use his wood treatment instead of Joseph trying to re-tune Chinese copies. But I understand Joseph's thinking to try and keep a better sounding violin at an affordable price, which was $6,000 at that time,
BTW, I have one spruce top left if anyone should choose to pay me $50,000.00 US for a special Miguel Rodriguez style classical guitar with Church Door rosewood :-)
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Tom Blackshear Guitar maker
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REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE |
Date Mar. 30 2013 12:06:08
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estebanana
Posts: 9370
Joined: Oct. 16 2009
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RE: chemicaly soaked timbers (in reply to Kevin James Shanahan)
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I Remember when I lived in Big Sur CA in the early 1980's there was a summer called the Summer of the Seaweed.
The US Coast Guard was chasing some smugglers up the coast and as the Coast Guard gained on them they threw the cargo over board. It was several bales of marijuana, I don't know how big they were, several kilos each, but there were dozens of them washing up onto the shore of well known surf beach called Fullers Reef.
Fullers was run by a local crew of tough guys, surfers who lived in their VW vans all summer on the Pacific Coast Highway. The wetsuit draped caravan over looked the ocean from 400 ft high cliffs covered with the dusty ecceum plant, sage thickets and lots of blue belly lizards. The boys at Fullers kept non locals at bay, by among other un savory strategies, setting a non local guys car on fire by the side of the road after he got into a beef with one of the local heavies. The guy who's car they torched happened to have been a lawyer who lived up on Monterey. I don't know how that turned out.
Part of the charm of Big Sur is that even though Henry Miller had long passed away, Richard Brautigan no longer lived there had had committed suicide in Bolinas CA, just north of San Francisco, Big Sur Still had a cast of celebrated roadside characters. Brautigan and Miller wrote about them back in the old days, but the new breed was just as interesting as the ones in the novels and short stories.
There was a Kiwi who lived near the trailhead of Fullers Beach in his van, his name was Terry, but most of us called him 'Hide'. He made leather hiking sandals that all the surfers in the area used to traverse the steep goat trails that led from the cliffs to the beach. I had a pair that Hide made for me. You would go find him by the side of the road and ask him for a pair of sandals, he would pull out a piece of cardboard and a sharpie pen and trace your foot ask a few questions and measure your arch. You would give him half of the money in deposit come back in two weeks. His father was a cobbler back in New Zealand and he learned shoe making from his dad and was an excellent craftsman. Hide was also a published author, he wrote mystery novels and it was rumored he had a doctorate degree in something like biology. But this part of the story is not leading anywhere so back to the white punks on dope of Fullers beach.
The day the Seaweed washed up the big boys cleared the beach of all the non essential personnel, meaning the twurps from the city. They set out on surfboards and paddled out half a mile or more scouting the area beyond the kelp beds. The bundles of seaweed were getting stuck in the kelp and they dutifully ridded mother nature of this unwanted sea trash. Surfers really were the first conservationists of the ocean in California.
Once all the seaweed was collected, the surf mafia set about drying it and selling it about town. It became all the rage. I don't smoke, I have asthma, but I was told the salty sea water imparted a raspy after effect giving the smoker a bit of a scratchy throat. But that minor irritation did not deter the robust usage of this seaborne product.
I don't want to moralize and make this into an allegory, or worse yet a pretentious exegesis on the evils of drugs. But I think you know where this is headed, so brace yourself. The Seaweed did not make great violins, but if one smoked enough they all sounded like Stads.
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https://www.stephenfaulkguitars.com
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Date Mar. 31 2013 2:11:41
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