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Sitka spruce vs Canadian spruce?
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estebanana
Posts: 9351
Joined: Oct. 16 2009
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 RE: Sitka spruce vs Canadian spruce? (in reply to Ahmed Flamenco)
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Sitka works just fine, I've made several Santos models with sitka. John Gilbert used sitka for most of his classical guitars and those guitars are sought out by concert artists still today.
Find sitka that is very stiff across the grain you can thin it enough to reduce the weight. Spruce can be funny, you may find some Sitka that is better than some European spruce and some Engelmann better then both of those two kinds. There are interesting natural hybrids of the spruces, Englemann and Sitka have interbred in some places in the wild, another subject.
Santos tops are often not super cosmetically perfect, look at them in internet searches. He sometimes joined three pieces to get a top which most customers today think is odd, but its perfectly fine. He also added wings to lower bouts to get the width, which more makers do than you may think. If yo can make flawless joints you can me multi piece tops. In Spain when Santos was building they often used what they could get because times were tough.
The insides of his guitars are not always super cleanly made. And one important thing to note is that he used solid liners, usually Beech wood or other left over furniture making wood. He made as many with solid liners as with glue blocks.
Any Spruce will make a good Santos guitar, the thing is to research as much as possible how he worked. Search for pictures of this guitars which are under repair of with the back off. There's not much unfortunately, but every bit helps.
I got some funny advice on tops wen I first started. I lived near the same lumber yard John Gilbert bought his Sitka spruce at and I looked through he same racks of pattern making Template grade spruce he and many others in the area looked through to find spruce. Template spruce is mostly quarter sawn boards that are about 1/4" thick or slightly more and usually from 4 to 8" wide and very long. It was used by pattern makers for creating the molds for investment casting of iron tools, bridge parts, etc. and this lumber yard sold it as a specialty during the hey day of parts making. They had one floor devoted to storage of this wood and by the time I had gotten there is was 50 years old and the best of the best guitar making pieces were mostly gone. Most guitars makers in the area had some of this templet stock for fan braces.
I bought it several times and made three and four piece tops with it. I gave a piece of it to the fellow to showed me how to build and he really liked it. I gave him a bit more. He continued to build with his European spruce which he had had a large stock since the 1960's, then he moved to another state and I did nor see him working any more.
I got a call from a salesman at a well known classical guitar shop in my area and he asked me to come over and have a look at the guitar he had just acquired from my "teacher". As soon as I saw the top I knew the guitar was made with the Sitka I left with him. It was a fantastic guitar, heaven would open up wen you played a C chord. It did not have any of the bad qualities people say come with sitka, it was big, sweet, robust and just a guitar you did not want put down. So the advice I got for this guy who taught me was it's the kind of spruce, it's just who you use it. And as my 'lessons" went he told me to get as much of this spruce as possible a practice joining it into multi piece tops as a way of learning to match grain lines and add wings and do nice repair work. Some of those tops ended up being too soft across the grain and flexed too much to make a good guitar, so I did not use them. The tops that were stiff enough made good guitars.
I prefer good Sitka to Engelmann if I can get it, and you don't know what Santos used when he really needed to find top wood. He could have used spruce packing crates or shipping pallets and made three piece tops with the wood. His contemporary Domingo Esteso certainly shows in his work that he saved everything every scrap of wood because you see the heels are build of different colors thicknesses of cedar and mahogany.
Blah, blah, blah....
_____________________________
https://www.stephenfaulkguitars.com
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Date Oct. 27 2014 0:31:44
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