Official Luthiers Forum!

Hey, Tracy, it'll last plenty long! See, once you've spent all your money on wood, you can't do anything other than build with it. Then you sell your guitars (even if it's just a hair over materials cost), and you get yourself more wood. See? Perfectly logical! (said the man with 35 back/side sets and only a guitar and 7/8 under his belt, with a maximum expected yearly output of 2 or 3..)

[QUOTE=tl507362] Maybe we should start a support group called "wood collectors anonymous"
Tracy[/QUOTE]

Howdy. Mine name is Don and I am a wood-a-holic. I started out as an occasional sawdust user but then BobC put the monkey on my back.

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Don Atwood
Arlington, VA

Worked my way thru college by spending summers in a cabinet shop but by that time I had aready built an electric guitar, a violin and a mandolin. the acoustic guitar didn't happen until after college was completed and my new career was started.

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Tickle your guitar daily, and it'll tickle you back.

Well, you see it all started with this handsaw, then I bought the skilsaw, and a jigsaw, then the tablesaw, and later the small bandsaw, followed by the resaw bandsaw. I just can't help myself. I never saw a fine piece of wood I didn't like. This is only fueled by my tool acquisition needs. Sorry, pass the box of tissue would ya? Choke, sniff, I even bought this Poulan chainsaw and forty two acres of timber. I'm sick, really, I need help. Every week or two I get this flyer on a Woodmizer Sawmill and I'm trying to ignore it, but I'm having trouble, somebody help me....

Hang in there Bruce. We've all been there. We're here to help you. First, you need to get rid of some of those tools and wood.

You can send them to me and I will make sure they are properly disposed of, so no one else has to suffer as much as you are now.

Email me for my address.....

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Dave Rector
Rector Guitars

[QUOTE=Dickey] Wood collection seems to be the greatest weakness of a luthier.[/QUOTE]

Weakness, WEAKNESS, I call it one of my finer virtues, giving a good home to all those lost little bits of wood. I build about 4 maybe 6 guitars a year maximum, but I have in my store more than 80 top sets alone, never mind B&S sets. But if I didn't have them in my store they'd be lonely and unloved in some big old wood yard. Come on it's our duty to give all these bits of timber a good and loving home.


My store of topwoods. See they all look very happy.

Colin

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I don't believe in anything, I simply make use of a set of reasonable working hypotheses.

That's the sirit Colin!
Most of my jobs have involved working in a shop environment. Bench tooling, lathe, milling and various mechanical and electrical assembly and troubleshooting. It is amazing how much of this experience applies to guitar building.
Working with wood is usually something I do at home and I have build Guitars because I wanted a particular instrument to play. This started back in high school when I built a double neck 12 and 6 string electric out of cherry. I played that vary heavy guitar for several years and when my back started bothering me, I figured I should build a lighter one. And so on. Now at 40 something I can say that my previous experience has been in spurts but also over 25 years or so and from various job related sources.
The access to the discussions here has helped to further my understanding of this complex craft! Thank you all!

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Wade
Nashua, NH
http://www.wadefx.com

Colin, I like the way your mind works. You've provided me with a new defense next time someone despairs at the ludicrous amounts of wood piled up here..

I built a lot of Balsa Sail planes as a kid, couldn't afford RC, so they were usually writen off on their maiden flight. So I'd build another...

Did wood shop in high school, and then left school to work machining and welding bits of metal for 12 years - taught me to work to faily close tolerances (fitter & turner). Went back and finished high school 'cause fitters get dirty and have to work too hard. Got into science (chemistry & microbiology) and stopped working with my hands.

I moved around a lot in my early years, and never did get a workshop set up, though I wanted to. When I finally settled down and we bought a place of our own, I at last had an oportunity to have my own workshop and start working with my hands again - for fun this time. Renovated the house, live near the ocean, so I built a wooden kayak from plans I found online.

Started building guitars because, and this sounds a bit silly even to me, I woke up one morning and HAD to learn to play acoustic guitar, just had to. So I put it out of my mind for a few weeks, or tried to, but couldn't. So I bought a cheapy and started learning. Two years later I had stuck with it and saved up enough cash to buy a mid range acoustic. But the only one I found in my price range that had a nice tone, had so many cosmetic errors, that I sat in the music shop with it in my hands and said to myself "I can buy this, and never be really happy with it, or I can go home and build a better one, though it may take a few tries". And here I am.

I too built many balsa planes as a kid, I still have my PT 17 stearman which some how survived it`s test flights. I worked as a carpenter for my grandfather starting at age 12 right around the same time I picked up the guitar. I ran a roofing and siding company through the 80`s. In the 90`s i started to work for a friend of mine who opened up a sign shop. I got exposed to hand carving signs and quarter boards with ornate decorations on the ends and raised relife objects like flowers and scallop shells. I also got into carving birds after attanding a bird carving show. I was so impressed with the detail of the bird carving that I had try it. so I guess it has always been inside me to carv wood. One day I was carving a sign at the sign shop out of some nice mahogany and I relized "this is the same wood as my Martin guitar neck"

The light bulb lit up.....and still burns brightly in Chatham Ma.

Matt

We just always made stuff. My mother used to give us soap bars to carve with a dull knife on rainy days: that's how she got the soap flakes to wash my little sisters' diapers. We got into a phase of folding little houses out of card stock: you had to cut the whole thing out of one piece and fold it up and glue it together. If it had a chimney or a porch, or the roof had an overhang, that had to be planned for. That was when I was about 8.

My carpentry never went really well, nor was I ever much of a mechanic. My older brother is so good with mechanical stuff I just never got into it.

We did make a lot of models: plastic kits, and the old Guillow WWI rubber band models, that we got 3 for a dollar by mail order. They'd get flown for a while and then, when they started to look ratty, we'd install a firecracker and send them off for one last patrol.... We couldn't afford the radios (single channel escapement was big then), but we made a lot of control line 'planes. We'd take them to the field in fleets in the winter and fly until they were all too wet from 'landing' the snow to fly, then dry them out and get the warps over the radiator (glo fuel on cold hands is a drag).

Most of my rocketry was the old 'basement bomber' kind: they were only just coming out with the Estes stuff then. Various concoctions in CO2 cartridges. I'm lucky to be alive....

Worked a stint on drill presses before I went into the Navy. Production stuff, but I was doing setups, and learned a lot about production jigging.

It's all been grist for the mill. My violin making teacher commented on how quickly I picked up on carving archings, and I thought of those soap bars.

In my teaching I've noticed that the carpenters always seem to have the hardest time getting started: it takes them a while to get calibrated. Machinists, on the other hand.....

When I was about 7 my mom sent me to woodworking classes. So by the time I was 15 I hooked up with my guitar teacher who had decided to build guitars. So my first real experience with woodworking WAS building guitars-the first four took a year each and they all collapsed after a while! Remember this was thirty years ago-in"the dark ages of Lutherie" no books (well almost none) no videos, no one to talk to and no internet, so we just kinda made it up as we went along. Went on to other more (and less)profitable things, built houses,kitchens, cabinets,tilework,etc.stopped building guitars for 10 years, back into it for 12 years now.Now my tonewood business is slowing down my building!