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Vintage threads from the first ten years

Curing Process

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9/14/1999 2:43 AM
Tailpiece	Curing Process Anybody out there know the curing process/time for tone woods? I know buying preseasoned lumber is much easier, but I live in the woods and some really nice looking trees got blown over in a storm. There is a lumber mill nearby, so milling is not a problem. I would like to build some ideas that I have been tossing around including some unconventional stuff just for me.

9/14/1999 4:24 AM

When I was young ("when dinosaurs ruled the earth...) everyone believed wood for guitars had to be air-dried for 20 years at least... I think the great lumber shortage for guitars between '65 and '80 proved that standard kiln drying for a year is plenty fine. It's true that 20 or 30 years old mahogany has a little mellower tone than one year old kiln-dried wood, but there have been a LOT of great guitars, even classical and auditorium sized ones, made with fairly new wood over the last 20 years.

Hi

9/15/1999 12:19 AM

Hi´s right. "old" woods are maybe marginally better, but newer woods work just fine, as long as theyre dry enough (not too dry) and have finished "working" -wood tends to move around for a while, twist, bend, and finally settle. A year should be more or less fine.

When you do use wood that you cut yourself, find a suitable way of drying it (it´s *very* wet straight out of the tree, especially if the tree has been down for a while), be sure to take the wood out of the forest before decomposition or other nasties set in - meaning fast, and get the saw miln to quarter saw it, if the log is big enough. Do not saw smaller - thinner- bit right away. Dry the logs for a couple of months in the basement, or wherever it dries, but it´s not too dry or warm (warping!). Carefully move the wood to warmer & drier parts of the house, eventually, settling in the last few months on "regular average house tempurature" whatever that is. Irving Sloane actually has some nice tips in his books on wood drying and storage, if I remember correctly.

´Nother note; There are guitar companies that bake their woods in an oven nowadays. This appears to work for wood stability, and it makes the wood grain stand out in a very amazing way. I´ve seen guitars made out of woods that normally have no or very little grain patterns, looking way more spectacular than anything but a grade AAA PRS top.

Might be one of those don´t-try-this-at-home jobs, though.

9/15/1999 1:01 PM
Doc	I wonder if microwave ovens are employed to reduce the wood's residual moisture content to that of a 40 yr old naturally dried vintage piece. Those microwaves are tuned to the resonance of water molecules and would tend to liberate water as steam. If done in a controlled fashion, unwanted splitting could be prevented.

9/15/1999 1:15 PM

I never even thought about microwaves, though I should have. There are about five furniture factories in my town and some of them use microwaves exactly the way you described, Doc. You always know which ones do because your radio reception goes out when you drive by them (don't even want to think about the cancer risk in living close!), but that's just because the companies are too cheap to properly shield and operate them.

9/15/1999 2:45 PM
Mike Burgundy	Re: Curing Process - microwaves I reckon control would be really essential here - a treatment that works for furniture might be disastrous for tonewoods (gut-feeling/suspicion). Microwaves are pretty hefty devices, and going as far as releasing the moisture as steam sounds rather destructive on cellular levels to me. Does nuking the wood also enhance figuring like the slow-baking does?

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