Official Luthiers Forum!

A few months back, I tried to find a good deal on a bulk buy (at least bulk for me......possibly not bulk relative to a full time luthiers purchase) of red spruce to use for bracing guitars. I never found a good deal from a source I trusted.

The main thing I want in my braces is perfect quartering and split so so there is no runout. I grew up around bluegrass and because of this I've tended to lean toward using red spruce. I like red spruce for it's stiffness but it's difficlut to find good stock at a decent price. Sitka has very near the same stiffness and l'm guessing it's easier to obtain good stock at a lower price. Shouldn't we pay more attention to the stiffness to weight ratio than the overall stiffness? If that's true, doesn't it bring other species of spruce into play? I'm curious what others thoughts are on this. One reason for asking is that I can get nice Lutz brace wood from Shane at a good price. I've read that black spruce is similar in stiffness to red spruce. Is black spruce available that would make good brace stock?

_________________
Formerly known as Adaboy.......

Here is where I get my red spruce:

http://adirondackspruce.com/

They have great tops and brace wood. Don't know what you consider a good price, but you might find the quality you are looking for there.

_________________
ELEVATE || Next Level Lutherie
http://elevatelutherie.com
&
http://ensorguitars.com

I can support Dave Smith for Red Spruce. But despite what Bob Taylor says I am not certain that Red spruce for braces is any better than good Sitka or Lutz. One thing I like to do is get bolts and split them myself. I have had sawn brace stock that I was not happy with and most ended in the waste.
Tom

_________________
A person who has never made a mistake has never made anything!!!

+1 for Dave Smith. You just won't find better red spruce or a more reasonable price on brace stock. Tell him exactly what you're looking for and he'll make you happy. OS is fine too, but a bit more pricey in my experience.

Anyone like to share your thoughts of using Lutz, Black, Sitka, etc. for brace stock as opposed to Red spruce? Seems if you want to build the lightest guitar possible at a given stiffness, using a lighter spruce with slightly taller braces would create an overall lighter soundboard than a denser, stronger spruce with equal stiffness.

_________________
Formerly known as Adaboy.......

Hi-

I bought a bunch of Red Spruce cheaply from Dave Smith - great stuff for the money.




I have bought Lutz from Shane and it is great stuff also. This is my favorite spruce.

I bought about 20 pounds of Sitka stock from Aircraft Spruce in Peachtree City, Ga. It was all quartered with little to no runout. It was all different densities, but all seemed usable. Martin has used Sitka for a long time - the pre-war guitars with Red spruce tops had Sitka braces.

I don't think it would be easy to find Black spruce brace wood. They are very small trees for a spruce - the only Black spruce I ever came across big enough for an instrument yielded mando tops that had to be cut slightly off quarter to make the halves big enough. If you do come across some, buy it. What little I have is nice - it is light, stiff and resonant.

_________________
John Lewis
Wannabe builder owned by 2 crazy dachshunds

Darryl: After I get my braces to size,generally .625" by .280" for the main braces, I do a deflection test with them and sort the braces into pairs. I just use a pipe wrench and a piece of wire as the weight. Measure deflection with a dial indicator. This is done over an 18" spacing. From previous testing I know what is acceptable to me and only use the ones that I am happy with for the X braces and tone bars. The weaker ones are used for the fingers. I have used both Red and Sitka and am not sure there is any big differance. Bob Taylor claims that a Sitka top with Red bracing is better than a Red top with Sitka bracing. I tend to think he is full of sales pitch.
Tom

_________________
A person who has never made a mistake has never made anything!!!

Anyone who processes red spruce top will have red spruce bracewood to spare; it's a waste product, after all.

I burn red, white, and black spruce "bracewood" in the 'ol campfire all the time... <lol> While black spruce is typically very small, I have scored one log that was over 26" at breast height; got many excellent guitar tops from it, as well as plenty of mandolin tops and of course, bracewood. But even a small log will yield plenty good bracewood, yet the reason you won't see any "commercially" available is the PITA factor VS possible financial gains. Black spruce is a self-pruning tree, meaning it naturally sheds its lower branches as it grows, such that even a skinny 6" diameter tree will have 12-16 feet of nearly perfectly clear wood. It can be the stiffest, strongest spruce you'll ever handle, but it can also be the densest, with some of the densest "swamp spruce" rivaling soft maple in hardness and density. I used to have a small slab of it that had over 80 growth lines per inch! Methinks we wouldn't want to use these very dense examples as bracewood...

If stiffness for weight is what you're looking for, your average Red spruce will not be the best bet. The stiffness of a brace is proportional to the Young's modulus of the wood times the cube of the height, all else equal. It turns out that the Young's modulus for softwoods is very nicely proportional to the density: in my measurements 2/3 of the samples I checked fall within 10% of the same line plotted on a graph of Young's modulus against density. _All_ of the softwoods I've tested, except Eastern Hemlock, fall on the same line. Since the relationship between Young's modulus and density is linear, and the relationship between stiffness and height is cubic, making a low density brace a little taller will generally give you the same stiffness for less weight. Although we often talk about 'stiffness to weight ratio' as a material property, it's really a _structural_ one.

By the same token, using a low density wood for the top will generally give a lighter structure than using a high density one. In fact, since most of the weight of the completed top _is_ the top, and not the bracing, that's the place to save weight. Which brings up the point of why we prefer the denser sorts of spruce, like Red and Sitka, for some things, instead of the lower density ones like Engelmann, or even Western Red Cedar. Aside from issues of surface hardness/toughness, I think a lot of it has to do with 'headroom': the denser woods, and the heavier tops they yield, seem to be less prone to 'breaking up' at high levels. There are ways around this, to some extent, but sometimes it's just better to do things the easy way.

Do you remember if you got their "bargain bag" or their regular stock? I bought their bargain bag a few years ago and also got a lot of densities... 24 to 35 pcf, IIRC. That was fine with me, as the big boards are nice to process and assign to specific braces. But most of what I got was off-quarter, and I didn't know of an easy way to split it to check the runout.

_________________
David Malicky

Part of the spec for aircraft grade wood is low runout. It doesn't have to be zero, but it can't be much; a slope of 1:20 comes to mind, although I can't attest to that. I could look it up... THey pay more attention to runout that quarter.

Alan, That's good to hear -- thanks for the info!

_________________
David Malicky

I use Lutz sapwood bracing. Its hand split, no run-out. Thank you Mario.

_________________
Jason Moe
LaCrosse WI 54601

I use Shane's Lutz for all my bracing. It's just too easy.

_________________
Waddy

Photobucket Build Album Library

Sound Clips of most of my guitars