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Joe,

I only chose to use master grade cedar because of the price. I picked up AAAA grade cedar from Allied Lutherie for $70. I knew I wanted to use cedar for the top, and since it was relatively affordable (compared to the price of good spruce) I went for it.

I agree that going "whole hog" on a first build is not necessarily advisable, but it was only $10 more than getting mid to mid-high grade Sitka.

Justin.

You could bake it if you want. I would do as Mario says, set the oven to 195-200 and heat it up. Then check with a thermometer. An oven will be much hotter in the top, especially while heating but if the temp looks ok after it is preheated you can put the top halves in close to the middle of the oven. Mario says leave the door open a little but I am afraid to do that. If it cools to much the burners come on high and the rising heat can burn the wood in my oven. It's your call. I bake for about twenty minutes, checking on them from time to time. You will need to let the baked top sit for a week or so before you can start to work on it.

But... only do wood that has not been glued, no joined tops, no rosettes.

_________________
Joe Beaver
Maker of Sawdust

Grumpy,

That's not the way Dana Bourgeois describes it. I don't disagree that it does pre-shrink the wood, but he claims that it removes not only moisture but also removes other elements from the wood that would work their way out of the wood on their own over time.

I'm not saying you're wrong about this, I'm also not saying that Mr. Bourgeois is right. However, I have heard other manufacturers who *dont't* bake their tops describe the physical change that happens over time, and they describe it the same way as Bourgeois. Richard Hoover, founder of Santa Cruz Guitar Co., describes the exact same end result, but he just buys old wood that has been cycled through exposure to the seasons, and has aged for many years in a certain kind of conditions. He apparently picked this up from spending a lot of time with violin makers in Europe.

According to all of the descriptions I can find from luthier's who are in the league of people like Bourgeois it's all about the tone, and after many years of wood air drying naturally, the "volatiles" such as sap, pitch, sugars etc. work their way out of the wood naturally, leaving you with just the wood cells and lignum. Supposedly heating tops, specifically the way Bourgeois describes doing it, is supposed to achieve the same kind of results.

I'm not saying that I'm going to rush home to turn the oven on or that there's some sort of magic to it. I don't know about you, but I don't have the money to set up an oxygen free environment to heat tops in, and never will. I will say that I joined this forum to get advice from more seasoned builders than myself, and I appreciate everyone's responses to this thread. However, I don't think any of us are selling our instruments for $6,000+ or having them reviewed by Acoustic Guitar magazine.

None. Of. Us. Knows. Everything.

That's not the way Dana Bourgeois describes it

Right, but we're talking about -----baking---- tops here, not artificially aging them. Baking tops has been done for at least a couple decades by myself, Taylor, Collings and others. We don't do it to age the wood, just to make it less crack-prone. What Dana and a few others are doing is a different process altogether, and that's what I wish to clarify here.

"The spruce in the Aged
Tone series is treated with a
process called torrefaction,
in which the wood is heated
in an oxygen-free environ
-
ment at a relatively low
temperature. This process,
which is undertaken prior to
Bourgeois receiving the
tops, reduces the oil, sugar,
and resin content of the wood,
reducing mass and weight and
increasing stiffness—resulting
in similar chemical transformations,"

http://www.pantheonguitars.com/images_1 ... OM_pdf.pdf

Torrefaction

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torrefaction

_________________
Thank You and Best To All

What I get from that is that someone else is terrifying the tops and that Dana then buys them. Which in theory means that if you had the right connections you could buy them too...

Hmmm.....

"However, I don't think any of us are selling our instruments for $6,000+ or having them reviewed by Acoustic Guitar magazine."

Hi Justin,
Grumpy (a.k.a. Mario Proulx) as well as a few other posters here quite possibly is.

I had some spruce tops in my shop attic (for 5 to 10 years) which gets hot in the summer and cold in the winter with resultant daily humidity fluctuations. They were stickered the entire time. I recently brought them down and baked them. I then "skip" planed them and stacked them flat in a temperature regulated environment. They did loose some moisture in the process, but I didn't measure them to check for dimensional changes.
There may be some virtue to baking tops, especially if they are not well seasoned, to gain some dimensional stability as Mario said. Torrefaction is a similar process to making charcoal so you don't want to go too far with that!

Careful. You might be surprised who is kind enough to offer us advice here.

Thanks for the clarification, Grumpy. I made the mistake of talking about the two different processes as though they were on and the same, and they are very obviously not.

I apologize if my reply offended anyone, especially you Grumpy. I am an amateur at this in every way imaginable, and need all of the advice I can get my grubby paws on.

"That's not the way Dana Bourgeois describes it"
If torrefaction is generally done between 200 to 320 degrees centigrade (392 to 608 F) I wonder how close Dana gets to that with his "low temperature" version. His superglue finish sounded interesting too.

Justin,

One thing I have learned here over time is that Grumpy is one of the good guys. He is a very respected builder and you will learn much from his advice. When he responses to a question I always read it carefully and often make a note of what he says.

It is true that even the best builders may not agree on all aspects of building but that is true for all endeavors.

_________________
Joe Beaver
Maker of Sawdust

Very true, Joe. I have since looked up some of the outstanding instruments that Grumpy makes, and I was absolutely floored. I feel like a small child who clambered up onto a chair at the adults table and tries to contribute to a conversation so far above his head he has no idea.

I also made the mistake of mixing terminology by talking about baking tops vs torrefaction which are very different things.

You learn something new everyday, and sometimes that something is how to extricate ones foot from ones own mouth.

Hi ya Justin!

A couple of things:

First when I first met Mario in 2007 at the Black Elks Lodge OLF get together prior to meeting Mario we did not always get along.... Although no one always gets along after meeting Mario and also promising not to tell others that he's actually one hell of a nice guy.... I realized that the written word, especially on Internet forums, does not always accurately represent the possibilities.... An understatement I am sure.

I also had the sincere pleasure of getting to play one of his superb instruments, this one had a killer burst on it too, my favorite! In my life I have played a LOT of guitars and I can actually remember the top five that I have ever enjoyed. Mario's was most certainly one of them....

No worries either, Justin, it's difficult on forums to tell who talks the talk and who actually can walk the walk. Also an understatement.... What's important if we make mistakes and I have made plenty is what we do about it afterwards. I can see that you are a great guy in so much as your responses are both understandable and appropriate in my view.

Moving on....

Regarding baking, baking tops that is.... I bake mine too and here's why.

When I first started baking my tops like many here I could not know for sure how well seasoned any tonewood that I purchased might be. Back then I did not have the luxury of hand picking what's in my stash and instead had to rely on many of the great sponsors here on the OLF. I may not have even known enough to ask the right questions either.

For me baking was cheap insurance in that it had some of the benefits of seasoning and likely would add to the stability of the wood when the resulting instrument encountered temp and RH swings.

Tonal benefits may be here too but I am not willing to say so on an Internet forum. Why? Because as others rightly said it's subjective and not something that any of us can provide empirical evidence that would pass muster speaking to our position.

A couple of years ago I happened unto a stash of 30 - 50 year old often-master grade German spruce tops. These tops had been seasoning in a climate controlled shop which is not in my view as good as say the attic but nonetheless 30 - 50 years is a very long time.

What I immediately noticed is that these tops feel like the tops that I bake for my own stuff. For those of us who bake, our tops that is...., when you pull them out of the oven they feel different. Not unlike a potato chip in my opinion in that the sound of scratching them, rubbing them, changes and they are definitely drier overall. Two weeks later which is how long I wait after baking a top to turn it into a guitar they don't feel as different anymore but still different than a non-baked top from the same tree IMHO.

I may not understand the science, know the terms, have the ability to communicate well enough to even be understood, but to me the 30 - 50 year old German tops feel a lot like a top that was baked a couple weeks ago. And.... me thinks that this may be the goal.... too....

Do they sound better? IMHO very possibly but I am not willing to say this on an Internet forum even though I just did. It's an impression that I have, can't be proven, I won't lose any sleep over it, but this is how I roll in connection with this topic.

Lastly it's crack season here in Michigan with last night being about -12 where I live. Lots of folks with everything from a vintage Martin to an inexpensive Seagull guitar are finding their prized instruments have developed a crack or two. So they bring em to us at our repair/restoration shop in Ann Arbor.

The real benefit in my view as Mario has said for baking tops is that it increases the resistance to RH and temp swings in so much as proper, long term seasoning does too.

I won't name names but one manufacturer likely made a poor choice in the middle of the great recession and elected to use some unseasoned wood on one of their models.... Remember when one is a manufacturer of guitars one also has to purchase this year wood intended to be used in subsequent years perhaps even five years from now. If times were hard, and they were, and if cash was tight for the company, and it was by all accounts, it's very possible that purchasing futures was not the priority of the minute again back in the middle of the great recession.

So this one model of a well known maker is cracking seemingly every time you look at one. We have seen many of them with more than several cracks at once.

Crack resistance and stability is the real, measurable benefit of proper seasoning or baking tops. Tonal benefits though subjective and not something that many in the trade will commit to a position about is possible, you will just have to experiment for yourself and see what you think.

After all ultimately forums can only inspire us to get off our butts and pursue research or gain experience doing test pieces, etc. in an effort to find out what we think.

PS: Don't tell anyone and I would never say this on an Internet forum either but I think that there is a tonal benefit too.... It may not be because of what we might think though and might have something to do with the reduced mass of a top once all the gunk has been seasoned out of it and it's capacity for moisture absorbance is reduced by having the cells shrunk over time. But don't tell anyone I said this OK?

Thanks for the reply Hesh. I have a master grade cedar top that I have already joined, so no baking on this build. However, my next build will probably feature spruce and I'll give it a go on that one. I have a 30 year old D-18 VS that I love, I'm building a OO, so I'm thinking #2 will be an OM to round out the set.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Timely thread. I was just baking a batch today, newly cut Lutz from Shane. An excellent candidate for the oven. I am able to get 20 year old Sitka and I don't bake that. I do it mainly for stability.



I've been putting a surface thermometer on the top and keep it around 200 for a couple of hours and let it cool in the oven. I set the timer on my phone to check the temp every 20 or 30 minutes.

I got into it after a long conversation with a violin maker about seasoning wood and later talked to Frank Ford about what Collings and Taylor were doing at the time. Seemed to make sense. I bake all recently cut tops and ones where there is no information about age or seasoning. No downside so far.

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It's not what you don't know that hurts you, it's what you do know that's wrong.

For stability, don't forget to bake your backs, also, or iron them. Someone I corresponded with irons his back wood in a home made press. It seem a bit like laying the wood down on a couple of heating blankets under weight. His machine was heated metal on top and bottom of the wood. He said that future cracking was much minimized in BRW.

Yeah...Chris Pile is always trying to cook my goats but has so far, been unsuccessful.

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http://www.CostaGuitars.com
PMoMC

What about your brace wood? I'm not getting carried away, I hope, but to those of you who bake your tops (and backs), do you toast your brace material as well? Just curious.

Seems like it would be logical...l

Tony_in_NYC said...

Yeah...Chris Pile is always trying to cook my goats but has so far, been unsuccessful.

You just have to sauté them with fava beans and a nice chiante

_________________
Joe Beaver
Maker of Sawdust