Finding gorgeous wood in unexpected places
I think most guitar makers are wood freaks
at heart. There’s nothing quite like seeing a
potentially nice set of wood become a guitar
when you finish sanding and get that first
coat of finish on it. You can control almost
everything else about the outcome of a guitar,
but the final result is often due to the
talents of Mother Nature. Sometimes it’s the
builder’s job to just get out of the way and
let her show off.
The oft-referred-to “Golden Age of Lutherie”
that we find ourselves in has given rise to a
number of excellent wood suppliers that can
provide you with almost anything your heart
desires in terms of beautiful, exotic guitar sets.
But sometimes, if you keep your eyes and ears
open, wood just seems to find you. I’d like to
share a couple of these stories with you.
The Best Day Care Ever
Around 1989, when I had built several hundred
banjos and only a handful of guitars, I
went to pick up my son at day care after making
sawdust all day. He stayed at a very nice
Mennonite woman’s home along with a few
other children. On this day, however, Mabel
was gone and her sister was watching the
kids. We introduced ourselves to each other
and she asked what I did for a living. When
I told her that I built banjos and guitars, she
asked me if I ever used rosewood. I told her
rosewood was a prized wood for guitar makers
and then asked what prompted her question.
She told me she had about 25 rosewood
logs laying in her yard as we spoke!
With more than a little skepticism, I asked
how that came to be. It turned out that
her husband grew up in a logging family in
Canada. He had moved to Virginia several
years earlier and had kept his hand in the
logging and lumber business while also being
heavily involved in missionary work in Central
and South America. While working in Belize,
he developed a relationship with some logging
families and eventually began trading
them logging equipment for lumber, which
he then had shipped to the US. In his latest
transaction, he had sent some kind of crawler
tractor. He then flew a commercial flight into
Belize, transferred to a small prop plane, flew
into the jungle, and finally rode a truck inland
further to reach the logging camp. There, he
chose 25 of the nicest Honduran rosewood
logs they had and had them shipped by way
of truck, boat, and truck again to his yard in
Stuarts Draft, Virginia.
They had arrived two days before my conversation
with Mabel’s sister. It turned out that
they were about five miles from my house. I
met with her husband the next day and convinced
him to quarter-saw as many of the bigger
logs as possible. A few months later, he
had processed most of the wood on his band
mill, and a friend and I pooled our meager
resources, picked through the lumber, and
bought as much as we could afford. Several
dozen band-saw blades and a new motor
later (that stuff was hard!), we had nearly 100
sets of beautiful Honduran rosewood—which
has since been built into guitars.
A Very Special Neighborhood Jam
A few months after the rosewood adventure,
I was at a woodworking shop about a quarter
of a mile from where the rosewood logs
had been. The machinery was pushed aside
every Tuesday evening and folks would bring
food, drinks, and instruments and have a nice
little community jam session. A builder friend
and I were playing when we noticed a large
board stored up in the rafters that either had
an awfully curious pattern of dust clinging to
the surface or was something more interesting.
We asked our host about it and he said
he’d bought a bunch of mahogany years ago
and that was what was left. He said we could
come take a look at it the next day if we
were interested. We were, and we did.
When we got the board down, we found it
to be one of the most heavily figured pieces
of wood we’d ever seen. It was covered from
end to end with large, distinct, undulating
tiger stripes, but the color was different than
the rest of the boards in the stack. We sent
off a sample to the U.S. Forest Service for
identification, and it turned out to be light
red meranti from the Philippines, which is
commonly referred to as lauan. Trust me, if
lauan all looked like this, it wouldn’t have
such a lowly reputation! There was enough
for about ten guitars in that board, one of
which I built for the shop owner in exchange
for the wood.
While the great majority of what we use
today comes from guitar wood supplier specialists,
we still keep our radar out for wood
discoveries. You never know what might be in
the neighbor’s garage!
Jeff Huss
Jeff Huss, co-owner of Huss & Dalton Guitar Co., Inc., hails from North Dakota and moved to Virginia in the late ’80s to pursue bluegrass music. Along with the music came the opportunity to build acoustic guitars and banjos. In 1995, he and Mark Dalton became business partners, and they’ve since achieved worldwide recognition for their boutique guitars and banjos.