Good Woods in Pacific Northwest?

[Michael Murray]

I'm interested in making guitars & ukeles with woods readily available in Pac.Northwest. These should be naturally native trees, or abundantly planted (e.g. in cities). Should also be fairly easy to work with - as I consider myself a beginner still. I am aware of several woods for soundboard (Engel. Spruce, W. Redcedar) but what about other parts, especially necks and backs/sides?

Thanks for any tips,
michael

[John Sonksen]

Oregon white oak, western maple, claro walnut, and I've worked with salvage elm before, and know that sycamore grows here too but am not sure of its availability

[Jason Rodgers]

We gots some good stuff in these here parts (Oregon)!

If you want to stick to traditional woods, you can do Sitka spruce tops (or Western Red Cedar) and bracing, walnut back and sides, and maple neck. Fingerboard and bridge might need to be sourced outside the PNW, but there are domestic options like Osage. Folks have reported fair succes with denser pieces of walnut working in these areas, though.

If you want to try something outside the mainstream, there are plenty of options, as well...

Tops: Douglas fir, Port Orford cedar (actually a cypress), Ponderosa pine, Lodgepole pine, Western hemlock

Backs, sides, necks, and other accouterments: Maple, Oak, Myrtle, and you can find many non-native woods collected by urban hardwood sawyers. Red alder and various "poplars" if you are building electrics.

While I was visiting my folks in Central Idaho, I collected some Mountain mahogany (not really mahogany, in the rose family). These pieces are no bigger than your arm, but might eventually yield some bridges on the big side or knobs and pins on the small side. Larger pieces would get you some pretty fingerboards.

[David King]

Red alder makes a decent neck, madrone and myrtle do too. Pacific yew might be really nice for uke bodies and also might make a mean flamenco guitar if you can find it wide enough and quartered.

[Michael Murray]

Great tips. I actually live where the great northwest meets the rockies………so rocky mtn woods is good too. Mtn mahogany sounds exciting. I like juniper, but most are probably not tight-grain. (I won’t cut down living old-growth). I had an old-growth yew fall over on my woodlot (about 2ft diam), so looking forward to using it!

Based on my limited research and trees which are most local, it’s looking like:
Necks: Birch (paper?) and Sugar Maple
Backs/Sides:Paper Birch, Quaking Aspen, Yew.
Fretboard: Yew?, Sugar Maple?, Mtn Mahogany

[John Sonksen]

Yew is poisonous so be careful with dust and wash your hands really well after using it.

[Jason Rodgers]

There's a guy who has been specializing in juniper as a tonewood. Can't remember his name. Guy with a beard. Saw him at GAL 2011. Anyways, it's out there, as both a back/sides and top material.

If you want to see an all-Oregon guitar, google "tsiorba juniper guitar." He used the Mountain Mahogany for the fingerboard (hard to find stuff like that) and Manzanita for the bridge. That's another one I forgot.

[Mario Proulx]

Walnut makes excellent necks.

[David King]

John, thanks for the heads up on pacific yew. I might have to recall a few xmas cutting boards (oops). I read a bit more and found that pacific yew has very low levels of the taxine a and b and that few if any reported cases of poisoning exist. It's needles are a staple in the diets of white tailed deer, elk and moose while many birds feast on the red berries. Rabbits and other rodents devour the bark with impunity. Much to my surprise I found out that mountain mahogany and pacific yew are one and the same - Taxus brevifolia.

[John Sonksen]

John, thanks for the heads up on pacific yew. I might have to recall a few xmas cutting boards (oops). I read a bit more and found that pacific yew has very low levels of the taxine a and b and that few if any reported cases of poisoning exist. It's needles are a staple in the diets of white tailed deer, elk and moose while many birds feast on the red berries. Rabbits and other rodents devour the bark with impunity. Much to my surprise I found out that mountain mahogany and pacific yew are one and the same - Taxus brevifolia.

Yeah David, I wasn't quite sure of any real toxicity numbers but in one of my other hobbies, Bonsai, it is standard procedure to clean your cutting tools thoroughly with alcohol before using them on other species of trees. I've never worked with it myself but thought it would be good to point out nonetheless.

[Michael Lewis]

Les Stansell makes some really nice flamenco guitars from port Orford cedar and offers some wood. He is in Oregon near the coast.

[Jason Rodgers]

No, Mountain Mahogany is in the rose family http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cercocarpus and is a shrub.

Pacific Yew is a conifer tree http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_yew

[David King]

Thanks for straightening that out re Mt mahogany and Pac yew. I have plenty of samples of both here and they look and feel completely different hence my surprise. We know how common names can get misapplied and then stick around forever. I'll bet mesquite and and mt mahogany also get confabulated in webworld distopia.

[Jason Rodgers]

This wood is new to me. Several years back, when I was visiting my folks, I was reading an old plant taxonomy book of my dad's from college. It was something like desert plants or plants of the arid west (he went to ASU then UofA). I ran across the Mahogany and asked my dad, "Hey, is there any of this stuff around here?" He said, "Sure, it's all over the place. You can see some on that ridge over there (pointing northwest of their house)."

As I'm getting tooled up to do this turning on my DIY lathe, I'm looking at all sorts of woods that can be found in small dimensions, like yard ornamentals: laurels, rhododendrons, boxwood, and other things that might have hard and twisty limbs. I might head down to the local yard waste recycling center later in the spring and ask if I can poke around in the pile where landscapers dump their trucks.

[Michael Murray]

Mt Mahogany...........is a dryland tree, or rather tall woody shrub. It's usually pretty gnarled with twisted trunks and branches. It's not very common. I've seen it on ridgetops in Marble Mtn Wilderness southwest of Ashland, OR. But probably more common in the rainshadow of Eastern Oregon and California.

[Jason Rodgers]

This morning I got an idea. At work, I sent out an email asking people to save me chunks of wood as they're trimming and/or removing yard trees and shrubs this spring. Around 10:00, I ran into the librarian in the staff lounge, and he asked what kind of wood I was looking for. I gave him a laundry list of woods that would be interesting to play with. He said, "Could you use Madrone or Manzanita?" I said, "Heck, yeah!" He said, "My brother has some property down by Medford and I get Madrone and Manzanita firewood from him. It burns great. I'll see what I have out back when I go home for lunch." At noon, he calls me and says he has a couple pieces for me. I go down to the library and he hands me a small piece, about 2" x 15", and another larger piece, about 4"-6" x 30". Gawd, this is cool looking stuff! Thin, smooth bark, like burgundy skin, and curves and billows and folds like it was poured out. Hard and heavy, reddish brown heartwood and creamy sapwood. Can't wait to cut into this stuff!

[Jason Rodgers]

Along with native PNW woods, there's nothing like helping out the ecosystem by removing invasive species. Just up the street from our house, there are a few acres of green space that sit adjacent to my daughter's school. Last spring, the city did some clearing of invasive plants: mostly English ivy, but also holly, and another small understory tree that I didn't recognize. Much was cut and taken out, but they missed some on the cleanup, and on a walk recently I got a piece of holly about 4 feet long and 2-1/2" to 3" in diameter.

When I cut it up this weekend, I was expecting some clear, white wood, as holly is know for. I guess this is only the heartwood, and there was some in there, but it was mostly sapwood that looked more like maple, only with a slight grey/green cast instead of yellow/gold. It has a lot of that checker-y ray fleck on the quarter face like maple. Not at all unpleasant, but not what I expected.

I saw some unsupervised 3"-4" diameter chunks of laurel hedge sitting on the side of the street a couple blocks up. Might have to investigate!

[Michael Lewis]

Pacific north west big leaf maple. Makes great necks and bodies, often extreme figure, good for both solid body electrics and acoustics, and abundantly available.

[Chris Mudd]

I just spent 18 years in Eugene, Oregon.
I found the Alder to be nice, Walnut to be great. I played around with some redwood, but never got it to a guitar.

I might offer that Oregon Myrtle is very beautiful. There are small shops around the state that make furniture and bowls out of the stuff. They all sell wood by the foot.

[Jason Rodgers]

I have yet to stop in and check out the available stock at Goby Walnut in northwest Portland, but their website sure makes me drool. Walnut out the wazzoo, but also maple. Even their "bargain sets" are bling-a-rific.