Alternative to wood on solid body

[Fernando Esteves]

Hello!
I'm from Brazil and here the deforestation of all kind of forests, swamps and whatever else can be transformed into cropland to make soy for the cows food grows every year.

So, I'm starting to become sensitive about use only wood as materials to build guitars, specially because there are some new companies creating new kind of materials to guitar, like Aristides.

I got interested in learn a bit about it, but couldn't find anything and I'm not sure Aristides will tell me anything about their process, it seems like was years of research for them.

Does anybody has any familiarity with that?
Thanks

[Paul Rhoney]

Aristides makes great guitars, and indeed their construction is somewhat of a trade secret. They have a formula, and they prefer it stays theirs. We can theorize though, and think of some ways to make a guitar without the use of wood. For example my guess is that they are using a carbon fiber shell that is filled with some kind of high-grade expanding foam, and the fretboard is made of Richlite. Using composite materials like that is nothing new in the guitar world, just look back to the 60's and what Valco was doing. Many of the old Supro/Airline guitars featured a hollow fiberglass body. You'd be looking at making molds, learning about vacuum bagging, and getting to know a lot about epoxy. Could be fun!

[JC Whitney]

Fernando: If you have a minute, Google Paul Rhoney's (previous post) guitars - absolutely fantastic designs.

[Paul Rhoney]

Kind of you to say JC, much appreciated. I'm just starting to get back into building again. It'll be a while yet, but I'm looking forward to it.

[Jarno Verhoeven]

Aristides makes great guitars, and indeed their construction is somewhat of a trade secret. They have a formula, and they prefer it stays theirs. We can theorize though, and think of some ways to make a guitar without the use of wood. For example my guess is that they are using a carbon fiber shell that is filled with some kind of high-grade expanding foam, and the fretboard is made of Richlite. Using composite materials like that is nothing new in the guitar world, just look back to the 60's and what Valco was doing. Many of the old Supro/Airline guitars featured a hollow fiberglass body. You'd be looking at making molds, learning about vacuum bagging, and getting to know a lot about epoxy. Could be fun!

I think the Aristides guitars are actually solid casts, maybe with a center core for weight reduction, and although they resin they use is proprietary, I cannot believe it would be that special. It is likely that they made a mixture with curing and shrinkage and some kind of solids added for their requirements, but some experimentation is all you need. Given that they have super low volumes (for resin suppliers anyway) it is unlikely that a supplier will make something completely bespoke for them.
Aristides guitars are actually a continuation of an earlier dutch firm making polymer guitars, but I cannot recall the name, did a little search but nothing came up.

SKC Bogart did make basses with a process that you describe their "blackstone" material is a shell with PIR (I think, I saw a crosssection once on a tradeshow, and it looked like PIR) foam inside

[Alan Carruth]

Three questions:
1) what is the problem?,
2) what is the nature of the substitute?,
3) how is using it going to help solve the problem?

For whatever reason, forests are being destroyed because the market value of the trees, and the services they provide, are lower than whatever else can be done with the land. They're not being cut down to provide materials for the most part, and certainly the amount of wood that's used in making guitars is not what's straining the resource. There are lots of reasons for that low value; it's not a simple problem to solve, but if wood was more valuable on the market than, say, palm oil, there would be more wood and less palm oil.

Non-wood substitutes are, in themselves, not without problems. Plastics are usually made from petrochemicals, for one thing, so there's the whole supply chain there. There is also the question of what happens to the plastics once people are through playing the guitar. At present there's no good way to recycle them, and they don't break down naturally on any human time scale, so they tend to accumulate. Both ends of the supply chain pose problems.

Substituting some synthetic material for wood would thus seem to make the problem worse, both by further reducing whatever value the trees might have, and in degrading the environment further by the supply/waste chains involved with the substitutes.

Again, if these were simple problems they'd have been solved already. From what I've seen the most intractable parts are social, economic, and political, and thus far more contentious than we want to be dealing with on this list. But, if we don't think clearly about them, they'll never get solved.

[Bob Ionta]

Alan,
That's about the most thoughtful and useful comment I could have imagined on this topic. Thanks.
--Bob

[Matthew Lau]

I'm with Alan on this one.

In terms of deforestation, instrument makers are not even the tip of the iceberg.
Much higher is stuff like cosmetics (perfume), lumber, and furniture.

Brazil (sorry) famously destroyed much of their precious rosewood reserves in a shortsighted bid to make money. They cut the wood so badly, that most of it was useless.

If you really want to have a minimal impact on the environment, consider building guitars using salvaged wood. I think Ramirez, and a number of other greats used old furniture for building guitars due to shortages