wood sourcing

A lot can be said (and fabulated) about the tonal qualities of the various types of wood used in guitar making, alas, having not much personal experience in this field, I admittedly based my choice largely on visual qualities.

In particular I came across this neck piece of Ziricote, a tree I had never heard of before, but immediately liked due to its intricate markings:

As I prefer single-type wood guitars (save for the fretboard) I then faced the much harder task of finding a large enough Ziricote piece for the body. Most dealers said this was not possible, but after much back and forth Nebelheim Tonewood procured a plank that seemed promising (thanks much to Manuel Wemmer for helping with this):

Note how the dark core is surrounded by lighter wood.

Of course this wasn’t wide enough for a one-piece body, and even a two-piece didn’t pan out because I had to work around a crack. So I ended up with this cutting plan:

Put together like this (Photoshop simulation):

With an overlay of an early design sketch:

I then took this to a local shop in Berlin to do the actual cut and paste. Thanks much to Guitardoc and Anthony Schneider in particular for the help!

I forgot to take a picture of the raw assembled block, so here’s one at a later stage where the upper curve has already been cut out:

More on the machine in the background in the next post