Spanish Cedar - Mahogany - Sapele

Vic D

Vic D

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Aight, I'm all out of Spanish cedar and can't find any quartersawn locally, don't wanna pay the high price of ordering delivery. I can get sapele for like 5.50 a bd ft in the 8/4 flavor, didn't ask about the 6/4. So my question is, how does the sapele compare to Spanish cedar and like honduras mahogany? I like Spanish cedar over mahogany both for its ease of working and the light weight, but I haven't got any experience with sapele. I've seen some ukes with sapele necks and they look real nice so I'll probably go that route, just wondering what to expect.
 
I've tried sapele for necks before and it's much too heavy for my liking. My own preference is for Spanish cedar, then Honduran mahogany. African mahogany if nothing else is available. Luckily I have a reliable source for 12/4 Spanish cedar.
 
Chuck, 'preciate it. The search for Spanish cedar continues...
Andrew, yep, Paxton is my source for the sapele, unfortunately they don't have quartersawn african or honduran or Spanish cedar. I'll find some.
 
Kekani said:
Goosebay Lumber - I usually call and specify 12/4 flatsawn.
Click to expand...

*Smacks forehead*, I didn't even think to ask the guy at Paxton if he had Spanish cedar in 12/4 flatsawn... Got the Goosebay site bookmarked just in case. Thanks Kekani.

Chuck: You've got a point, I'm just not looking hard enough and or using my noggin.
 
The key to buying wood is to know how it is converted from the tree. 12/4 flatsawn yields ideal quartered necks. Have you read my neck thread - I drove 130 miles to get decent African grown Spanish cedar. It's great wood because it doesn't have the gum ducts you get in South American grown Spanish cedar. It ended up that I got 68 Necks for about $200. Just have to wait 6 months before I can use it.
 
Yep Pete, that's a great find. I just wasn't aware, being a noob and all that I could get that thickness... makes perfect sense now though lol. I told dude I was makin' necks and that I was clueless. He sounded busy though. After reading Goosebay's price list and dimension description and the tip from Kekani I've got it down now. Thanks guys!
 
You would think that I would have encountered this 12/4 thing somewhere in my reading... Just seems like everything I've read on it they say like 6/4 8/4 etc...I guess I just assumed buying hardwood was like buying pine or building lumber. Question, these stores like Paxton and Goosebay... do they all stop at 12/4?
 
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Most of your research has probably been guitar centric. If i'm not mistaken, almost all guitar necks are built up, using smaller dimensioned wood than the 12/4 that has been mentioned. Building ukuleles, we don't have near the strength requirements that you have for guitars so we can easily get by with one piece necks. When I order Spanish cedar I ask for either flatsawn or quartersawn (I almost never get quartersawn), it doesn't matter since the board will be ripped to 3" X 3" x 18" long pieces. Since the cross section is square I can rotate it to get any grain orientation I want. From each of these pieces I get two necks. The bigger the tree, the more consistent the grain tends to be in a given plank so I get the biggest boards as I can. In my case they come 12' long and anywhere between 9" to 14" wide. That's a lot of necks.
 
Right on everything Chuck. That puts things in better perspective. Hehehe, that's a ton of necks... I think I might have to repeat three times tonight before I go to bed, "ukuleles are not guitars.".
 
Yes you will - they are not guitars! There has been many threads on this forum where posters have confused the two in terms of wood technology discussion and the merits of construction techniques and how they cross over/apply. Having been a guitar maker once I can honestly say that the two disciplines are different, right down to the critical consideration of materials selection - in many ways you can get away with so much in a ukulele and yet are paradoxically restricted by many 'constraints'. The real upside is you can use materials guitar makers have to reject - I made so many sopranos from the off-cuts from my Weissenborns; that kind for thing or being able to negotiate a pin knot, gum duct because the dimensions are that much smaller; or like Chuck, getting your fingerboard, bridge blank and bindings from a guitar fingerboard... there certainly is more to this game than meets the eye!
 
Chuck, Pete;
When you build necks do you orientate the grain parallel or perpendicular to the fret board?
Or does it not matter?
 
I can only speak to what I apply in my own work. I'm sure others will disagree. It's my understanding that almost without exception, every component of wood that is used in acoustic instrument building should be quarter sawn, including necks. It have more to do with wood movement than it does strength. A quarter sawn board of any given dimension will shrink a lot less across it's width than it's flat sawn counter part. Can you imagine a quarter sawn neck mated to a flat sawn fret board? Chances are you're going to have some movement between the two pieces before long and develop a nasty ridge where the two pieces meet....or even worse. Some people also believe that quarter sawn braces are stronger because of their vertical grain orientation but simple testing proves that notion wrong. Quarter sawn braces are also much easier to carve! Aesthetically speaking, flat sawn pieces cannot be properly book matched for body construction, aside from the shrinkage problem.
Having said this, when you order a guitar neck blank from StewMac, you have your choice between flat or quarter sawn. Beats me why. Oh, and electric guitar builders seem to break most of these "rules" just because they are a squirrely bunch.....
$.02
 
I always worry about putting ebony on cedar necks - different expansion rates and also if you have very dry ebony, it just sucks all of the water out of your glue - I think you'll find Collings Guitars epoxy their fingerboards on...oh, I forgot, ukulele making is not guitar making ;) I digress - everything quartered; a simple rule of thumb but hey, I use my cedar offcuts for back braces and bridgeplates...
 
Much to the chagrin of repair people, I think a lot of the guitar builders are using epoxy on their finger boards now. Oops, I almost forgot, we ain't building guitars!
 
I was at Paxton in Cincinnati a couple of weeks ago and only saw 4/4 flatsawn. That said, I didn't flip through the entire stack. There may have been a random quartersawn or two in the stack. Even when flat sawing lumber a few boards come out quartersawn. My last neck came from a perfectly quartersawn cedar board (Western Red, not Spanish) that I found at Lowe's.
 
Ken W said:
I was at Paxton in Cincinnati a couple of weeks ago and only saw 4/4 flatsawn. That said, I didn't flip through the entire stack. There may have been a random quartersawn or two in the stack. Even when flat sawing lumber a few boards come out quartersawn. My last neck came from a perfectly quartersawn cedar board (Western Red, not Spanish) that I found at Lowe's.
Click to expand...

Oh that's terrible Ken... I can't pick any up till next week anyway but I'm gonna call them and see what they can do. I picked up all of my poplar (tulip?) from Lowe's. Someone told me a friend of his knows when the wood is coming in and snatches all the rainbow (mineral stained).. dagnabbit. I've got some nice western red I picked up there too... I think I told you about that. I might have to give Goosebay a ring.

I do wish I could find a board of quarter sawn poplar though. I suspect those are snatched up too. Which makes me think to add, in a previous post in another thread I wrote that the backs and sides don't have to be quarter sawn, which is true but if you want to warranty it for a long period your best bet is the more stable quarter sawn, as Chuck, Pete and others have pointed out. That seems to be the major consensus among the pros.
 
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I don't think I can add any light to this forest - only a few sparks that will surely dwindle or be stomped out, but here they are...

We have used sapele for all kinds of stuff, including necks - it's heavy, that's certainly true, but you can take it way down and it does yield some nice tonal qualities. Check out the sustain on our little Brasiliana.

With mahogany and sapele I don't mind that much whether the neck is quartered or flatsawn. At least in the wood we have used so far the grain is so fine and so homogeneous that it doesn't seem to matter - time will tell. With the sapele we go by how the curl and ribbons are oriented.

Please be nice to your customers and your fellow luthiers and use hide glue or wood glue to join the fingerboard to the neck - epoxy is just wrong, wrong, wrong...
 
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