soundboard question

I know, I know, not another tonewood question…..
So I was sitting in my kitchen looking at a piece of wood, daydreaming of a themed uke project from some reclaimed wood… I’m not really going to use any of this, just daydreaming and it illustrates my question, but….



I noticed something… I’m kind of knew at this… So far with my bookmatching I have been mostly looking at which side looks better, but is there a which side sounds better?
With not so quartersawn wood, there is some chirality (handedness) to it. When resawn and joined the grain can be predominantly NW to SE or NE to SW. When incorporated into a soundboard, can this have an effect at either accentuating or dampening the treble or base depending on the orientation?
It seems with the tonewood questions, it always comes down to the builder, but it seems like this could be one of those builder choices that dictates sound???

By the way, anyone know what those are on my kitchen counter for the night??
and... as a disclaimer, I'm not really thinking about making anything out of pine, it's just that for the last several months I've had ukes on my mind and am allways looking at something wondering if I can make a uke out of it. I'll post my first uke soon, it's themed and on it's way, the serious ones are coming a little slower.

Thinking about this way too much. If you carried this presumption on to the next level, what do you do with re-entrant tuning? Kinda stuffs up the theory doesn't it.

There are just so many infinite variables to instrument building, that worrying about grain runout and it's potential to affect, and or enhance tone are well beyond anyones skill set.

I've seen many a guitar that had some shocking runout evident in the tops, and they sounded fantastic. And others that sounded like crap. And the same goes for some perfectly quartered wood with no runout at all. So what was different? The entire package I think.

The biggest problems with run-out are structural.

Archtop instruments are practically nothing but run-out!

please make a quartersawn pinetop uke.

I'd join on the quartered side, puting the rift grain part on the waste side. I'd also have no beef with building a pine uke. You might have trouble selling pine ukes though, with the Koa blinkers the market is obsessed with wearing and all.

Some really tight grain white pine might be good, some of it feels very similar to Redwood, Cedar, or Spruce.

Has anyone used Oregon Pine (aka Douglas Fir) for tops? I read about it recently on Mandoline Café - the poster described it as "red spruce on steroids".

erich@muttcrew.net said:

Has anyone used Oregon Pine (aka Douglas Fir) for tops? I read about it recently on Mandoline Café - the poster described it as "red spruce on steroids".

Click to expand...

Doug fir was one of David Hurd's favorite sound board materials when he was building.

I have built quite a few with doug fir tops. As I'm sure you know douglas fir has a wide variation in hardness/density. I prefer pieces that just a little heavier than sitka. My contractor friend bought three huge standing dead douglas fir and had the entire trees quarter sawn for a fancy house he built and I worked on. Needless to say some of the really nice shorts made it back to my place. Some had grain so fine you could not count it with the naked eye. We counted up to 75 lines per inch. It's making beautiful tops in both sight and sound. Fir is a little weak and easy to split across the grain so I feel I need to taper and thin the bridge patch to about 1/32" or less at the edges and run it very close to the kerfing.

Here is a photo of a doug fir I completed

That's a great looking top Michael. Where I grew up in Canada all the gymnasiums had fir floors, as well as most of the older homes. A mate of mine had a salvage license to pull out floater logs in a couple of lakes that had been left from logging taking place in the very early 1900's. I had a floor in our family room out of some of that salvaged wood. And like you, could not count the growth rings with the naked eye. One of the pieces we did count at over 300 years old and it that was only in a piece 3" wide. It came out of a very big log. It boggles the mind on how old that tree was.

That really does look nice, Michael.

Some of the other posts in that thread at Mandoline Cafe did mention that DF had a tendency to split (at least with certain pieces under certain conditions).