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Originally posted by derekanjo

Part of me is regretting asking anything about this topic here. I should have just contacted people privately.

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Just unsubscribe or quit reading or quit caring. It ain't your fault what other people say.

What an interesting thread! I never thought of this until I was at a festival here in the NW a few years ago. I was jamming with some folks I didn't know and when the mandolin player took off my mouth dropped open! His mandolin had the most beautiful sound I had ever heard. It made me want to take it into a dark room and pluck its strings to be able to totally enjoy the beautiful sound. (A dark room just so I wouldn't be distracted by anything at all). I asked my husband if he knew the guy playing and about the mandolin. My husband said he had talked to the owner and the mandolin had been made by a luthier who had used wood he got from an old submerged tree in a lake somewhere around here. No one seemed to know who the luthier was. I found out later that the owner of the mandolin had traded it for something. To me, that mandolin made the most beautiful music in the world. A mandolin player friend of mine said she didn't like the sound of it at all. So I guess it is all a matter of opinion anyway. But as to finding old wood - how about this. My husband is a piano technician and he says that when a piano has reached its end, it is taken to the dump and over it goes. That's hard to believe but that is what happens. He knows of a piano store that often has old pianos ready to be hauled to the dump out back of the store. Since he knows the owner, if he needs some part for a work project, he can look through the old pianos when they are back there and salvage. I don't know what kind of wood pianos are made of or if they would be of any use. But its a thought. Good luck!

It is rumoured that C.F. Martin himself used old bannisters from the tenement buildings being torn down, the yard I mentioned earlier in Kansas City is all above ground and you can just go look at it. The timbers are from all over the U.S.A. and the people know when the tree was cut, then how long the building stood, stuff like that.

The fun for some of us is that garage sales, Ebay and craigslist can be a source of good wood, the alleys of central Phoenix, and construction or remodeling dumpsters have been a source of 50-year old Mahogany 1" x 12" by 7', curing straight, held in place by the house itself.

Please forgive those who apparently are seeking attention for their particular philosophy, some of us are just trying to answer the question. Good luck, don't get turned off by strong opinion, fresh air does wonders for stale thinking.

I do  know  the   The  wood  in  My  52  year  old  Gibson  Flat -- Top  guitar  is  sounding  better  every  day.

Nechville.  In  Higginsville.

Lee kelso

Two points of view here...old wood, and old recovered submerged wood.

Different animals completely. Old wood floors, beams, table tops, banisters, etc etc may produce outstanding wood, however its not the same as old wood that has been recovered from the Great Lakes. It feels different, it works different, it sounds different. Note that I didn't say better, just different. Anyone who has worked with both will tell you the same.

Here's a couple of clips from two people I consider experts....Bill Palmer, and Scott Zimmerman. I hope they don't mind me taking some copy from their sites. Bill Palmers Banjo Wizard site is gone, but Scott Zimmermans site is going strong and is a wonderful source of true banjo wisdom...check it out at http://www.desertrosebanjo.com. Read the background on recovered old growth woods from the Great Lakes before you make any assumptions about woods. The recovered woods are in a class of their own.

From Scott Zimmerman

"During the entire history of the logging of the American wilderness, and especially during its peak in the last half of the 19th century, literally hundreds of thousands of logs bound for the mills became waterlogged on their journey and sank in the rivers and lakes before they could be processed into lumber. In some of these rivers and lakes the ideal conditions exist that have allowed this priceless heritage of the American continent to survive intact. In the northern waterways and lakes, when the water temperature remains extremely low and the oxygen content limited, the natural forces, especially the bacterial degradation that would normally turn the wood into useless pulp in a short time are arrested and the wood has survived. It has not survived unchanged however. In the cold depths of the Great Lakes especially, natural leaching and the action of anaerobic bactertia which live in the absence oxygen have been at work for the centuries the wood has been submerged. These bacteria have entered the logs and consumed only the substances such as the resin, starch and all the soft materials inside the cells, leaving the wood and its cellular structure intact. The wood now consists of millions of hollow chambers that were once cells full of organic materials. It is this verifiable fact that has led the interest in this wood in the musical instrument field."

From Bill Palmer

"One of the missing ingredients in obtaining the pre-war sound on a modern instrument is the right kind of wood. The Gibson banjos that were built in the 1920's and 1930's came from "old growth" wood, from Canada and the Northern U.S. This type of wood came from trees that were grown under adverse climatic conditions. The growth was slow and the grain was very tight. Some of this wood had aged for many years after being cut down. When this wood was made into a banjo rim, it produced spectacular sound, and it kept getting better with each passing year.

But the supply of this wood was finite, and much of it was used during World War II for various types of construction. Conservation efforts produced tree farms that were to replace much of this old wood. But the tree farms are generally in areas with better climate than the frozen North. These trees are actually almost pampered. They don't have that tight grain.

A few years ago, divers exploring the bottom of Lake Superior made an interesting discovery. At the bottom of the lake, buried under several feet of mud, there were logs that had been harvested over a century ago. They had been buried in the mud as the logs from the north were floated downstream from the big forests. And they had lain there undisturbed. When some of these logs were brought to the surface, it was quickly determined that they were not only old growth wood, but they had not actually been damaged by submersion. While there was some penetration of the surface of the logs by water, the amount of water damage was minimal. Much of the wood was completely dry, and it had aged anaerobically. This produced a cellular structure very similar to the wood in a pre-war banjo rim."

Edited by - lazyarcher on 02/18/2012 09:13:03