Engleman vs. Adirondak

[bryce]

I buy (adirondack spruce) from old standard. Thats what they sold it as. I assumed (Oh No) that it came from the adirondack range.
I have always been told that all adirondack spruce is red spruce, but not all red spruce is adirondack. I therefore thought adirondack spruce was red spruce that came from the adirondacks.
I guess I'll call Old Standard to see if my tops came from the adirondacks.
This is making my brain tired.

David

[Chuck Naill]

I buy (adirondack spruce) from old standard. Thats what they sold it as. I assumed (Oh No) that it came from the adirondack range.

Did you really or are you pulling our legs, David.

I have always been told that all adirondack spruce is red spruce, but not all red spruce is adirondack. I therefore thought adirondack spruce was red spruce that came from the adirondacks.

Well now you know the truth. There is not such thing as Adirondack spruce and besides, its easier for me to spell red/Red.

[Dfyngravity]

I don't know, maybe someone here knows, but are there more Red Spruces being harvested from the Adirondack mountains than any other place? I would assume if a supplier says it is Adirondack Red Spruce that they simply mean that the piece of Red Spruce came from the Adirondack mountains.

In essence though, Red Spruce is Red Spruce.....you just want to make sure it is a good piece of wood.

[bryce]

Old Standaed lists it as adirondack spruce on thier site. Call it what you like, it is very good wood. David

[Dfyngravity]

I find this http://www.mythicguitar.com/tonewoods.html to be an interesting read.

It seems to me that people like to put a regional tag in front of Picea rubens "Red Spruce" because of previous "Golden Ages" of guitar or instrument making. Yet there wasn't necessarily any direct labeling saying where the Red Spruce was in fact coming from, just simply that it was Red Spruce.

Who knows, maybe someone was like hey, I have this Red Spruce from the Adirondacks and it seems to be a good wood.....lets use it on the guitar. The guitar turned out so good that the piece of Red Spruce from the Adirondacks became legendary.

[Chuck Naill]

Who knows, maybe someone was like hey, I have this Red Spruce from the Adirondacks and it seems to be a good wood.....lets use it on the guitar. The guitar turned out so good that the piece of Red Spruce from the Adirondacks became legendary.

Since Martin was originally in New York, that make sense to me.

I noticed on a map that Nova Scotia has the largest stand of Red spruce. It would be interesting to know how much Red spruce was sourced from outside the Adirondack range.

All of this discussion make me wonder if those Adirondack chairs that L.L Bean sells are really from somewhere else.

[buddyellis]

Pretty much, unless you come across an old growth, very high altitude tree somewhere, or find a stack of 100 year old beam laying around, sourcing red spruce with a 30gpi count is for all intents and purposes impossible these days -- the wood just doesn't exist on the open market that much, especially in guitar widths. That's not to say there aren't people who don't have it, but generally, the reality is that, like Brazilian rosewood, that wood passed into history back many years ago, much of it, sadly, turned into paper pulp (or Chanel #5 perfume, in the case of brazilian).

[Chuck Naill]

Pretty much, unless you come across an old growth, very high altitude tree somewhere, or find a stack of 100 year old beam laying around, sourcing red spruce with a 30gpi count is for all intents and purposes impossible these days -

Actually, Buddy, I remember doing a core sampling with John Arnold 20 years ago near Cataloochie with some pretty tight grain There is also some very wide grow near Maggie. Availability of tight has a lot to doi with restrictions and topography.

Now that some long time and knowledgeable members have responded, can you appreciate that I was not "jacking" anyone around, Buddy?

[buddyellis]

Yea, go to Cataloochee and cut some of those trees. See you in 30 years after you get out of the federal pen ;-) I know very well there are trees that exist. There are just very, very few that exist out side of the park in this area. There are quite a few trees up on the BRP (esp in the Balsam Mountain Campground area) that I'd love to get a hold of, they get windblown all the time up there, they saw them up and toss them in the ravine. And no, you were jacking people up. And I'll leave it at that.

[Chuck Naill]

Yea, go to Cataloochee and cut some of those trees. See you in 30 years after you get out of the federal pen ;-) I know very well there are trees that exist. There are just very, very few that exist out side of the park in this area. There are quite a few trees up on the BRP (esp in the Balsam Mountain Campground area) that I'd love to get a hold of, they get windblown all the time up there, they saw them up and toss them in the ravine. And no, you were jacking people up. And I'll leave it at that.

Buddy,

I said "near" Cataoochee.

[oldwave maker]

FWIW, top wood is compression grain red harvested by Arnold in 99, bottom is compression grain engelmann harvested by Musser in 98

[JEStanek]

Gently, please gentlemen. This is an interesting conversation.

Jamie

[D.E.Williams]

It doesn't really matter what we call it, where we got it, or from where it came, 'cuz in a few years, CITES will make it illegal to cut, buy, and use...or transport from state to state.



Don

[F-2 Dave]

When tone woods are outlawed, only outlaws will use tone woods.

[John Arnold]

Hello everybody!
This is my first post on MC, and I hope it won't be the last. Chuck asked me to contribute to this thread, and it has been an interesting read.
Ted Davis asked me to join him in cutting red spruce in October 1990, after John Hamlett's trips with Ted in the summers of 1989 and 1990. Since then, Ted and I cut over 7000 guitar tops, and over 3000 mandolin/violin tops. We have sold red spruce to most of the major manufacturers, as well as a host of independent luthiers. I never imagined that I would be involved in cutting so much, and I will be eternally grateful to Ted for my involvement in the red spruce revival.
I prefer the name red spruce, for these reasons:
1) It is the name of the tree, literally translated from Picea rubens, just as Engelmann (Picea engelmanii), and Sitka (Picea sitchensis) are. We don't call Sitka 'Pacific coast spruce' or Engelmann 'Rocky Mountain spruce', do we?
2) Calling it 'Adirondack' implies that there is some superiority to the red spruce from that area, which I have not found to be true.
3) 'Adirondack spruce' is not specific, since white spruce and black spruce also grow there. To be fair, most of the 'Adirondack' spruce that is suitable for guitars is red spruce.

Picea glauca in the Adirondacks? Did you plant some there? It's pretty rare, being that's about the southernmost it range might extend.

The range maps for white spruce extend as far south as Pennsylvania. I saw white spruce growing in the Delaware Water Gap area of NE PA when I visited there. I have only been through the Adirondacks one time, and I didn't see any white spruce, but it is within the boundaries of the range maps. I also saw very few red spruce (and no black spruce) in the Adirondacks that were large enough for guitars. That is not surprising, since the area has been extensively logged numerous times. BTW, the same is true in West Virginia. The big trees are few and far between.

Martin, for example, has always called red spruce Adirondack spruce.

No, CFM III called it red spruce. This is a copy of the interview of him, conducted by Eric Schoenberg and Dana Bourgeois.



Today, Martin calls it Adirondack red spruce in most of their literature.

Whether or not it grew in a specific area matters to me less than the quality of the wood.

Exactly what Mr. Martin said.

I'm only saying that good wood is good wood, no matter where it comes from. I wonder if we've got some fine stuff up here in the Northern Illinois area? Too cold to go look right now.

That is outside the range of red spruce.

Arguing that universally 'blue ridge' red spruce is 'warmer' than 'west virginia' red spruce is equally absurd. You simply cannot make those sorts of universal generalizations about any sort of wood -- there are too many variables. What altitude did it grow at? How dense is it? etc. etc etc.

Altitude is probably not a factor because red spruce grows in such a narrow climate range. In the Smokies, red spruce only grows between 4500 and 6000 feet. The tightest-grained red spruce I have cut (up to 65 grains per inch) came from the 'warmest' end of that altitude range in the Smokies....4700 feet. It also was within 15 miles of the southern end of the red spruce range.
The most important factor affecting the growth rate is the availability of light. Next is soil quality. Those trees in the Smokies were in an old forest that was undisturbed for over 400 years, and they were growing on very thin soil on top of solid rock. When the remains of Hurricane Opal came through in October 1995, the combination of wind and rain felled those trees in a landslide. The soil was additionally weakened by the building of US 441 through the park.
I have several pieces of the Smokies spruce, from 1984, 1985, and 1995. In each case, it is a softer wood than similar old growth red spruce from West Virginia.

There's a guy around here, Chuck Norris (no not that one) that has an Arnold guitar with 'adi' (red spruce) top and that's a fine instrument.

The Chuck Norris guitar is one of the first dreads I built with the Smokies red spruce.

John Hamlett wrote:

We cut two trees in 1989 and two in 1990, actually, 3 in 1990, but one had so much wind in it that a local logger bought it and we cut another.
I've had the wood from all four trees since, it's been moved from place to place, and has gotten mixed up. Some of the wood is pretty good and some is excellent and most is in between, but none stands out from the rest as harder. I'd have to say that I don't know which tree from 1990 Ted would have been referring to as being the hardest he ever had because all the wood I have is relatively similar, other than appearance.

Ted did tell me about those two trips, and they were true adventures. In 1989, the butt cut block of the larger tree was rolled down a steep mountainside, hurdled the road, and continued on down the mountain. Ted had to rent a wrecker truck in order to retrieve it. Later on, the forest ranger said that they had made a mistake, allowing Ted to cut in an area that was protected. In the summer of 1998, Ted and I returned to an area nearby, where the Forest Service said they may allow cutting in the future. We marked several trees, hoping to get one a year or two later. A downburst storm in March 1999 felled some of those same trees, and we were able to cut some with a firewood permit. Talk about divine intervention!
In the summer of 1990 with John Hamlett, Ted hired local help to do the logging in an area further south, still in the WV National Forest. Pat Burgess was an interesting character, 67 years old, with teenage sons. He had lost a leg below the knee when he was 11 years old, but that didn't slow him down. He barely had a limp with his artificial leg, and could traverse the steep terrain as fast as anyone. They had a draft horse to pull the logs out. Pat told me he had logged violin wood in the 1940's to be shipped to Germany, cutting the logs 11 feet long. I asked him why 11 feet, and he said it was so they wouldn't cut it into stud lumber at the sawmill. I can just imagine CFM III and his dad visiting all these sawmills, picking from their 'violin logs'.
Though the summer trips to WV were good for Ted and John Hamlett, they pale in comparison to the October 1990 trip. The ranger had some big trees in mind, and showed them to Ted before he left for home. Ted, looking down from the top of the mountain, said, "They don't look that big". What he didn't realize was that he was only seeing the tops of the trees, above the other hardwoods like cherry and maple. When they walked down to the trees, it was obviously a strip of old growth timber...everything below (on private land) had been clear cut, while above it was a strip mine. The first red spruce tree they encountered was almost 34" in diameter at breast height, and easily over 100 feet tall. When Ted asked me to go with him that October, he excitedly showed me core samples the ranger had taken from those trees, showing the extremely tight grain. It turned out that the two trees we cut that fall were almost 400 years old, some of the oldest red spruce in West Virginia.
Ted's experience with cutting live spruce in the summer led both of us to conclude that fall and winter are much better times for logging. 'Summer logs' tend to grow blue stain in the sapwood, ruining the cosmetics of the most valuable part of the tree...the outside just under the bark. We learned that the red spruce goes dormant in the latter half of September, and stays dormant until late March. Trees cut in that 'window' are much less susceptible to blue stains, and cutting in October gives the most time to resaw the wood and get it dry before the summer heat causes problems. So, from that day on, we tried to always cut in October.
The other 'problem' that John alluded to was spiral growth. They wasted the cutting of one tree, since it had too much twist to be usable for instruments. I decided that since we had access to an increment borer (from the ranger), that I would see if the spiral could be detected in the core sample. It turns out that spiral is visible in the core sample, if you know what to look for. I later bought my own borer, and learned how to sort out this problem and others, simply by taking samples. I am proud to say that I avoided spiral growth almost entirely, with the exception of one tree from Maine. In that case, I had only taken one core sample, and it was from the only part of the tree that was not spiralled. We still used the wood, though the tops did have some runout.
We met Pat Burgess and his sons that October in 1990, on the top of the mountain. We proceeded down the steep hillside, finding the trees that Ted had seen that summer. Pat turned to Ted and said "You guys must be from Virginia". "Why?", Ted asked. "Because only Virginia boys log uphill." The terrain was too steep for Pat's horse, so we would have to figure out another way. We ended up using the boy's four-wheeler on private land, using a skidder road that had been built when the private land was logged in the 1960's. It was miserable work, primarily because of the incessant rain and cold.
By the way, I learned later that the private land, which was completely enclosed by National Forest, was owned by Mildred Natwick, an actress who had John Wayne and Alfred Hitchcock in her movie credits.
(To be continued)

[John Arnold]

(Continued)

I buy (adirondack spruce) from old standard.

I know it is not all from the Adirondacks, because there is a famous photo of John Griffin (Old Standard) and Dana Bourgeois, standing next to a large red spruce log from Maine.

are there more Red Spruces being harvested from the Adirondack mountains than any other place? I would assume if a supplier says it is Adirondack Red Spruce that they simply mean that the piece of Red Spruce came from the Adirondack mountains.

I doubt it. The Adirondacks have been logged too much and too often. I believe most of the red spruce being cut today for instruments is Canadian, either from Quebec (Bouchet), or from New Brunswick.
I think we have established that 'Adirondack' is a trade name for red spruce, nothing more. If you want to be correct, you can provide the GPS coordinates for where the tree grew, something I can do for the majority of the red spruce I have cut.

Re: NC red spruce:

I know very well there are trees that exist. There are just very, very few that exist out side of the park in this area.

I have found hundreds of guitar-size red spruce on NC private land, adjacent to the Blue Ridge Parkway on the Maggie side. Most of them are wide-grained, something I was hesitant to pursue, at least until I saw some very wide-grained red spruce on recent Martins. The average grain count on those trees is probably 5-6 per inch. Incidentally, it is very high elevation, above 5500 feet.

in a few years, CITES will make it illegal to cut, buy, and use...or transport from state to state.

I know that is a joke, because CITES has no jurisdiction. The EPA could theoretically declare it endangered and restrict trade, but the red spruce is definitely not endangered. There are plenty of small trees, though pollution has slowed growth in certain areas. What is rare is to find red spruce that are large enough for a two-piece guitar top, since the common logging cycle is 30 years. Ted and I worked with the Forest Service in WV to designate certain areas for 'future tonewood production', extending the cycle to 60 years or more.

John

[F-2 Dave]

Welcome John. I just got here myself and found it to be an interesting place.

[Hans]

I've always called mine West Virginia red spruce 'cause that's where Ted said he got it.

[Michael Gowell]

I love to see experts bicker...

Wonderful photo of that tall spruce next to the walking path. It would make a superb schooner mast, almost a shame to waste it on mandolins.

[oldwave maker]

John- thanks for the wood stories. I'm finally getting around to using red I got from you at the y2k ASIA convention in Nashville.
John had a few big bearclaw red logs from the north country last time I stopped in at Old Standard:

[D.E.Williams]

Nice to see you here John...and thanks for the stories. And yes, the CITES remark was a joke.

[Shelby Eicher]

I have a question. What are the common spruces that violins are crafted from? I haven't noticed violin makers talking about the different spruces like I do the mandolin builders.
Thanks,
Shelby Eicher

[buddyellis]

Generally picea abies (that is, Norway, German, Italian, Carpathian, or 'European Spruce' -- they are all the same species with different growing ranges) is the 'usual' violin wood.

[Chuck Naill]

I have a question. What are the common spruces that violins are crafted from? I haven't noticed violin makers talking about the different spruces like I do the mandolin builders.
Thanks,
Shelby Eicher

Traditionally European spruce is used and many makers prefer those woods.

Yes, there are exceptional makers using Red, Sitka, and Englemann. Stradivarius used local woods for his builds according to the book by the Hilll brothers http://www.cello.org/heaven/hill/index.htm this tells me that when Charles Horner constructs something he got from Ted Davis or Mr Arnold, he is following in the same foot steps.

Below is a fiddle recently acquired from Mr Horner for a student of Kenny Sears, a member of the Grand Ole Opry. The top looks very much like the 1995 log John accessed.



Below is Kenny evaluating the violin.

[buddyellis]

Concur, its more about 'tradition' than anything, just like the mando crowd & red spruce. Again, there's such potential overlap of the characteristics between species, that it really, IMO, says more about the luthier when an instrument turns out good than the particular sort of material. I think most of the the most successful luthiers find a group of material which is similar and predictable to work with, (or a supplier than can supply that predictability) and carve/rinse/repeat until they understand what needs to be done with the particular material and dial in what 'they want' in an instrument. That's probably one of the 'infant steps' to repeatability.