Torrified tops? anyone doing that on mandolins yet?

[OldSausage]

Well, call me back in 3 years if everyone's still as excited about it. Meanwhile, I really must find that new suit I had made. The guy swore he left it hanging right in the middle of the room, but I just can't see it anywhere.

[mandroid]

Cigarette burns from parking that smoke under the strings, on the headstock, part of the Cache' ?

[verbs4us]

I played a "roasted" Red Diamond F5 that Morgan Music brought to IBMA this year. I believe it had been subjected to the "Torrefied" process under discussion. It had a slight charcoal-smell to it and I thought it to be the best sounding mandolin I played there.

I talked with Don about this in August and yes, he is experimenting with terrified wood. His interview, which covers this topic, will be posted in the Feb or March issue of the MBOTMA newsletter. I'll post a PDF here once it's, uh, fully cooked.

[barney 59]

The removal of oils would explain why the Collins guitar is maple and not rosewood or mahogany. Dana using the processed wood on the top only of a mahogany bodied guitar. I'd think you would want those oils in your tropical hardwoods. I have taken old rosewood bridges and fretboards that were warped and put them in the micro wave for 20 second increments --some take two or three passes at that but you can practically tie them in knots while they are still hot, it's the oils still present in a 80 to 100 year old piece of rosewood that make that possible.
It's getting harder and harder to come up with quantities of quality properly air dried wood. If you are a company like Collins, or Martin or Fender it must be daunting! You need a great deal of the same kind of wood to produce a product line. I know a guy that is making a very good living custom milling lumber, for furniture mostly, from what would have been decades ago landfill("salvage" they call it now I always referred to it as "roadkill") and in just a few years his business has gone large scale. I have an old stand of black walnut on my property in W.Va. it was a common occurrence for tree hunters from Rocky Mount lumber brokers to stop by and offer me as much as $10,000 for a veneer quality tree. This was in the 70's and 30 years later when I thought maybe I'd take them up on it, having not even seen the place in 16 years, they were offering maybe a quarter of that. Black Walnut had gotten so short in supply that they couldn't sustain manufacturing a furniture line made of black walnut so they moved on to other things and weren't particularly interested anymore. So my trees just get older. I live in N. California now and I can no longer get the local mill work shops to supply me with redwood moldings or mill work unless I supply the redwood because they claim to not be able to come up with a "reliable" supply of a local tree! For my purposes I am able to come up with the quantities that I need because all I need at any one time is a few hundred to a few thousand board feet.
It is still possible for small builders who produce one instrument at a time or small batches to stumble on caches of wood or even logs--and sometimes-- that have been stored for decades by small production shops, hobbyists or farmers-- at least enough to meet their needs and my guess is a lot of them do find their materials this way and not buy from the commercial brokers.Every woodworker I have ever known has a private reserve stash! It doesn't take a tremendous amount of wood to make a mandolin and the small builders will be able to produce instruments with much better quality materials than the larger (and richer) manufacturers simply because of their small volume. If your going to cut on the quarter your probably better off being real small and you don't need to bake the wood you just need to find some good old wood!

[Jeff Mando]

I have an old stand of black walnut on my property in W.Va. it was a common occurrence for tree hunters from Rocky Mount lumber brokers to stop by and offer me as much as $10,000 for a veneer quality tree. This was in the 70's and 30 years later when I thought maybe I'd take them up on it, having not even seen the place in 16 years, they were offering maybe a quarter of that.

Wow! In the 70's, $10,000 would have bought you two signed Loars. I think I'd trade a tree for two Loars. Or half a tree for one Loar.

[Grommet]

I think I recall Steve Sorenson reporting on baking a series of top plates for some of his beautiful mandolins (maybe a bit removed from the full Torrification deal). Maybe he will chime in here and tell us how the process affects the tone in his experience.

Scott

[Astro]

At what stage do they apply the heat ? Is it after the tops/sides/backs have been carved ? Or do they apply the process to the big slab of wood and then cut it down and carve it out from there ? Is there much shrinkage from the process ?

Just curious.

[Marty Jacobson]

It's done to the wood in blank form, before any jointing or carving is done. It's not just heat, it's heat in an oxygen-free environment with very specific heat cycles applied depending on the look and physical properties desired. For example, you can treat poplar to make it dark chocolate brown and so it will weather better outdoors, but it dramatically reduces the stiffness, so you wouldn't want to use that "recipe" on spruce for instruments.

[Steve Sorensen]

Regarding Scott's note above --

The "Wedgewood Baking" process that I've been playing with this year stems from trying to emulate the variable, but mostly dry environment encountered as wood ages under typical natural conditions after it is put into use in an instrument.

The torrification process is something that, while interesting, creates an effect which does not occur in nature.

I realized, while tearing out attic joists and external walls during remodels of my house, that the Douglas Fir framing wood had a hard, bright ping and felt very different from the new framing material that I was buying. The feel and smell of the wood reminded me of the feel and smell of old instruments.

Imagine the hot summers before air conditioning and the dry winters before central heating. As with the framing in old homes, the wood in the great old guitars, mandolins and violins, which we now hold up as examples of tone-targets, has not been sitting in a climate-controlled vaults . . . because that is not the way people lived (until recently).

The results, in the first set of instruments completed this fall, particularly with Englemann and Sitka spruce tops, have been fascinating. I like what I'm hearing and plan to keep exploring the idea.

Steve

[sunburst]

It's obvious to me:
Normal wood, straight from the tree is pure junk... worthless stuff, and all instruments made from it for that last few centuries are pure junk because they are made from lousy material (normal wood, from normal trees). Stradivari violins? Loar-signed mandolins? pre-war herring-bones? Junk!! How did anyone ever convince us that those horrible instruments are worth anywhere near the kind of money they've been selling for for so many years??!!
But!!!... Now that we have the torrefaction process, we have the ability to make instruments of otherworldly quality that will surpass anything made before these new golden years! Just wait, and the undeniable superiority of these new instruments made form this miracle new material will drive prices down, and we can buy all the Stradivari, Loar, prewar Martin, and any other old instrument we want at fire sale prices! But who would want such junk when we can have the new torrefied instruments that so obviously make all previously produced instruments obsolete? Perhaps those old obsolete instruments can be used to stoke the fires to produce torrefied wood for the immensely superior instruments that are the future. Might as well use them for something...

I suppose there is also the off chance that I am wrong about all that, but seriously, considering all the evidence presented, I don't see how.

[Petrus]

It doesn't take a tremendous amount of wood to make a mandolin and the small builders will be able to produce instruments with much better quality materials than the larger (and richer) manufacturers simply because of their small volume. If your going to cut on the quarter your probably better off being real small and you don't need to bake the wood you just need to find some good old wood!

This is one of the things that will save quality mando making for some years to come; the other is the greater variety of woods that mandos can be made out of (compared to say violins, which are almost exclusively spruce and maple.) Another thing is the changing taste in woods for different uses as you mentioned earlier in your post in regards to black walnut. Woods go in and out of fashion; walnut and mahogany were hugely popular for furniture in the 19th century before being superseded by other woods. The fact that different instruments can benefit from different woods helps distribute the demand (ash and alder for solid-body electric guitars, koa for ukes, etc.)

I suspect that torrification will have more complications than initially expected. Different woods have different oil quantities to begin with and may react differently to the process, not always to the benefit of the end product. Done imperfectly, you could end up hurting the wood rather than improving it. (Though application of a ToneRite might be able to fix things, ahem ...)

[Bertram Henze]

Allegedly, this process is the fast track to what normally takes hundreds of years. However, we still don't know what comes after that, for the simple reason that we can't wait for another hundred years to see what happens to naturally aged woods. But with torrefaction, we get a chance for that glimpse into the future, for that might now be just a few months away.

Its like a trip to Tir na n'Og. You may put your wonderful sounding torrefied mandolin in its case today and find no more than a small mound of ash when you open the case tomorrow...

[kidgloves2]

Its like a trip to Tir na n'Og. You may put your wonderful sounding torrefied mandolin in its case today and find no more than a small mound of ash when you open the case tomorrow...

That image made me lol. You never know, but many violins over 300 years old are holding up very well. Maybe that's the secret to their sound. I often wonder what they sounded like when they were new.

[Ivan Kelsall]

From kidgloves above - " I often wonder what they sounded like when they were new.". If we're talking Strads. & Guaneri's, they most likely sounded totally awesome,that's the reason that the great Violinists of the day bought them & played them, & why they ultimately survived. How much better are they now than they were ? - that's something we'll never know.
If the Cafe is still going in 60 /70 years time,i'd like to be around to hear the opinions of owners of some of our top line mandolins such as Gils./Dudes./Heidens/Ellis etc. as to how they've changed / improved (or not). We don't really know exactly how a new LLoyd Loar mandolin sounded . Even Bill Monroe's Loar was 16 years old when he bought it,but maybe that's as close to the sound of a 'new' Loar as some folk ever got to hear shortly after he began playing it. Bill Monroe seemed to like it ok, & that's the mandolin tone that aspiring players began to seek out,
Ivan

[Bertram Henze]

they most likely sounded totally awesome,that's the reason that the great Violinists of the day bought them & played them, & why they ultimately survived.

Hey, there's a nice reverse reasoning: they don't sound good because they're old, they're old because they sound good! This is much more plausible than all the other folderolusion I've heard so far.

[Tavy]

But!!!... Now that we have the torrefaction process, we have the ability to make instruments of otherworldly quality that will surpass anything made before these new golden years! Just wait, and the undeniable superiority of these new instruments made form this miracle new material will drive prices down, and we can buy all the Stradivari, Loar, prewar Martin, and any other old instrument we want at fire sale prices! But who would want such junk when we can have the new torrefied instruments that so obviously make all previously produced instruments obsolete? Perhaps those old obsolete instruments can be used to stoke the fires to produce torrefied wood for the immensely superior instruments that are the future. Might as well use them for something...

LOL, well clearly this "accelerated aging" will pre-crack the wood, ready for the local repair man straight from new, maybe they'll fit a few dust bunnies inside too for that extra resonance they provide - much better than a Virzi clearly

[Petrus]

That image made me lol. You never know, but many violins over 300 years old are holding up very well. Maybe that's the secret to their sound. I often wonder what they sounded like when they were new.

There's the issue of survivor bias with antiques. There aren't too many 300 year old beaters lying around.

[Jeff Mando]

I agree with Sunburst. My BS meter went off when I first heard about the process.

[nickster60]

SteveS has brought up a good point. I have a older house and I did some work in the attic. The wood was 45 year old Douglas fir and some southern yellow pine. I expect the yellow pine to be pretty hard but the fir was really hard. The attic also has that old instrument smell as noted. 45 years of the Florida sun along with a barrel tile roof to top has changed the wood. Granted I live in a humid environment but the wood is still hard as a rock

[Willie Poole]

I was talking to John Duffey one day and he told me the took an older F-2 and converted it to an F-5 and he used a step from the Cellar Door, an old bar room in Gerogetown DC to make the top for it, the step originally was a part of one of the old clipper ships that at one time came up the Potomac river to DC, those ships date back to before the Revolutionary war so that top was made from some wood that was well over 200 years old...I did have the pleasure of hearing the mandolin and it was one of the loudest mandolins that I have ever heard and with a great tone also, the owner said he didn`t need to get anywhere near a microphone when he played a show because it was so loud and carried a ways off....I have no idea where that mandolin is now days but do have some friends that might know so I will see if I can locate it to see how it has held up for the past 50 years...

Willie

[ccravens]

It's obvious to me:
Normal wood, straight from the tree is pure junk... worthless stuff, and all instruments made from it for that last few centuries are pure junk because they are made from lousy material (normal wood, from normal trees). Stradivari violins? Loar-signed mandolins? pre-war herring-bones? Junk!! How did anyone ever convince us that those horrible instruments are worth anywhere near the kind of money they've been selling for for so many years??!!

Interesting how you can criticize a process that basically accelerates aging by using instruments as examples that have a lot of age on them!

Also one that you/we know very little about.

[Timbofood]

Didn't Doyle Lawson have a Pag with a "step tread" for its top too or am I mistaken? I thought I had heard that years ago.
I agree, it will be interesting to see how these will age, what will they sound like in fifty, sixty or more years. I won't live to see that but, it will still be interesting in ten years.

[Jeff Mando]

There's the issue of survivor bias with antiques. There aren't too many 300 year old beaters lying around.

You are correct, there is no such thing as a beater Strad violin. IF, and it is a big if, one was found at a flea market and identified, in any condition, it would restored to playable condition and appraised and then offered at market value. (i.e. $big bucks)

Not too long ago in the vintage guitar circles, only perfect mint condition original examples brought the big money. A custom color Fender Stratocaster from the 1950's might go for $25K, but a refinished one that was beat up was next to impossible to sell except to a player and for a fraction of the price, say $1-2K. (think Stevie Ray Vaughn) Collectors soon figured out the parts were worth more than that to restore a nice guitar and suddenly the beaters started to bring big money.

[Eddie Sheehy]

That's just torrific...

[Jeff Mando]

That's just torrific...

I get it! Kinda like Benghazi, Ben Gazzara, and Ben Casey.....