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Hi guys, I recently moved from the central valley california to the high desert near victorville in california. My question is, what can I do to bring up the humidity in my 40'x8'x9'6" shop? the relative humidity is 20-25 year round. How bad would it be to build under these conditions? BTW my shop is in a 40' shipping container.

See:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6muU3E7WIg

TJ Thompson (famous luthier..)says a few things about building, including the fact that the builds at 28% - intentionally. So it may not be a huge problem for you.
Generally the most disastrous combination is a guitar built at high humidity, then moved to a low RH environment (like a heated house in a snowy winter environment)- shrinkage cracks are practically inevitable.

Hopefully some of the pros will chime in here, since they ship guitars 'all over'.
John

Yep!! John is right. Most problems come from drying out not from adding humidity. I to live and work in a region that the RH is low year round. Worse than yours, low RH as low as 15%. I do have a humidifier but I don't elevate the humidity as much as you may think. I build at around 32% RH year round. This is our average RH during the spring and fall. It will on occasions get higher in the summer and fall way less in the winter. So I set my shop RH at the mean. When I ship to an area that has high RH I always tell the client to allow a week for the guitar to acclimate before tension up if possible If the guitar is coming back to me after being in a humid climate I tell them to use a humidifier in shipment.

Thanks, I feel less worried about building in this climmate. I will get a humidifier to help out a little.

[QUOTE=MichaelP] When I ship to an area that has high RH I always tell the client to allow a week for the guitar to acclimate before tension up if possible.[/QUOTE]

I'm sure they obey don't they

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Ed, I live in the mountains of northern New Mexico and we often have even lower humidity if you can believe that. But I use a Sears house humidifier and it keeps a 20 X 26 x 8 area at 35-40% pretty easily. It could do 45% also. I do have to fill it up pretty much every day.

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http://jameswattsguitars.com

Thanks Jim.

in the summer you may want to think about a swamp cooler. will kill two birds with one stone,keep you cool and the rh up in the working zone.

whilst going from high rh to very low rh will cause the top to drop, often resulting in buzzes and in the worst cases cracking. on the other hand, going from low rh to high rh will cause the top to rise and can make the action nearly unplayable. saddle changes are commonly needed in each of these cases.

on the whole it is preferable to try to keep the range of rh changes the instrument experiences as narrow as possible to avoid problems. the reason that mid 40% rh levels are recommended for building is that that range falls in the middle of the ranges generally experienced around the country giving the instrument the best chances of survival. if you knew the an instrument was never going to leave your area, or that it would not experience seasonal rh variation there would be no problem building in your ambient rh level. generally we cannot make those assumptions and thus need to control our building environment to best allow our product to survive.

[QUOTE=Jim_W]I do have to fill it up pretty much every day.
[/QUOTE]

Me too, and I've been trying to figure out a way to avoid that. My shop has no running water, so I can't install the kind of humidifier which is hooked to a water line. I just wish I could find something (or construct something) which has a much bigger reservoir. I want a 50 gallon tank that I can just fill with a hose every so often.

Anybody ever heard of anything like that? Any other ideas for me?   

Thanks!