Official Luthiers Forum!

Has anyone ever tried to lobby for relaxed regulation on shell pieces in the US? Is the restriction both import and export? As in if you are in the US you can't buy shell pieces from taobao or aliexpress, is that correct?

Anyone know why did the US all of a sudden decided to regulate shell import/export? Is abalone endangered or exploited?

I mean over here we eat the stuff (the animal, not the shell) for weddings, and those shell are essentially trash.

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Cat-gut strings are made from kitten guts, stretched out to near breaking point and then hardened with grue saliva. As a result these give a feeling of Pain and anguish whenever played, and often end up playing themselves backwards as part of satanic rituals.

Typhoon Guitars
http://www.typhoon-guitars.com

We can import shell to the US, but cannot export shell due to abalone poaching on the US west coast.
Abalone poaching is for the meat, not the shell.

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That is not quite correct. Import or export of any quantity of shell requires an import/export license from US Fisheries and Wildlife, and the US importer/exporter needs to fill out a wildlife form that lists the species and country of origin and lodge it. Crazy if it is only a few grams of shell, but that is what needs to be done to be legal. Whether US Customs actually enforce this on individual shipments is another question.

So anyone familiar with this, why did the regulation become this strict? It wasn't anything before about 2008.

And as for not enforcing the law, I find law enforcement in the US has become rather overzealous and there's a case of a person who was sentenced to 8 years in the Federal penitentiary for violating the lacey act. All he did was package lobsters in a different container than what the country of origin required (and that country did not enforce that law either). Since the Lacey Act requires you to follow all laws from the country of origin, and it is a felony to not do so. Gibson got in trouble for this too (and I do not know if any of their employees went to jail for it). US Federal government loves to jail people over any little violations of the law, even by one period or comma. And there is little to no due process either (as in the due process consists of a judge or magistrate telling what you are charged with, and what your sentence will be, and everything else is a formality).

So I am wondering has anyone tried to lobby for this? I mean they were able to get exemptions for musical instruments on CITES restriction.

_________________
Cat-gut strings are made from kitten guts, stretched out to near breaking point and then hardened with grue saliva. As a result these give a feeling of Pain and anguish whenever played, and often end up playing themselves backwards as part of satanic rituals.

Typhoon Guitars
http://www.typhoon-guitars.com

"So I am wondering has anyone tried to lobby for this? "

Lobbyists cost money, and we don't have any organization that speaks for us and has the resources. You have to remember that the entire musical instrument manufacturing sector amounts to a small rounding error in terms of the US economy. The regulations are not written with us in mind, because, for all intents and purposes, we don't exist. Several years ago, after the Lacey extension went through, some folks from the lutherie field got together with one of the higher-ups in FWS and hammered out some changes to the laws that would have made things easier. They actually made it as far as a congressional committee, and sent out an e-mail to a bunch of us to get in touch with our representative and push it. Then the government was shut down, and a couple of days later we were notified that it had died due to a 'lack of interest'.

Before you know it we'll be making guitars entirely out of oak and rock fragments! Even some stuff you can get legally is getting so expensive it's pushing smaller makers into unrealistic price points or negative margins.

We use Paua Abalone for our shell inlay, and I'd probably replace it with some other natural material before switching to a synthetic alternative. Hope that's nowhere in our future, cuz the stuff is just perfectly beautiful, and an amazing reflection of the natural world.

You can make some pretty nice guitars out of oak and rock fragments.
Unfortunately diminishing resources is a reflection of the diminishing natural world.
The planet needs fewer humans. The Chinese had the right idea - one child households (says the "do as I say, not as I do" person with three children )

Paradoxically, China doesn't impede commerce in any way with their regulations. No stupid shell regulation, no stupid restrictions except reasonable ones (like ivory and stuff, that seems to be ignored in China), etc.

I get more and more raw materials from China because not only it costs less (Zircote costs 150 a set, not almost 400, most wood cost less than half as much as LMI), but because there are no stupid regulations either, but also much lower shipping cost and all that.

What was the reason for the Lacey Act extensions?? Was there really a problem with exploitation of abalone shell? So what about personal instruments?

It seems like these regulations serve naught but one more laws they can jail you for, if there isn't enough felonies the average American commit each day.

_________________
Cat-gut strings are made from kitten guts, stretched out to near breaking point and then hardened with grue saliva. As a result these give a feeling of Pain and anguish whenever played, and often end up playing themselves backwards as part of satanic rituals.

Typhoon Guitars
http://www.typhoon-guitars.com

"What was the reason for the Lacey Act extensions?? Was there really a problem with exploitation of abalone shell? So what about personal instruments?"

Yes:
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news ... th-africa/

Considering that Taiwan is an island and fishing is a 2 billion$ industry there, have you considered getting with some local markets and seeing if you can source some shell yourself? Might be cheaper with just a little extra labor to purchase the specimens yourself. They may not even care about the shells and just give them away to make some space. Who knows you might even find some cool looking stuff you can't buy from suppliers.

EDIT: Just a quick google search showed a Taiwanese dish called Gongliao that uses Taiwanese abalone. Just looking up the species they apparently have very pretty shell colors. I really think it'd be worth your time to go to a market and get some stuff direct from the source. It would be the real deal and all you'd have to do would be to process it.

A friend of mine took a hike on the New Zealand shore years ago. He stopped to pick up paua shells for me, which struck his local companions as odd. At the end of the hike they passed a local land fill. There were dumpsters for clear glass, green glass, steel and aluminum cans, and one for abalone shells.....

Yes it is crazy. My country farms pearl oyster by the millions for the pearls, no chance of it ever becoming endangered. Paua Abalone is also farmed in New Zealand. The South African abalone is listed on CITES, but it is not used for inlay, and I have been reliably informed it never was. I used to get all my shell inlay from the USA, but now can't so I get it locally in Australia or from Vietnam. Clear case of the US shooting itself in the foot, but the businesses affected are relatively small so nobody cares.

I have no idea who's who when it comes to shells. I did find abalone shells but they were too small to be used in inlays. I found some large abalone shells in some stores but they wanted 15 dollars for one of those.

Besides I heard preparing the shell for inlay is quite a bit of work... and unsafe too.

_________________
Cat-gut strings are made from kitten guts, stretched out to near breaking point and then hardened with grue saliva. As a result these give a feeling of Pain and anguish whenever played, and often end up playing themselves backwards as part of satanic rituals.

Typhoon Guitars
http://www.typhoon-guitars.com

Well without "stupid regulations" you will see many extinctions in your life time. In fact they happen every day. I still have no problems getting shell here in the US. And also BTW I can assure you that the US has due process. It's ridiculous to state otherwise. I'm not going to argue that point any further though as per the rules of this forum. But I mean.... Geesh!

jfmckenna is right. I'm all for what the Lacey extension, Endangered Species Act, and other environmental laws are trying to do. The fact that the mechanism is a bit clumsy at times is frustrating, but understandable. I do object to the way much of this has been politicized, but, as he says, forum rules limit what you can say about that here, and, again, with good reason. It has been said that when you have no good choices it's a sign of bad policy, and in many respects we're reaping the fruits of decades and more of that. All we can do is try to mitigate the worst injustices and move things in the right direction (whatever that is).

This is what I managed to procure in Taiwan/China cheaply.

The piece on the left is some kind of abalam material. It comes as a 4 x 8" sheet, but don't be deceived by the beauty of the piece. The abalone layer is paper thin, less than .01" thick, and one swipe with a sandpaper and the rest is mother of pearl beneath. It is a complete waste of time to deal with as if the piece is slightly proud of the surface any attempt to sand it level will destroy the inlay. Only way is to mount it beneath and cover it with epoxy.

Piece on the right is solid abalone. It is about 1mm thick. It is however not straight, but curved. However I can fix this by crushing the piece between 2 metal plates then gluing the resulting piece together with epoxy. But I think on curved fingerboard I can probably use it as is, to match the piece with the radius of the fingerboard.

I can laser cut the piece to shape.

The board on the left cost about 10 dollars and the piece on the right costs 1 dollar.

_________________
Cat-gut strings are made from kitten guts, stretched out to near breaking point and then hardened with grue saliva. As a result these give a feeling of Pain and anguish whenever played, and often end up playing themselves backwards as part of satanic rituals.

Typhoon Guitars
http://www.typhoon-guitars.com

That's not quite what I was suggesting. I'm suggesting going to a fish market, finding someone selling shellfish, seeing if they have any abalone shells they want to get rid of. I'm talking about when it looks like this. If you can laser cut things to shape then get a bunch of shells (possibly for free) and then cut them to a standard shape on your cutter. If they're free then you can't get much cheaper than that.

I won't profile (cut to blank) on a laser. Believe it or not the only way I have gotten it to work is raster engrave, and it's very time consuming to do. But I just need a standard blank then I can use the laser to raster out something complex, like Chinese characters.

I will try the traditional market but since abalone isn't an everyday food (they are eaten during banquets, weddings, etc.) it may be hard to find. Only shellfish I found at the market is oyster and clams.

_________________
Cat-gut strings are made from kitten guts, stretched out to near breaking point and then hardened with grue saliva. As a result these give a feeling of Pain and anguish whenever played, and often end up playing themselves backwards as part of satanic rituals.

Typhoon Guitars
http://www.typhoon-guitars.com

Processing out raw shell like that is a pain. A long while back,when it was hard to get paua, I found some whole shells at a local shop, and cut one up for inlay. I used a jeweler's saw to cut it into pieces that were small enough to be reasonably flat and large enough for what I wanted to make. These were lapped flat on one side using fairly coarse wet sandpaper on a glass plate, and then taken to thickness and polished up, all by hand. Don't even think of using a dry grinder for this. One of the reasons this stuff is so expensive is that the shells are fairly small, and quite curved, which limits the size of the flat pieces you can get, and it's very labor intensive.

Does Taiwan have any import restrictions? I know of some Taiwanese guys in Vietnam exporting instruments and all kinds of parts. I know their suppliers. I'm sure you can get a good deal on a whole bag of the stuff.

Pat

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Pat

Yea, I know there's Depaule supply that is based on Vietnam but their prices are still rather expensive. I guess I understand that to get a 1 square inch piece that's flat you have to start from really large shells. All I was able to get from China probably came from smaller shells so they are curved. If you break the piece up and glue it back together you can't tell in the final product, and you can just break them and glue it to a flat piece. Don't get why it has to be flat.

But Abalam from luthier suppliers are often no cheaper than whole shell, other than that it's possible to have larger pieces. So it looks like smaller shell pieces can be cut up and reassembled into large pieces.

I mean there has to be a reason why dots are much cheaper per ounce than square pieces right?

_________________
Cat-gut strings are made from kitten guts, stretched out to near breaking point and then hardened with grue saliva. As a result these give a feeling of Pain and anguish whenever played, and often end up playing themselves backwards as part of satanic rituals.

Typhoon Guitars
http://www.typhoon-guitars.com

Not DePaul, he's focused on the retail Western market by the look of his prices. The quality is pretty good though, so good for him. There are some Taiwanese guys selling Vietnamese stuff mostly on eBay pretty cheap. if you're just trying to get inexpensive flat pieces of Pearl and abalone I'm sure you can get a large quantity pretty cheap. Prepared pieces that are already flattened and ready to cut. Thicknesses are not very consistent, but you could probably specify.

Pat

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Pat

I found few ebay sellers, in particular one from Israel who sells inlay pieces, at a good price:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/1oz-DEFECT-Gre ... Swzpxd2QML

https://www.ebay.com/itm/1-oz-Premium-Q ... SwmuNZ3eTk

There are US sellers selling 1 oz for about 30 dollars:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/1oz-green-abal ... SwrIlaxHv1

And ships overseas (maybe he didn't get the memo regarding Lacey Act?) In fact I seen several US seller offering worldwide shipping through Ebay's global shipping program.

The stuff I got from Taobao wasn't truly flat but at 1 dollar a piece it brings the per oz price to around 10 dollars.

_________________
Cat-gut strings are made from kitten guts, stretched out to near breaking point and then hardened with grue saliva. As a result these give a feeling of Pain and anguish whenever played, and often end up playing themselves backwards as part of satanic rituals.

Typhoon Guitars
http://www.typhoon-guitars.com