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I guess High Mountain Tonewood is no more? Bummer I need to order some Ukulele tops. Any ideas? Anyone else selling Lutz?

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StewMac does:

https://www.stewmac.com/tonewoods/shop- ... ll-guitar/

Yikes, 50US for AA, gotta find the mills and buy direct. I’ve only four sets left…

I’ve heard it bandied about that Mario’s widow still has a stash. Anyone know how to get in touch?

Here is an email address Brent sent me some time back for Mario's widow. You can try that.
inge.sindaco66@gmail.com

Looks like LMI has some too. I guess it's expensive now because it's becoming more scarce? I remember buying decent tops for like $30 bucks IIRC.

I have still yet to use any of the Lutz in my stash.

The days of a 10 pack for $500 shipped are gone lol. ya it seems uber expensive now. And I'm looking for Ukulele tops. Which of course no-one has.

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Allied also has some Lutz.
There is a guy on Ebay trying to sell a Lutz top he bought from Mario 15 years ago. He is asking $855.00, down from $995.
Kent

Yikes, that’s a lot of money. I guess it’s been a while since I had to go shopping…

The supply of Lutz stands is not a problem so much as the lack of tonewood processors willing to go after it. Pacific Rim Tonewoods is supplying manufacturers such as Taylor, Martin, Collings, etc. as well as StewMac.

When I last bought from them, there was a minimum order, and there may still be for volume pricing, but their web ordering system seems to accept orders for a single set, for the material offered online.

[url]pacificrimtonewoods.com[/url]


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Definitely try Pacific Rim Tonewoods. (It looks like Tim might have mis-fired with his URL above). PRT have just (last few weeks) launched a new website with the intent of retailing sonically graded soundboards - that means soundboards scientifically graded by their acoustic properties, not just how they look. I think that's a first and a great step forward for people building top grade guitars.

There are also some great videos featuring the playing of Miroslav Tadic and Yvette Holswarth, (and some of my guitars!)

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Trevor Gore, Luthier. Australian hand made acoustic guitars, classical guitars; custom guitar design and build; guitar design instruction.

http://www.goreguitars.com.au

You’re quite right — my iPad is not cooperating, but I think it’s fixed.

Deleted

I have a stash of Mario's Lutz tops. I'm willing to let some go for a very reasonable price. I'll send you a PM.

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Jason Moe
LaCrosse WI 54601

I don’t think the PRT sonically graded tops are a first. The Abies Project from Wood N Tones, using wood from Rivolta in Italy, did it during the pandemic. I don’t know the current status of that effort. I bought a few, but have not used any of them yet. It’s a great idea.

How do you "sonically" grade soundboards? I know you can measure the physical properties of "tonewoods", but so much depends on the way they are used by the luthier who builds with them. But knowing what you are getting is better than the current system of buying a pig in a poke.

One downside to this is that there will be fewer $5 ugly but acoustically great soundboards.

Info here and in related pages and links.

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Trevor Gore, Luthier. Australian hand made acoustic guitars, classical guitars; custom guitar design and build; guitar design instruction.

http://www.goreguitars.com.au

It is not Lutz, but I have a good supply of red spruce uke tops.

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John

Hi Trevor,
Thank you for the link to PRT's sonic testing. Interesting stuff!
I read that the tops preferred for the Taylor guitars built and tested were those with both low density and _low_ stiffness. As noted, they said this was dependent on the particular model being built. I think this is something that those of us who build many different types of instruments also recognize, and pick tops we think will compliment the design.
One thing that struck me was that the sonically graded sound boards they sell have to fall within 10% +/- of the - average - stiffness. This seems to indicate that an extremely stiff piece of spruce would not make the grade.
It is nice that the company is testing and grading soundboards for properties beyond cosmetic considerations.

Those prices though!

Although most of us would agree that the soundboard wood is the most critical part of the instrument, we baulk at paying even a fraction of the price of what is asked for a premium set of back and side wood. It's true that in the (now distant) past bulk purchases I have received some perfectly fine (and a few dud) soundboard sets for $3 + $2 shipping. With dwindling resources I don't expect that to be the case today.
The processing, testing, and sorting gives some added cost, but the selection of the premium material some added value. Being the eternal cheapskate and having enough to finish out my days I won't be rushing out to buy any, but for those low production builders who feel the testing is of value and separates the wheat from the chaff the prices might be quite reasonable. It does seem to be more than BlueSky marketing that some people "moon" over.

I ended getting a bunch of 3A and 4A tops from PRT. They look good. But wont really know until I let them sit around for a year and try a few out.

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Send me some, I’ll let you know in a few weeks…;)

If you measure up a lot of softwood tops, and plot the density against the stiffness (Young's modulus) along the grain, you'll find that they will all fall broadly along the same line. A top of any softwood with a specific gravity of about .32 will tend to have a long-grain Young's modulus (E) of about 6000 megaPascals, while ones at the other end of the density scale, around .52 sp.g. will have an E value around 18,000 mPa. In my tests about 2/3 of samples fall within 10% of the the E value predicted on density alone. Runout reduces the long-grain stiffness as any given density. Wood with heavy latewood lines tends to have lower than expected stiffness. Again, this holds for all softwoods that I've tested when I've seen enough samples. Cross grain stiffness tends to be all over the place, with the main correlation being to how well quartered the piece is.

Cedar and redwood tend to have notably low damping as compared with the spruces. One researcher (Haines) reported that the damping in softwoods tended to vary with the frequency, but he could not see any reason for it, and wondered if it might have been an artifact of his test method. If the effect is real he thought the Sitka spruce varied somewhat from the others in having higher damping at the very lowest frequencies, but, again, he could not explain this. Also, since he was mostly interested in violin wood I don't think he tested much Sitka spruce.

The bottom line, so far as I can tell through measurements of the properties, is that spruce is spruce. I have yet to find any systematic differences in measurable properties between the various species. All of this makes sense in that all of the softwoods share a very similar structure on the microscopic scale.

Note that the relationship between Young's modulus along the grain and density is pretty much linear in the range we're looking at. The stiffness of the top plate (without taking the braces into account) that resists the bridge bellying up depends on the Young's modulus along the grain and the cube of the stiffness. We all know that a 2x4 up on edge is a lot stiffer than it is when it's down flat. If you take two tops that fall 'on the line' of expected E to density, the lower density one will be less stiff at a given thickness, but lighter in weight. If you leave it just a little thicker you can get the stiffness up, and it's still going to be lighter than the denser top. Since there's only a limited amount of power in a plucked string a lighter top tend to put out more sound. And, since about 2/3 or more of the total weight of the top with bracing is in the top itself, that's the place to save weight.

Denser tops do tend to give more 'headroom', all else equal, while lower density correlates more with 'responsiveness'. But so much depends on exactly how the bracing is done that it's really hard make ironclad rules. All else is almost never equal in guitars...

Sustain is complicated but would this not also suggest that the heavier top would have more of it? Like once you get it going it takes longer to stop where as the lighter top would stop sooner?

If sustain refers to how long the sound of a string remains audible, there are two ways to get more of it. One is 'banjo' sustain, where the soundboard is so easy to move that it can produce audible levels with very little input. The level jumps 'way up right away, and stays high enough to hear for a while. The other is 'Les Paul' sustain, where the top is so heavy and stiff that the energy can't 'leak' out of the string very fast, so the sound keeps going at a low level for a long time. Steel string guitars tend more toward the 'Les Paul' type, while you see 'banjo' style sustain more on Flamencos.

With steel strings we generally get more sustain either by using a dense top and heavy bridge, or else by making top light but stiff with 'straight' or 'tapered' brace profiles rather than scalloped. Obviously they tend to sound different, and to be suited for different sorts of music.