Tonewood Spruce NE USA

[pstanton]

Hi All.  I am looking for advice, information, sources regarding the planting, management and sustainable harvest of a spruce tonewood plantation.  This is in the southern tier of NYS, near the Penn state line.  Red spruce or possibly other spruce species.  On a small 10a woodlot, privately owned.  Tonewoods are used for musical instrument soundboards:  clear straight grain, close grain (greater than 20 growth rings per inch) absolutely perfect vertical grain, i.e. 1/4 sawn.  Although often they are not sawn at all, being split with a froe.

Thanks,  pstanton.

[Ron Wenrich]

Interesting project.  Most acoustic guitars use Sitka spruce for tops. I did run across an article that said they used red spruce in pre-war Martin guitars.  I also ran across where some also use blue spruce and white spruce.

So, it seems that you're looking at a spruce plantation.  I wonder if it wouldn't be better to use a mixed stand of spruce to offer more variety to the stand.  One good insect or disease attack could wipe out the stand.

You're also looking at some slow growth.  You may start this project, but doubtful that you'll finish it.  At 20 rings/inch, you'll only have a 10" tree after 100 years.  To get that kind of growth, you will need a stand that is stocked very heavy.  I would think you would start with a stand stocked as heavy as a Christmas tree plantation.  Along the way, you'll have to do some thinning, but not very heavy.  You'll be looking at maintaining a certain canopy density.  If your canopy is too open your growth rate will accelerate. 

I have no experience in spruce.  Maybe some of our more northern foresters have better insight.

[Ramicorn]

Well it would be hard to have a tone wood planation per se, it would be like having a sugar maple veneer plantation. I am from Nova Scotia and would know a guy who would come up from Missouri to find some up here. You can plant red spruce, or Adirondack Spruce as it is called statside sometimes, would have to keep thinning and pruning to give it a shot at reaching tonewood quality, and would probably take a human generation and a half at  least to reach that potential. Best of luck but you wont be getting rich of it anytime soon, maybe your kids or grand kids if they are lucky.

[pstanton]

Thanks for the previous two replies.  I am not a young man, pushing 70 really, so obviously I will not be seeing the harvest of any of these trees, but hopefully someone will.  A bit crazy perhaps, but that is my specialty.  Anyway, those points aside, what have I got to lose by planting with this intent?  Question becomes how to proceed?

Spacing, limbing(pruning) schedule, Thining: when how?  Numbers please!

Sugar maple veneer plantation, hmmm?  Maybe not such a bad idea?  What don't I know that makes this so crazy in the long long term?

pstanton

[Ramicorn]

Well you certainly don't have anything to lose by putting in a spruce plantation, but if your goal is tonewood then its not really achievable in terms of a high success rate. Around here red spruce that goes for tone wood usually comes from old growth like conditions,. As Ron was saying and I didn't really catch at first, to get that kind of growth ring ratio its hard to recreate from scratch. As I see it products like tonewood and veneer kind of more or less happen then are created. Sure they can be encouraged but is up to the whims of genetics, nature and some good luck. Im not trying to discourage you at all, should definitely go ahead with a plantation, but as far as I know there is no real treatment regiment to produce tonewood other than alot of time, ie put in the plantation let it grow to maturity, do a light thinning to encourage some natural regeneration, encourage the ones with good genetics and wait till they become very old and maybe a few of them will be tonewood. And this is for red spruce which is what I have the most experience in, maybe some other species might have different characteristics that would be easier/faster path.

[Clark]

Spruce is an interesting tree in that it should do better in plantation settings then it does. It also has this peculiar ability to sit for 6-9 years after being planted before it decides to really put some vertical growth on.

Some will correct me and say that spruce is grown in plantations and it does well. I would say the first part is true. By and large those trees go for pulp and it isn't until they reach ~50-60 years that they start to show potential as sawlogs. I hardly call that "good" growth. Red pine will start to show it's sawlog potential at ~30 years, so that is the yardstick I use to measure spruce.

With that said I see the best quality spruce coming from the oldest plantations that have been thinned (not many of those around here) or having grown up with/under hardwoods. Spruce will and does grow on many of our hardwoods sites and in fact is often the largest tree in those stands. The lower limbs tend to die early (not necessarily self-prune though) and you can get some quality wood out of the trees. If done intentionally you could greatly increase the yields from such an operation. Pruning the dead limbs would instantly gain an extra 8' stick or two per tree. Growing under the hardwoods would slow the diameter growth although 20 rings/inch is bordering on the far end of impossible. Considering that our white spruce lives for 100-120 years there is no way you could get growth that slow and have a merchantable tree.

Clark

[pstanton]

Thanks to the above for your replies, very helpful.

Here's a bit for text from a Canadian company that harvests red spruce for tonewood, hopefully in a sustainable way.

Musical Forests (Northern Tonewood Company)

Red Spruce Picea rubens (aka Adirondack Red Spruce) grows in eastern Canada and in the eastern United States. Said to be the strongest and stiffest of all the spruce species. Red Spruce has a very high velocity of sound, and has the highest stiffness across and along the grain of all the top woods. Like Sitka, it has strong fundamentals, but it also exhibits a more complex overtone content. Tops made out of Red spruce have the highest volume ceiling of any species, yet they also have a rich fullness of tone that retains clarity at all dynamic levels. We are very fortunate to live in a part of eastern Canada where there has been very little commercial logging and there still remain large old growth spruce trees.

Tonewood in the Making

Musical Forests Inc. Canadian based company that is the Holder of a Select Cut harvesting permit, we do not clear cut.
Tonewood is no ordinary wood, there are certain steps that have to be taken to insure its quality. If someone does not know what they are doing, they can take a high grade tonewood tree and turn it into low grade lumber, if it is not processed correctly. We believe that we have implemented a system that insures the quality tonewoods that Luthiers need and expect.
Nowadays it seems almost every type of wood is considered tonewood, we believe this not to be true. We believe that there are steps which have to be taken to ensure its quality so it will be suitable for the use in instrument building.

Please note: Violin and Fretted instrument tonewoods are processed and air dried in a slightly different way, we have noted this and have applied two different sections where the process changes for each.

The 7 (seven) step process that insures this quality:
Tree selection
Time of Harvest
Location of Harvest
Hand Splitting & Sawing
Air Drying
Jointing & Sizing
Grading & Seasoning
1. Tree selection
Evaluating & selecting tonewood trees while they are still standing is a huge advantage in getting the quality of trees needed for tonewood, each tree is inspected before choosing it for harvest.  We start our search in the fall months for suitable trees which have a good portion of the tree free of branches.
Only certain trees are suitable for use has tonewoods. These trees must be large enough, a minimum of 16" diameter trees are chosen. Trees musts be straight growth, NO SPIRAL growth is permitted in tonewood grade trees and the grain lines per inch must be tight. A strip of bark and skin is removed from the tree so the wood is exposed and the growth of the fiber can be observed to make sure that the tree is straight growing.
We then bore the tree with a increment bore to see the grain orientation. If the tree is suitable for tonewood it is marked with florescent tape and its location is taken with GPS and logged in a log book.



2. Time of Harvest
The best tonewood trees are harvested from December to the end of January. This is when the moisture content in a live tree is at its lowest point. When trees are cut in these months they produce lighter weight wood and it takes less time to season. An added benefit is when the moisture goes to the outside of the tree near the bark in the winter months it also takes with it much of the minerals (red stain). So, if your see soundboards that has a reddish discoloration in it, there is a very good chance that it was cut in the wrong time of the year.
Harvesting tonewood in the winter month produces, lighter, clearer, better color and tonewood that has a better tap tone.
When there is a minimum of 2 feet of snow on the ground we return to cut and extract the tree. The trees are cut and hauled out of the bush in 100" lengths by snowmobile to a staging area (base camp) for primary processing. All trees are checked to make sure that there are no bird nests in them before harvesting. The greatest care is given to our environment, the only evidence of our presence where a tonewood tree was harvested is a stump and the tree (3" diameter) top is left for reseeding. There is absolutely no damage done to the forest floor.

3. Location of Harvest
In our experience, the best tonewood trees are found in temperate and cold boreal forests where the soil is thin,  and on the North face of mountains and hills where the trees have less exposure to the sun.
If a tree survives and reaches a large enough size to make tonewood in these conditions it is a very tough tree, and deserves to be made into a musical instruments rather than chopped into firewood. It is incredibly hard work removing logs in an uncontrolled environment with no heavy equipment to do the lifting. Alpine trees tend to have thinner and more grain lines per inch.

4. Hand Splitting & Sawing
The 100" logs are sawn into 18" - 24" lengths called bolts depending on the diameter of the tree. These bolts are then hand split into four pie shaped quarter sections. Hand splitting the bolts into four quarter section insures the straightness of the growth can be seen. We always leave a live edge on all billets, wedges and tops to be removed at a later time.

Violin Wood, Spruce & Maple: The tonewood bolts are then hand split into four pie shaped quarter sections with splitting wedges and a froe. The bark is removed with a draw knife at this point. When bolts are hand split virtually all the stress is removed from the wood. These quarter sections can now be quarter sawn, radial sawn or hand split into the applicable dimension. Some quarter sections are larger and the tops or backs can be sawn into rectangular shapes rather than wedges, this allows for extra wood to be used in other parts of the instrument. At this point a thin slice about 1/4" thick x 4" wide x 16" long from each quarter section is hand split off with a froe and placed with the tops from each quarter section, this small section will be used for stress testing and tap tone testing during the grading phase.

Fretted Instrument Wood, Spruce & Cedar: The bark is removed with a draw knife at this point and the two wings are then hand split from each quarter. By splitting off these wings, you are left with a billet that is 100% on quarter. This rectangular shaped billet is where guitar tops are sawn from.  When you hand split straight growth bolts you virtually remove all the stress from the wood.
These hand split wings taken from the quarters make very nice bracewood billets. Guitar billets are sawn into 2 piece pairs called book matched sets (a top). The back side of the first slice and the top side second slice is the book match set, and so on. Depending on the thickness of the billets there is usually anywhere from 2 to 20 tops in a billet. It is important to saw the halves of each set the same thickness, the thickness will depend on the instrument tops that best suit the width of the billet that is being sawn. Tops range in thickness from 3/16" for flat tops and up to 1-1/2" for arch tops.

"Have you ever seen or worked a top that when turned against the light will appear to have one half a different color than the other half"?? This is caused by the top not being sawn 100% on quarter.

5. Air Drying
This is the slowest part of the process. We do not kiln dry any of our tonewoods, kiln drying harms the resonating quality and weakens wood, we have done tests that indicates this. We leave the billets and wedges outside until late spring; wood will dry outside in cold weather if you live in a lower humidity climate like we do.



Violin Wood, Spruce & Maple: We sticker each individual top, back, ribs & necks in piles of approximately 30 per pile.
The tonewood is then put into our dry room, which contains an air exchanger that removes the stall humid air and replaces it with fresh dryer air. There is no heat or forced air used in this process. The tops will stay in the dry room for about 1 year and will go down to 6 – 7% moisture content.



Fretted Instrument Wood, Spruce, Cedar & Maple: Each individual top, back, sides & necks is stickered in piles of approximately 50 per pile. The tonewood is then put into our dry room, which contains an air exchanger that removes the stall humid air and replaces it with fresh dryer air. There is no heat or forced air used in this process. The tonewood will stay in the dry room for about 3 months and will go down to 6 – 7% moisture content.

Please Note: Do not let anyone tell you "Kiln Dried" tonewood is better than or equal to air dried tonewood (naturally seasoned). We have tried it and have seen many doing it. If you want to take a perfectly good top or billet with a good tap tone and turn it into a top with the tap tone of a Brick, go ahead and try it. Kiln drying tonewood is done for one reason and one reason only, "To Speed Up the Process" so it can be shoved out the door quicker. It is very noticeable, when you can pick up a piece of spruce or cedar and tell by it's weight and the way it feels if it has been kiln dried, it feels different, like the life has been sucked out of it. Kiln drying works for lumber and flooring, but if sound counts in what you are trying to build, forget it.


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Doing the red spruce growth ring math: minimum 16" dia, x .5 x 20rings/yr =  160 yrs minimum to harvest.

Also don't see anything about planting, just leaving the tops for reseeding.

So red spruce seems to be the species for this purpose and location.

Thought this was once an abundant tree in our forests, what happened to it?  I'm off to research this a bit.

I used to live in Dolgeville NY, once the location of a piano parts factory.

pstanton

[Magicman]

I am not a young man, pushing 70 really, so obviously I will not be seeing the harvest of any of these trees, but hopefully someone will.

Don't put that statement in your business plan because the IRS takes a dim view of planting with the intent of never harvesting.  I planted Oaks when I was in my 60's with the full intent of logging them in 50 years.   ;)

And Welcome to the Forestry Forum.   

[pstanton]

There goes my "cost of doing business" deduction.

Looking forward to news of your harvest Magicman, pictures please!

pstanton

[Magicman]

Ya never get too old to dream.    smiley_old_guy

[Magicman]

There goes my "cost of doing business" deduction.

No, your business deduction is still there, but it is there "only" if you intend to harvest the trees.  If you state that you will never live to harvest or that you are planting for future generations, then your venture becomes a hobby and is not deductible.

[pstanton]

Looks like I need to incorporate, would'nt the Internal Ripoff Service allow that

The American Forestry Association lists a tree 133 cm (52.5 in) in d.b.h. and 33.5 m (110 ft) tall in Great Smoky National Park in North Carolina as the largest living red spruce.

Put 25 red pine seedlings, plugs, in the ground a few day ago, then have 25 more stuck in a sand mound waiting. That is it for this year I think.