Nazareth
an Art of Dying fragment
That’s PA: Nazareth, PA, the home of Martin Guitars.
Roger Bucknall, owner and maker of Fylde instruments, and his then wife came over to New York in the fall of 1979; both to visit and to do some sightseeing and to see if he could collect some of what I by then owed him.
We got the sightseeing done to everyone’s satisfaction, and we got the moneys owed settled to no one’s satisfaction.
At one point, Roger asked if we could visit the Martin factory in Nazareth, PA and after a brief phone call or two, I had lined up a tour and some one-on-one with the production folks at Martin (Roger, as a premier English luthier, was well-known to the Martin folks).
The drive was through brilliant summer weather and it was a pleasure to get out of the city (to say the least).
On the way there, Roger went in to more detail about why the Fyldes did not stand up to American winters as well as say, yes, the Martins do. It had all to do with drying and curing the wood the guitars are made of.
Say you buy a log of Brazilian rosewood (no longer possible, but at one point you could — nowadays the Brazilian will only sell you pre-cut pieces of rosewood, if at all). Say this log arrives by boat in England and then driven by truck (lorry) up to the Fylde factory. There is no way you can now cut up the log and use it for guitar backs and sides for the log is far too fresh and moist to serve an instrument purpose.
Ideally, a log of rosewood would be left out in the air for a decade or more to let it dry out (cure) naturally/organically. Only if you were a very wealthy company, with loads of resources and reserves, could you afford to “sit on” a log of (very expensive) rosewood for ten or more years. Roger, for one, could not afford to do so. Nor could many other smaller manufacturers.
Their solution was to kiln-dry the wood, which readies it for use in a fraction of the time. A kiln is a large oven or insulated heating room, but with nowhere near the temperatures of a regular oven. Naturally, the temperature maintained will determine how fast the wood will dry. Set it at 120 degrees and it will dry a lot faster than at, say, 70 degrees.
There is a quality tradeoff here, and it has to do with the integrity of the wood’s cellular walls. With an organically dried log, over a decade or more, the moisture takes it sweet, leisurely time to evaporate and the cell walls stay fully intact and therefore very strong. When you force the moisture out, it will — do some degree, depending on how much heat you apply — force its way out through the cell walls and in the process actually rupture them. At 120 a fair amount of damage is caused to the internal strength of the wood, at 70 much less so, but you have still compromised the natural integrity of the cells.
I believe Roger ran his kiln at around 80 degrees in order to keep the wood as strong as possible — and definitely strong enough for the UK market. However, any kiln-dried wood is not going to remain strong enough to withstand a sudden humidity drop form say 90% relative humidity (not unusual in New York, even late fall) to 10% in the span of hours, which is what happens when the central heating comes on in New York — and which event was announced to us in our apartment by the sharp snaps we heard as fronts and backs of our samples cracked.
Martin, on the other hand are sufficiently well of the have a small field of logs all drying naturally (which they showed Roger), yielding very strong wood once cured for manufacture.
I don’t remember how much rosewood Martin had stacked up for future use but I remember Roger almost shaking his head in disbelief. A fortune sitting there doing pretty much nothing at all — other than curing.
But Martin’s guitar backs do not crack when the humidity level suddenly drops; that’s the big lesson. Was for me anyway.
The guys at Martin gave Roger a great tour and they shot the guitar-maker breeze for a while, all glad to have met Roger and Roger happy to have met them.
Me, I was happy to finally truly understand why we had humidity problems with the Fylde guitars.
© Wolfstuff
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