We all know what bearclaw looks like whether we call it maschiato, hazelfichte or rizado. However, I had never examined the flat-sawn surface of a really good bearclaw board. My last post showed some of the spruce that I used to make braces and here is another one. You can see the typical surface of the bear claw along the quarter but in the next picture you see what the flat-sawn surface looks like. Pretty cool, eh?

Some think that bearclaw is very desirable for guitar tops while others feel that anything which interrupts the straight, parallel grain cannot possibly be good for sound transmission. I have seen very flexible bearclaw and very stiff, both along the grain and transversely. I have made some excellent guitars with bearclaw so while I don’t think it is any better I do think that a well-chosen piece can make a great instrument. The main attraction of bearclaw of course is its beauty.

I don’t think many makers are using bearclaw for bracing and I normally wouldn’t either but I did put aside one set this time. I am going to dig through my bearclaw tops and find a particularily intense one and brace it with this set of braces, just for fun. I don’t think I will see any great difference especially since I selected the braces the same way I always do: split them and test them for longitudinal strength.

You don’t need perfectly quartered stock for making braces nor do you need the raw billet to be cut perfectly along the grain the way this is. However, if you want maximum strength and stability per gram then you do need to split it and follow the grain and then cut each brace on the quarter. Of course this is easier and creates less waste if the billet looks like these. I always split my stock for braces as well as my stock for necks. It introduces some repeatability which is pretty hard to come by in guitar-making. These pieces made some nice stiff fan braces and the process was quite fast. However, I split a few more billets at the same time and some of those weren’t quite so perfect. In the end I spent considerably more time on the off quarter pieces especially the ones that split diagonally through the length. I used three different saw setups and three different planer setups through this whole process. One of those billets had a little surprise for me but I will talk about that in the next post.

So I now have hundreds of triangular-profiled sticks; some stiff and some not so stiff and some lightweight and some a bit heavier. I will use the stiffer ones for the centre fan braces and the lightweight ones on flamenco guitars. Because of the splitting beforehand every one of them is as strong as it can be and when I scallop the ends after they are glued to the soundboard they will carve very nicely.

Indian rosewood is a great wood to make guitars with. So far it is not scarce or controlled and it contributes to making a great-sounding guitar.  It is also very stable, in part because you can usually find it cut on the quarter. The widespread preference for Brazillian rosewood is due to a few factors that can be a bit contradictory. Buyers love Brazillian because it is scarce and expensive and because it can be very beautiful. Makers love Brazillian because it is nice to work with. A plane and a scraper leave a lovely surface, the smell is heavenly and it has a nice sonorous ring to it when you tap it.  However, beautiful to a woodworker and beautiful to a buyer is not always the same thing. We love well-quartered wood no matter what the species. The shine of the medullar rays and the even grain is the perfection we look for. I have used great pieces of Brazillian like that and had clients say, “No, that’s Indian rosewood”. These are the clients that want crazy grain patterns, various colours in the same piece and spider webbing that to them are the indications that it really is Brazillian. Crazy grain makes for a greater likelihood of cracks, different colours often indicates a flat-sawn piece while scarcity means that it is expensive and its commerce severely restricted. So why use it? Especially if many of us have found that it really doesn’t make your guitar sound any better. Furthermore, why spend the extra money on it if the best pieces are going to be confused with Indian rosewood making it hard to pass on the extra cost to the client? Just to illustrate the confusion here are 4 guitars under construction: 2 of them are being made with a south american rosewood and the other 2 are being made with Indian rosewood. Can you tell which is which? Letter A, Letter B, Letter C, Letter D.

Letter C

Letter D

Letter B

Letter A

Here is a new video by Andrea Corongiu. That Santos Hernández copy is going strong.

What a wonderful opportunity for a young spanish guitarist to study with some fantastic teachers in Alicante. The masters programme in guitar from the University of Alicante is certainly one of the most prestigious of its type. The Sabadell Bank offers a scholarship each year for this course and here we have the winning applicant with his submission. Juan José Rodríguez has been playing on one of my guitars since 2016 and has done very well in festivals and competitions and is currently attending said masters programme. I wish him the best of luck there. Click on the photo for more information on the course.