Guitar built from wood salvaged from old church pews
Posted: Mon Aug 18, 2014 6:30 pm
I didn't build this guitar -- it was was built by Carter Ruff, a professional luthier -- but the story behind it is interesting. The Unitarian Universalist Church of Burnswick, Maine, burned on June 6, 2011. Carter salvaged wood from some of the undamaged church pews and built a guitar that he donated to a fundraising auction to help raise money to rebuild the church.
The top is pine and the sides, back, and neck are ash. Both are fairly uncommon choices for building a guitar, but the result is a very nice-sounding guitar. The design is based on (I think) a 1927 Gibson L-26, or some similar designation. It's the "Robert Johnson guitar."
Here is a link to a video about it: http://blip.tv/bangor-daily-news/carter ... ew-6368563
And here are some pictures of it: http://submusicworks.com/wordpress/?p=489
I think this tends to demonstrate that if one knows how to work with the materials, one does not necessarily need "proper" tone woods to build a good guitar. (Though a pine top is never going to sound like old-growth red spruce no matter what you do.)
The top is pine and the sides, back, and neck are ash. Both are fairly uncommon choices for building a guitar, but the result is a very nice-sounding guitar. The design is based on (I think) a 1927 Gibson L-26, or some similar designation. It's the "Robert Johnson guitar."
Here is a link to a video about it: http://blip.tv/bangor-daily-news/carter ... ew-6368563
And here are some pictures of it: http://submusicworks.com/wordpress/?p=489
I think this tends to demonstrate that if one knows how to work with the materials, one does not necessarily need "proper" tone woods to build a good guitar. (Though a pine top is never going to sound like old-growth red spruce no matter what you do.)