Flamed Maple Tenor Guitar (IW#127)

Early in the summer a friend who is a very skilled furniture maker strolled by and said he was working on a table made out of some seriously flamed maple, and had some off cuts, and asked if I wanted them.

Of course I did.

"Flame" is a figure that happens in a tree that runs perpendicular to the grain of the wood.  It catches the light in ways that can be stunning, it is used on fiddles to make the backs and necks really shine, so it is often referred to as "fiddleback" maple.  The four pieces he dropped off were just barely enough to make a (very) small bodied tenor.  One of them had a knot hole in it, which in a piece of furniture is often completely useless.  A knot can't be used where a joint is put in a piece of furniture, and is usually seen as a flaw.

Then again, on an instrument you need a hole to release the sound.  So it made sense to resaw and bookmatch that piece for the top.  The end result was a grain and figure pattern that was visually striking and that had a grain pattern that sort of looks like a skull, which is cool.

I had a chunk of flamed maple from some other project that I can't remember for the neck, so that worked out well.  The fingerboard is made of Richlite, the bridge is an ebony piano key, and the tailpiece is a butterknife.

The sound is interestingly bright, because the whole thing is maple, but slightly damped, because the sound holes are not quite big enough to let the sound out the way it wants to come out.

Sure looks cool though.  Here's how it sounds: