Big purchase...

I bit the bullet today and went to try to purchase my guitar top material.  I headed over to my local fine wood supply today with Ed.  We had a lead on some figured maple there that we have been putting off looking at for a few weeks.

We got there and saw that the supply was still available.  It was at the top of a stack of other material and it wouldn't have been possible to look at it without pulling it down with a forklift.  Our contact there said that he had pictures of all the boards online and we proceeded to go look at them on his laptop.  To our dismay, none of the boards were really what I was looking for.  All the stock was western maple and we were expecting eastern maple.  Western maple is more yellow/brown compared to a white/beige eastern maple.  For that reason, eastern maple is better suited to my final design.  Also, the western maple stock at the wood supply had a lot of heart wood in the boards which works well for some applications, but not guitar tops - it just ends up looking like a stain to me.

To make matters worse, the wood supplier had already sawn planks into book-matched pairs (resawn in two and then one piece is flipped horizontally to make a mirror image of the other piece down the middle).  This fact wouldn't have been so bad (especially since I want to book-match my guitar top), except that now the supplier didn't want to split up the pairs, nor cross-cut the planks.  Seeing as each plank was over ten feet long and I was being forced to buy two, it was going to cost about $250!  That's actually a really decent price, except that I only would have needed 18" of each plank.  That would leave upwards of 17' that I didn't need for this project.  Too rich for my blood - especially since it was the wrong look for my project.

We were just about to leave when our contact asked how big a piece we were looking for.  I said two book-matched pieces about 1/4" thick, 6-1/2" wide and 18" long.  He said, "follow me," and then proceeded to take us to a corner of the warehouse where he had four book-matched (two pairs), figured, eastern maple that were each about 3/8" x 8" x 24".  Imagine that!  Perfect size.  Beautiful figure!  I, personally, only needed one book-matched pair, but our contact was willing to part with the second pair at 50% off.  Since we plan on many a guitar project (in fact, Ed is also building one concurrently), we took the bundle for a really good price.  Here are the two pairs on the table saw:

Book-Matched Eastern Maple

The photo really doesn't do the pieces justice.  For one, the two pairs (especially on the right) have burning from the rough milling.  Ironically, though, the burning gives a bit of an idea of the figure since the figures in the wood have different densities so they burn at different temperatures. It's hard to describe the figure, but it is quite stunning.  There is some very prominent tiger-striping, but also evidence of quilting.  Furthermore, the grain cathedrals all over the place producing some beautiful shapes.  Here is a close up of my favourite pair (I made the picture larger than usual for your viewing pleasure.):

Body Shape Drawn on Figured Maple

We scraped away some of the burnt wood.  You can sort of see the crazy grain and how it will book-match down the middle of the body.  You can also see some of the tiger-striping and quilting.  Keep in mind that this is somewhat rough lumber as it has only been resawn to thickness.  It has not gone through a thickness planer, nor has it seen a sander or been coated in glossy finish.  The grain and figure will really come out then...can't wait!

Next steps - I need to thickness plane the two pieces to my final thickness (a heavy 1/4") and then joint the middle edges of the two pieces so that they can glue together with a perfect seem without any gap.