How to Choose and Buy Good Guitar Making Wood with Ben
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- Опубликовано: 7 июл 2024
- Welcome to Crimson Guitars and a rare day out with Ben on a wood buying trip. They went to Tyler Hardwoods www.tylerhardwoods.com/ and had great fun in the massive wood stores picking out the best timbers for kit guitars, Scions and Ben's builds.
Chapters
0:00 Introduction - Wood buying 101
0:33 You get what you pay for
2:06 Wagner Moisture Meter
3:14 The science of wood drying according to Ben
4:38 Issues to look out for when buying wood
5:56 Diagnosing cracks
6:48 Unfortunate stains
7:46 Shrinkage due to drying
8:40 How do you tell if a tree is rippled from the outside?
9:34 The main warehouse
12:45 Wood delivery to Crimson
14:25 Conclusion
An essential tool for wood buying is a decent moisture meter and Ben's favourite is the Orion 950 Pinless meter from Wagner Meters www.wagnermeters.com/shop/ori...
This will also come in handy when Ben builds a wood store for his shed workshop.
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Thank you again for all your support, we really, really appreciate it! - Ben
Stay tuned and stay awesome!
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Хобби
"Guys, I've found a tree that I want"
Guitar making goals :)
got it in one.. the day I had custom hard cases made with Crimson Branding moulded in and the day I bought a whole damn flame sycamore tree are equal in my mind as watershed moments in my career! I am very much having the time of my life right now. B
"I'm actually standing in a giant kiln."
Even more reason to trust your supplier.
Flashback to the first Kickass film?
My wife doesn't understand why I am so happy at our local wood supplier - I don't build guitars but everything about what Ben said here still applies to what I do. I love the smells and the textures and imagining the possibilities.
Would love to see you process a slab into usable pieces.
Big bandsaws and delegation :) I am, at heart, a lazy man. But yes, that could make a cool video. I am thinking about buying a flamed Ash tree they had at Tyler and that will need processing.. mmm. B
A friend of mine told me, "You get what you pay for..... if you're lucky!"
There is that.. it used to be a given, nowadays some companies are not quite living up to the hype. The Wagner meter is incredible technology and pretty much bullet proof. We've been using, and abusing, them for years and they have stood up to all we could throw at them. B
I wonder if an employee at Crimson ever saw a plank and immediately claimed it. "No, that one is mine. You lot can bugger off and build with something else!"
I mean, besides Ben.
Happens everywhere
it does happen.. often! We let employees build on their own time and many a private build has some exceptional timber.. B
Fascinating stuff. Wood is just such an awesome medium.
It really is, I've build my life around it. Thanks for watching. B
The most interesting part of a guitar. Yes please more.
will do. B
"Your wood wants to lose moisture". I'm on it!
The teenager in me just laughed! 😂
Experiments shall be conducted.. report back later? B
You should make a nautical themed guitar: brass hardware, teak and holly body, inlayed compass rose or filigree, mahogany neck, inlayed manila rope banding
Now that is a great idea
Now I'm tempted to do just this! B
@@CrimsonCustomGuitars And then learn some shanties with the Longest Johns.
If we're going Nautical, Teak would be a great choice.
I can imagine all of the pirate puns that would happen...
15:42 Close; it's "electrodes". The anode is the positive electrode, specifically (cathode is negative).
I spent years working in a timber merchants. Miss those days.
So much wood, so little energy to use it after a day working the yard! B
Thanks Ben for sharing
Very nicely presented and detailed video! Thank you!
Very nice video, sharing your passion. Thank you !
Awesome. Love this side of your craft.
Finding something that could be a firewood or a £25 stool etc and seeing a £2k guitar or more is such a rush.. it is like bargain hunting at an auction house or car boot sale only less luck and more skill and knowledge, arguably... B
@@CrimsonCustomGuitars totally agree. I love wood. I found a sapling with a honey suckle twist and gnarled lump where the honey suckle had strangled it. It made an awesome walking stick with lovely grain and pattern. A feeling of accomplishment
Very fascinating video Ben!
Timber picking is probably my favourite process of a build.
Thank Ben, tech tip are always welcome. The beginning is always a good place to start. Keep your nose out of the wind and stay safe.
It is always a learning process with you...liked before watching it❤️❤️❤️
Thank you so much 😀 B
thank you for all the tips very useful !!!
Yes yes yes I'm just beginning to build my own Guitars and would love to have a little more knowledge on the kiln drying process
Cool. Coming up. B
Good to learn theses type of woods 😃👌 drying of wood
More of this content. Great info! Makes me miss England every time I watch.... lol. I really enjoyed just the age and history of your country. Lived in the area of Suffolk for 3 years. At that age I fell in love with Guitars 🎸
It's almost unbelievable the way wood will move. You have to cut it the right way, even when it's cured. I'm working on my first guitars right now. I've cut the blanks for the bodies and am letting it sit under heat in my shop. The slabs I'm using have been in my shop for two years now and the moisture reading is perfect. You still never know what will happen when you release that tension after a cut. That lumber yard looked like a very happy place. I wish I wasn't on the other side of the pond, but I'd spend too much money there.. You build beautiful guitars and your videos are full of great information..
Absolutely love the wood and the moisture info. I have struggled with it in furniture making. Thanks Ben
Most workshops are not ideally insulated or regulated.. we just have to get the wood as dry as possible and build the project as fast as practicable.. one option you may find useful is to make an air tight cupboard big enough for your general projects and keep a small dehumidifier in there.. every evening leave the guitar, chair, wing chun training dummy etc etc in that place to dry. Keep it at the same relative humidity as the intended location of the final product and you're golden! B
Ben, educational posts like this are what draws me as an aspiring builder. Been a guitar repairman since 1987.
Good info. Thanks Ben. 👍🏼
Any time! B
Glad I saw this one before I tried building my first guitar. Thanks Ben.
My pleasure, thanks for watching.. and enjoy the first build and the next 20.. this is an addiction a lovely lovely addiction. B
A video on the drying process would be great to see. Thanks so much for sharing.
Drooling at the site of all that wood and knowledge.Stay well,Crimson family and a cheery good holiday, Doc BC
Thanks Ben, great to get more behind the scenes info on and advise on before you start the building process even before making any shavings.
thanks, keep the questions coming and I will make sure to make more videos in this vein. VB, B
Awesome, I enjoyed the wood video...
Great Ben, this a information that we need!
Awesome tutorial I really need to start learning more about proper wood prep as I have always been a guitar modder, and now I want to start maybe building guitars from raw materials. Please put up more content like this.
Really appreciate this video. Happy holidays. :)
Glad it was helpful! Have a great holiday. B
I've always thought a video (or video series) titled something like "Wood Review with Ben" where you go through [eventually] every species of wood and rate them for guitar construction with categories like "appearance," "durability," "price," "easiness to work with" etc. would be cool. Also, one more category for some woods would be "color fastness," i.e. for woods like purple heart; how quickly its color goes fades over time. Possibly conclude the talk about each species with statements like "great/bad for guitars," "[not] recommended for beginners/advanced," etc.
Edit: Not just rating, but discussing thoroughly their pros and cons mostly as they apply to guitar building but also woodworking in general.
I love your videos, I'd like to see more on wood stores, and timber yards!
Will do. Will do for sure.. in the meantime check out @mattcremona he does amazing things with huge lumber! B
@@CrimsonCustomGuitars how much as the lockdown affected the build times? As I've a guitar being made by Crimson, and I'm impatient to get my hands on it?
great topic ben
Yes please! More of this kind of content, seeing as you’re offering.... Love watching things like the Out Of The Woods channel ( he’s also a pretty fine guitarist - that’d be an interesting collaboration) but always keen to see things in a more guitar/ musical instrument-specific context. Thankyouverymuch!
I just lost a load of time checking out, and subscribing to, his channel.. good shout! B
As always , great video !! Very informative and entertaining !! Please deep dive into this topic ?! We amateur guitar builders need to know this type of thing . Thank you for all you do !!
Hi Ben, Thanks so much for this video. I would definitely love you to produce more videos on wood select, kiln-drying etc.I'm currently setting up my garage as a workshop and definitely need education on wood selection, drying etc.. Cheers from Brisbane, Australia.
Trustworthy suppliers are so important. It's great that you give shout-outs to the worthy.
Interesting recent video on Texas Toast's channel about a customer who recently got their fingers burned 😞
it really is so important.. and sometimes it is a fluid situation, sadly.. B
Thanks, Ben! We had some maple fall on our property during a summer storm and I've been saying how much a damn shame it'd be to let it go to waste. Great starting point!
Use it!! It can sit for a year or three in log form before you really have to start thinking about planking it.. if you are lucky you may find a local with a chainsaw mill who will come do it for you for a small fee.. I wish I had big, pretty trees to fall down eventually and give up their sweet sweet timber! B
Very fascinating, I would love to learn more.
I'll be building a home timber store and small kiln one day soon and will film that and go into the whole thing in much greater depth. B
i'm loving this revived variety in videos, as much as building guitars is your bread and butter, this is the meat, in my opinion.
in the GGBO Brad Angove was giving advice to the competitors who wanted to have a RUclips channel in the end.. he said 'make sure you are useful' and I realised that at heart, while I was still teaching through the builds I was not being as useful and I could be and had strayed quite far from where I actually wanted to be.. timed builds, crazy challenges etc may be entertaining, but I want to educate as well, this is me trying too be useful and it will be staple from now on. B
@@CrimsonCustomGuitars nice one man! it's what i subscribed for back in 2014 and the knowledge was invaluable, don't get me wrong though, the challenge builds are great too! the perfect balance is there somewhere, but i'm glad you're leaning back towards the tutorial side of things.
Really interesting and useful! And the timber looks stunning.
We had a really lucky day, a normal buying trip doesn't often yield this much stunning wood.. trust me we are going back to Tyler Harwood again, and again! B
yeah loved this Ben, more like it please
Thank you for this vid - Dare I say your channel is one of the more informative guitar channels available and a source of information I trust. Whenever I've thought about building from scratch the procurement of wood has come up as a consideration and now I know a little more than I did 20 minutes ago =]
Great that we could help. DC
I'm a woodturner and buy all my wood at Tyler Hardwoods. They said it was great to have you there last week. Love this!
That was some beautiful looking wood. The best part of starting any project is getting that perfect piece of wood !! Hell, I'm always picking up nice looking wood and then thinking of the next project !!
Ben, I'm so jealous! I want a wood dealer!!!! And thanks for the little sound tip to find cracks. Neat!
I've got some wild cherry that I had cut 15 years ago that has been dying in a shop attic, that I'm going to try making my first guitar out of.
Cherry makes a stunning guitar.. quite heavy sometimes but nonetheless stunning.. send us pics when you are done? B
thank you Ben . this one put a whole new spin on woody for me
good 'timber' always has a special effect! B
Fascinating!
Great vid Ben.................Very interesting stuff.
Glad you enjoyed it, thanks for watching. B
This is Gold!
Thank you.. so is your user name! B
Please Ben... more videos on this subject . Thankyou
Certainly. B
Crimson Custom Guitars
Thanking you....just generally really. 👍👍
Just when I needed this video. Here it is
I love it when people say this, thanks for watching! B
Hey thanks once again, the very things I didn't know yet before starting my first build and 2 biggest questions before even starting and they were 2 of the first videos I saw after stumbling across you just a bit ago. Glad I found ya your guitars are great! Skervesen, Aristides, mayones are amongst my favorites and what I saw so far glancing over just a few thumbnails it's safe to say your in that same league. I'm just becoming familiar with the non giant companies more recently though (last 2 years) and lots to discover still it seems. Only own a legator 7 string ninja and schecter c1 fr sustaniac model so fun at least lol those were both opportunistic purchases for 600 and 300 insane price for both and both new just 2017 models that sat schecter on the wall at guitar center was 600 and the legator some overstock place on eBay it sat new in box for 3 years so lucky there it's multi scale so less than a thousand us crazy. Anyways bc I want something multiscale and 8 string and custom I'm gonna try n make it. My wife will be away for 6 months soon like 2 weeks she was 65% of income and we got by with very small surplus typically so I'm super worried about maintaining the house got a lab and 4 cats counting on me too so want to channel that into something to battle the sadness of her being gone so long and the stress of having to make 200% my normal income to stay afloat lol sorry for rambling but very helpful guitars and kickboxing are the only times I'm not a mess ATM
So Cool More about wood choice and grain direction.
Love to see the wood come from the supplier and become a guitar.
I mean a video 😊
Will do.. B
@@CrimsonCustomGuitars excellent, thank you 👍
Its amazing you have all that variety, in some places like here you only get pine and eucalipthus...
Love to know more about where to source building materials and why to pick those suppliers. Not just lumber but hardware and electronics as well.
m Ben this was very interesting they that do the storage of the wood. thank you for showing this to us
Very interesting topic.
I agree.. you need a basic knowledge to make guitars successfully but the more you know the better it gets. Thanks for watching. B
I'm quite lucky that the local building supply center near my home has a great selection of kin dried exotic woods. I get Wenge, Purpleheart, figured Maple, and Jatoba from them frequently.
For a small guy like myself a lightbulb kiln is very useful so I can utilize local lumber I mill or have milled. The moisture meter is huge, I watched a beautiful Blue Mahoe Stave snare drum pull itself apart before I got my meter. The wood came from a trusted friend who meant no harm.
Awesome! I've been looking for a timber merchant and I live just below Newbury so this place is a great find!
let them know we sent you, and leave some for my return trip yo? ;)
Always nice to rush home to the wife to show her your wood.... awesome 😃
I found that to be a very interesting video. Even though I'm not really a woodworker, I've often wished I was- wood is amazing stuff. That first piece of Wellingtonia is just gorgeous, and the price was a fair bit less than I would have guessed.
There'll be some beautiful guitars made with those pieces of timber.
there really will, and I was amazed at the price too.. I grabbed as much of it as I could as it is not likely to come up again like this any time soon.. you should get into woodworking, even in a small way, I find it makes my life so so much better. Thanks for watching. B
@@CrimsonCustomGuitars I did once make a custom body for one of my basses- three layers of mahogany, all cut out with a coping saw! The final result worked, so I used the spare body to make an electric 12 string with far too many switching possibilities.
Very much enjoy this type of video.
Glad you enjoyed it! More to come for sure. B
please more
All your wood buying adventures should be filmed - I'ts amazing to see what's out there and what could be used for a guitar beyond the usual mahogany/maple/ash etc.
I'd love to see something on using reclaimed wood - from 100 year old pubs being torn down or just someone's old house.
Gorgeous old floorboards as tops or even old tabletops re-used - and the pitfalls we may need to be aware of.
I have a few recycled timber places bookmarked to check out for my next build.
One has "project packs" of shorter lengths of wood
I take a paper clip when buying wood, unbend it out to poke into beetle holes etc. to find how deep and which direction.
Built a guitar over the summer with a ripple sycamore body - absolutely stunning wood... with the right finish
Great video. It would be interesting to see how you process some of the wood you purchased, particularly the pieces with defects, for use as guitar bodies or necks.
Yes.. I will do this. B
Sure...show us more. Very interesting
Yeah this was great. I actually have two mulberry slabs air drying in my home shop right now. :D please do more videos like this.
Well, a friend of mine says to me years ago, that an electric guitar is a good bridge, good frets work, a straight neck, a good nut, good tuning pegs, of course good pickups and a good adjustment everywhere.. The rest is only a peace of wood.
I think my two favorite stages of a project are picking out wood and applying finish. Unfortunately now that I'm no longer a student, I have to buy my wood (and have very limited storage) which means for now I can only dream of one day walking into a warehouse and taking home everything that makes me smile. In the meantime I can at least live vicariously through videos like this.
With time and effort you too can have what I have, I started out just like you, a student who loved wood! B
Yeah yeah! More please. Show us the kiln. More technical info and "science" cheers Ben
Will do. Soon as I build my home timber store and a small kiln I will share all of the above. B
Cool woods. I'd love to see a guitar topped with the crazy ash.
Great video! Would love to see a further video covering some kiln drying techniques :-)
Coming soon, I need to build a small kiln at home and will film the process. B
@@CrimsonCustomGuitars Nice one Ben, thanks for the reply.
My dad used to use Clorox and bleach wood to be lighter when he wanted to match an ajoining piece. As I recall it took the red out of cherry to match mahogany on my antique piano stool. It worked perfectly.
Very interesting Ben, was wondering about this since watching all the GGBO Un-Official and thinking about maybe taking on the challenge of building one myself. Must be so nice to have such fantastic places with such choice of wood, wish we had anything even close to that
We are very very lucky to have several yards within a few hours drive.. and now, with the ramped up production of both kit guitars and a whole slew of new production guitars in the pipeline I have an excuse to buy more and more! I love it :) drop us a line if you can't find anything good, I'm sure we could find you a few suitable pieces.. B
Dream job. Not a musician or musically inclined, but love wood and working with beautiful wood, figured if I did build one I would have to buy a neck that was leveled, crowned and polish, just needed carving. I think shipping would be a bit expensive to get a nice chunk of wood to the Caribbean :-D Will have to seriously check locally and see what I can find, even if not to try building a guitar, to at least start back doing some wood working.
I got a friend who felled a few walnut trees a few years ago and he's also got a sawmilling set and I'm going to buy some of those logs at a discount and im a bit excited
ben... great videos man
So funn!!
Very interessting video, thx :)
My pleasure! Thanks for watching. B
i want more videos like this
I'm just about to start a new scratch build but I will certainly be filming more one day builds and tutorials for the midweek video. Thanks for watching. B
I would love to see a video on how to harvest wood from the woods and the steps to dry it so that it can become a guitar
Hey Ben, Great video as always. However: you are talking about how important it is to dry your wood, but I missed the most important piece of information: How dry it actually should be? When is it dry enough?
thank you good info in thjis video thumbs up shared
Absolutely my pleasure, thanks for your support, it makes a huge difference having people willing to share the videos about the place.. B
Just booked a 6 day course with these guys. Spoke to Tom on the phone who was very professional. Cannot wait to start my course.
I've just passed this on to the office, they should have got back to you within a day.. please could you send it again and they will be on the lookout. I'm sorry we weren't more prompt.. times are somewhat fraught right now but that is no excuse! B
@@CrimsonCustomGuitars thank you very much, I have just sent it again. Sometimes things happen, it's not a problem 😊. I can't wait to do a course.
I think you got the radial and tangential rates reversed (just a verbal typo I am sure). Just mentioning it for viewers that wondered! One of the joys of quartersawn wood is that it shrinks half as much (very approximately) in the width of the plank, as a flat sawn piece would. The direction where it shrinks most is the thickness, but because it's a smaller dimension, it's no big deal. And just for completeness here, most woods hardly shrink at all in the length.
I would love to see another video talking about pre-cut boards usable for guitar building, like whether 6/4, 8/4, etc. are more suitable and what widths are needed to turn those into body and neck blanks since people who have an interest in guitar building might not have all of the woodworking machinery required to process down huge slabs like purchased in this video but still want to buy wood. Thickness planers and jointers are quite expensive and they seem necessary if buying raw chunks like this.
Would love to see the process inside Crimson
We will do some filming for sure. B
I love video`s like this. You are a natural teacher.
When i saved up enough (and the covid shit is over) i will come take a course.
Thank you, and.. I would love to have you one day soon! B
Watching this makes me miss the whats on the bench. Can't wait for the world to get back to abit more normality. Hope you're all staying safe.
I'd love to see more of wood stuff!
How dry is dry enough?
What damage you can ignore and call it "Raw" and what will mess up your work?
When you should just burn this piece of wood instead of investing time in it?
How to cure getting over excited with bare wood?
All great questions.. maybe topics for another video tbh? Dry enough depends on where the guitar will end up living.. much damage can be a feature so long as you have a strong centreline.. burn only scraps unless desperate and, frankly, old age is the only cure I have heard for getting over excited with bare wood.. or was that death? Yeah, maybe death! B
Have you guys done a video yet of how you process the bought timber to get the most out of a beautiful piece of timber like how to square it, level it, what's best for bodies, necks etc would be awesome to see
Let's hear more about wood curing storing and how to do it in a small setup for a home hobbyist!
Will do.. I need to build a small timber store at my home studio so will film a bit if that soon. B
@@CrimsonCustomGuitars that would be fantastic to see! I hope to be able to build a small workshop on my farm at some point and that would be a perfect guideline on what to do!
more in depth please!
will do. B