Douglas fir as a tonewood...

**lauri Girouard** · Apr-14-2014, 1:57pm

Originally Posted by Spruce

Very interesting...
Love to know more about that one....Rolfe?

I always thought DF was like Red Spruce on steroids, and highly unheralded...
I built a few mandolins out of 100-year-old DF stair treads, one-piece no less...
Still playing and holding up fine...

Here's a DF log I found on the beach a few years ago.
It's now in the hands of a few makers, and I'm looking forward to hearing the results...

I believe I have a piece of that log here in my shop and it is about to become an A mandolin top. Pairing it with a piece of Moosehead lake Maine sinker birch.

**Spruce** · Apr-14-2014, 2:58pm

Yep, indeed you do...
That stuff doesn't even check when left out in the weather unwaxed, which i did with the scraps...

**oldwave maker** · Apr-14-2014, 3:28pm

Thanks for the info folks, will be looking forward to the tone of the Girouard sinker mando too. I have a couple of 1 piece tops that were salvaged in the 80's from the bleachers (c.1950)of an Indiana high school gym, no doubt had decades of the hoops style toneright treatment. Looking to pair it with some old bowling alley maple.......

**tdnate** · Apr-16-2014, 10:37pm

I unearthed some quarter sawn Doug Fir 2x6 that I had left over from some french doors I built 6 or 7 years ago. I am seriously considering an oval hole A style. I also have some Padauk for back and sides....wonder what people think of this combo?

**lauri Girouard** · May-16-2014, 7:00pm

Originally Posted by tdnate

I unearthed some quarter sawn Doug Fir 2x6 that I had left over from some french doors I built 6 or 7 years ago. I am seriously considering an oval hole A style. I also have some Padauk for back and sides....wonder what people think of this combo?

Try it and let us know.

The build is complete and it will be strung up in the white in the next few days.

**Dale Ludewig** · May-16-2014, 7:21pm

I got some quarter-sawn Doug Fir in here a couple years ago as lumber to do some porch columns. When I saw the grain count I decided it wasn't going to the porch posts and pulled it aside. It's probably close to 30 per inch. But it didn't have the ring I like to hear. I resawed it into stock for ukulele tops. I've only used it on one so far, a tenor, coupled with quilted maple sides and back. The instrument is great. It's not particularly percussive in attack. After the resawing I found the fir wasn't very stiff. I guess it's another testament to grain count doesn't equal stiffness, but it can be worked around.

**lauri Girouard** · May-16-2014, 7:58pm

Hey Dale, we can attest to grain count not amounting to much regarding stiffness. I remember a couple of pieces of wide grain Sitka we had that ended up being as hard and stiff as some of the red spruce we had in the shop that had much tighter grain lines. I'll try to find a photo of those two pieces in particular later.

We have collected a few pieces of doug fir over the past few years. We got a nice piece from Rolfe that was about 30 years old and had been sitting in his wood loft for years. That piece is very hard to the nail, but we have not cut it to size for mando tops yet so we can't compare the stiffness to some of the newer stock we have. We have gotten a few pieces from Bruce from the floating log in the picture. Stiffness is different in all the pieces after re-sawing. We have one piece that is so stiff that Max want's to try using it for his tone bar-less experiment. But we also have a piece that has a really good flexibility and one of those tops is in the sinker mando we are doing. The wood has this really nice "feel" to it and everything about it tells us it will be a great mando. We'll post some clips once it is done. Here is a pic of some of the fir we have. The bottom piece is the board from Rolfe's shop, the middle is the joined piece we used for the sinker mando, and the top piece is a piece from the same log, just rough and un-joined.

**Max Girouard** · Jun-20-2014, 9:38am

We finished the mando and it is now living with it's new owner. I'm really happy with the fir and would not hesitate to use it again. I did adjust my graduations and arch profile to get the tone I was looking for as this piece was very stiff. This piece had the chop and projection of red spruce but there was also a little sweetness going on which I was surprised to hear once strung up in the white. This was also one of the loudest mandolins we have made to date. Here are a couple of sound clips. Pardon the playing I haven't played much in the past few months due to hand injury.