Visiting the Salvage Yard

It is always fun to go take a stroll around the racks and bins at the local salvage yard.

What do we have here?

Using salvaged or reclaimed lumber plays heavily into our purpose and brand identity. It is extremely interesting going through the racks to look for suitable lumber that might one day find a second life as a musical instrument.

They have a large selection of wood to take a look at!

You can find very interesting pieces. They have a large selection of Teredo Fir that was harvested from old log booms.

Lot of holes!

In the Pacific Northwest, it was very common to float felled lumber to the sawmills through the Puget Sound via tugboats pulling large ‘rafts’ of lumber. You can still see this in practice today, though it is less common. The log-booms on the outside of these ‘rafts’ were use to corral all the free floating lumber and were reused many times. Some of these old log-booms have been partially submerged for over 50 years!

In that time, the wood would become exposed to shipworms, also known as Teredo Clams. The shipworms would bore through the wood, living their entire life inside leaving a network of tunnels. When book-matched, it looks like a psychedelic Rorschach test.

Bookmatched Teredo Fir

At some point, I would like to try one of these sets as a drop-top for an electric guitar! In the meantime, I was able to score some Doug Fir ship-lap that will come in handy for a future build.

And of course, a critical part of the wood selection process is to try it out!!!

Yep, that one sounds good!