Tonewood score

At the Halifax meeting many of the builders talked about the use of tonewood recycled from old furniture. Last week I was in the local British Heart Foundation shop and saw a chest of drawers for sale - probably 1920's or 1930's, solid construction using what seemed to be nice mahogany or sapele. The price was very cheap. These things are a bit of a gamble as you don't know how much solid timber will come out and how much will be usable depending on construction joints and the wood cuts in terms of quarter, skew or flatsawn. Anyway I decided to go for it and this is what it looked like when I got it home:





Then it was a case of carefully taking it apart and sorting the tonewood from the other stuff. There were solid pieces of old sapele from the sides and the top plus the drawers yielded usable pieces of mahogany too:



The construction was done using animal glue, panel pins, screws and dovetail joints and there were no rebates in the sides or top - good news. Here's the pieces after removing dirt and old finish:



The next job was to decide just how to cut up the wood for best instrument wood yield. Here's the backs and sides processed pile:



Here's the neck pile:



There's a load of wood left that I will process into kerfed linings in due course.

The total score so far is five guitar back and side sets, three octave mandolin back and side sets, five guitar necks and four octave mandolin necks. Loads of mahogany kerfed linings to come.

Result