Seasoning wood: was facts and not facts : was Recommend Rebuilder?

[Frank Emerson]

Perhaps there is some benefit to soaking spruce for musical instruments for years or decades in salt water.  I have seen no studies to prove the point to my satisfaction.  If nothing else, the practice may have a simpler rationale behind it, i.e., postponing the milling of massive quantities of logs until it is practical to mill the logs in smaller production units.

I have no first-hand experience with drying, seasoning, and milling lumber.  I do have a cousin in Alaska, who selects the trees from the forest, dries and mills it for some very meticulous violin makers.  According to him, if you do not rough cut the logs green, you may as well just throw it in the firewood pile.

Frank Emerson
pianoguru at earthlink.net


----- Original Message ----- 
From: paul bruesch 
To: Pianotech List
Sent: 3/23/2007 8:28:58 AM 
Subject: Re: Seasoning wood: was facts and not facts : was Recommend Rebuilder?


This thread reminded me of a sequence of news articles a few years ago... about trees that had been discovered after many years in Lake Superior, and how violin makers wanted them desperately.  I googled <<trees "lake superior" violin>> and came up with some relevant hits: 
http://www.exn.ca/Stories/1998/04/02/59.asp
http://www.pulseplanet.com/archive/Nov00/2272.html 


On 3/23/07, RicB <ricb at pianostemmer.no> wrote:
Terry

I've seen pictures of masses of sikta logs soaking in salt water for
long periods of time. Yamaha I think I remember had these pics in one of
their marketing thingys I ran into once.  Cant quite remember what the 
bit about salt water was... but I remember running into this again in a
paper about piano building in the 1850's..

Perhaps you know something about why logs would be soaked in sea water
for a while before drying ? 

Cheers
Ricb
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