Spruce reeds

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PJ
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Spruce reeds

Post by PJ »

I'm interested in giving a go at making some spruce reeds. I have a few 4"x6"x1/2" spruce boards, salvaged from an old piano. I have 7 or 8 guides/manuel on making cane reeds, but nothing on making spruce reeds. Are there any manuels, articles or guides on making spruce reeds? I'm particularly interested in:

- Choosing the best part of the spruce board
- Preparing the slip

Any help is gratefully accepted.
PJ
m4malious
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Re: Spruce reeds

Post by m4malious »

Interesting topic....
I'd also be interested in hearing of peoples experience with;

a) different species / origins (e.g. Sitka? Red? European? Colorado? etc)
b) grain size (e.g. finest, closely spaced grain? bear-claw?)

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iain beag
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Re: Spruce reeds

Post by iain beag »

There's a thread here that may be useful.

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=99723


Iain
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Re: Spruce reeds

Post by JordanMcConnell »

I can chime in with a little bit of info here. I've made a handful of successful spruce reeds for both concert and flat chanters. Not an expert by a long stretch and definitely still have a tonne to learn so take all of this with a grain of salt...
I've found you don't really need to change much of anything to go from cane to spruce. Certainly staple dimensions stay the same, and head width shouldn't need to change either. Some find that a shorter head ends up being necessary, but I haven't really found this to be the case.
I've spoken to some who feel that a larger sanding block is necessary to get the aperture of the lips down, as spruce doesn't like to be squished by the bridle but I haven't actually personally found this to be the case either. I think it all depends on your reed style, and I've used a smaller radius block and a copper strip bridle to bring the lips closed just fine. Might be trickier with a wire style bridle. I have tried from roughly 60 mm up to 80 mm sanding blocks and found they will all work the same as with cane. Larger sanding blocks you might want to add a second gouge on the tails, or 'tone chamber' whatever you want to call it, but with a smaller block it doesn't seem necessary. Spruce seems to more readily conform to the staple without splitting.
A big factor for me has been using a split or cleaved slip. This keeps the runout to a minimum and also exposes any twists or bumps in the fibres of the spruce. This is readily apparent in a cane tube, but can be quite hidden in a spruce slip. It certainly isn't strictly necessary, but I find as long as your material is an appropriate size it's worth at least splitting one face on the quarter and resawing from that. Any twist will want to show up in a distorted aperture down the road. Maybe not a big deal but again, for the effort it takes it seems like a smart move. Also allows you to control better for a quartersawn piece, which will again be more stable in the long run.
I think less important than number of grain lines is just the density and stiffness of the material. In my experience (as a guitar maker, mind you) the higher or lower number of the grain lines per inch almost never correlates to the stiffness. That is to say that you can have floppy spruce with really tight grain lines per inch, and really stiff spruce with very few grain lines per inch. There are ways to measure the stiffness and density so I suppose if you were really serious about it you might want to look at that. Some suppliers of spruce for guitar tops are actually starting to include this info with individual pieces for sale, although so far I have only ever seen this with tops, not bracewood which is typically where your stock will come from if you're getting larger pieces. Buying 'topwood' will be less useful (as well as more expensive) as it's only going to be thick enough for one slip (guitar wood, anyway. Violin tops will yield mor' 'layers"), and unless you're buying the absolute primo material you will most like have some amount of drift in the quartersawn grain orientation towards the edges, as well as more runout as it has been cut from a much larger piece. Most suppliers try to minimize this but it's actually very hard to find perfectly straight, perfectly quartered sections in a tree that are large enough for guitar tops so runout and grain drift are almost always present. With a bracewood billet (and to a lesser extent a violin top) you can saw your billet into sections and split out smaller blocks for slips and then take slices off of that, maintaining control of the grain in both directions.
As far as types of spruce goes, it really can vary within a given variety so I wouldn't spend too much time worrying about it. Sitka is a bit of an outlier as it can be very ropey as well as quite heavy but that's not a hard and fast rule. So far I have found the best results with 'European' spruce, but I really think it just comes down to the supplier and the individual piece. If I was going to have a crack at this and didn't have access to offcuts from a luthier or a local supplier I might think about ordering a few different pieces of bracewood in different species from a supply house like Luthier's Mercantile or Allied Lutherie in the USA, or a similar outfit in Europe. They would supply well cut billets in different spruces as well as cedar and redwood which are probably worth looking at as well.
Last thing regarding preparing the slip... A bandsaw to saw out slips and drum sander are really helpful for rough dimensioning but a handsaw, a cleaver and a sharp plane are really just as fast. If you have a drill press you might look at "the luthier's friend sanding station" from Stewart MacDonald. You can gouge spruce and sand it just the same as with cane (just be wary of splitting along the grain if your tools aren't sharp or you take too deep of a cut), however I've found a small block plane or 'finger plane' to be much more effective, especially in shaping the outside of the slip, once the inside has been finished up. An inside (normal radiused sanding block) and outside sanding block in the form of a piece of tubing cut in half with sandpaper stuck to the inside will get the job done.
That's about all I can think of at the moment. Hope it's useful.
Jordan
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