What about Alaska

Well ask any one who lives there and they will tell you it is not tropical - but it is still a wilderness worth preserving. We sell Sitka spruce for the soundboards of guitars. This is a vital component in guitar construction requiring very fine grained old growth material.

Our shipper bases his supply on logs which are wasted by high volume lumber operations because they do not reach the sawmills when they are floated down river.

He finds them sometimes years later submerged or wedged against some obstacle.  He finds some at the coast which is evidenced by the damage from marine borers which are huge and hard to mistake. The logs are sometimes in quite a bad state when he finds them but they are so big that large amounts of degraded material can be trimmed away while still leaving plenty of good wood to cut soundboards from.

What about Europe – our own backyard?

We can consider Apple, Mulberry, Olivewood, Pearwood and European walnut all as agricultural by products although strictly speaking the Pearwood is more often planted as a roadside tree in alpine Europe than for the fruit.

I hope that some of you managed to read this to the end.

Yours sincerely,
Robert Smith
Timberline proprietor