Official Luthiers Forum!

Here in our rainforest, were we get anywhere from 8-14 feet of rain annually, we have a term for when one foregts to pull the plug in hull of their boat and it fills up with rain, hence "Land Sunk".
I've seen folks market and use sinker this and that specie of wood.
We really don't see that here. whatever is sunk in salt water, is either so broken up inside that it gets saturated with the salt water, Or is so holey from the toredo mollusk that the=re is no flotation left.
But we have what I refer to as Land Sunk. One won't see this in normal industrial logging operations where most other soundboard producers buy their log to cut. They get green timber.
The timber we source is all salvage of either dead down or previously used for something else loke bridges, bulk head, log floats for logging camps or salmon traps prior to 1964.
This is cedar that we termed earthtone cedar , that is the namesake that became the trade name of our product line of soundboards, i.e. "Earthone Soundboards"
The cool colors are the result of lots of water and a LOOOONG time.
Most of the material we cut to get this has been dead or down in our old growth rainforest for many decades in not centuries, permeated with the average 10' of fain per year. Often times buried under several inches of moss and other trees growing on the tree laying on the forest floor.
Sometimes they are just slabs.
The has soaked up the water and it mingles with the cedar oil in the fiber, creating an emulsion type of moisture. then with the decades or centuries of time the normal red color of the western red cedar is changed to all different colors. The dark chocolate brown is usually color from old standing snags[dead trees] that look like huge fence posts with no limbs.