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Here in our rainforest, were we get anywhere from 8-14 feet of rain annually, we have a term for when one forgets 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 rain 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.

Best way to get ahold of me about this is via email from our website. It can be weeks before I notice private msgs from here.

That’s pretty spectacular!


Steve

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Steve Smith
"Music is what feelings sound like"

oh man, I love sinker wood

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-Marcus
http://www.bailieguitars.com
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Pretty!

That is very striking, love it!

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jw ( o)===:::

So that this sort is somewhat easier to find, Because there is something going on in the search and filtering tools of the store that were not working correctly last week.
Maybe it's fixed now..
Regardless, Here is a link to the High Grade dreadnought sort https://alaskawoods.com/product/earthto ... r-top-set/
There is also a mid grade dread guitar top sort that will some "flash" knot shadow or other issue.
a classical/00 size sort https://alaskawoods.com/product/earthto ... ical-size/
also flat top mandolin/ bouzouki/ baritoine uku size sort 6" x 15" booksets https://alaskawoods.com/product/earthto ... itone-uku/

Something else that should be mentioned. Some booksets have a pocket rot spot on the board somewhere outside of the pattern.
That just came to my attention as I was just in the grading room sorting the stack of boards to put on the shelf.
These boards are cut from salvage wood, maybe even slabs as mentioned earlier. Wood that no other sawmill would even consider sawing, not even a shingle mill. Because of the scattered pocket rot.
Red cedar is rot resistant, but not rot proof.
There is no telling how long any of the chunks. slabs, logs we acquire with these colors have been dead or down. Whether 5-9 decades or 1-2 centuries? carbon dating could reveal the answer but the cost for that service was $600 in 2012. so I don't need to know, because every little log is different. Anyway, this pocket rot can be a speck the size of a bb or the size of a coin. When cutting the blocks into boards, often times 1/2 or less of the bookets cut are usable for a guitar size top, some can pattern the smaller instruments and some are just discarded. some blocks in this old wood has other issues like fracture that sin't noticeable until its sliced into a board or 2. Once we see something like this, no more soundboards will be cut, but maybe we can recover some bracewood or native flute blanks. There is a lot of labor and time in any and all of what we produce product from.

Here's what I came up with that might be considered "Land Sinkers." Cut from a 2x10 VG bottom board of a redwood hot tub, under water (on 1 side) for 40 years.

So a Cedar could be down for centuries, and still produce good lumber? Surprising!


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Pat

For Sure. why not?

But there is a difference. This like what I tried, and end up as just water stained but not inherent color changed.
Heres a story….
A number of years ago, maybe 10-12, I purchased about a cord of medium/high grade red cedar block from a local who was cutting container loads of cedar block for shake and shingles . He gleaned out the best shake bolts for guitar tops, and had planned setting up a saw and cutting it into gtr tops himself. He and his dad had done a lot of that when living in Washington yrs earlier. If anyone knew the Baker Family in Forks?
Anyway, he had this block he had been accumulating stacked up under the eves of his house for some time. So it was still in big mass 4-8” thick x 10” wide and 24” long. Well rain soaked in the endgrain of these blocks and turned them a very even color red from what we could see of all exposed surfaces.. But this color only went in a number of inches from each end. This was noticed after it was cut. The original color of most of it a very light light red gold color. But now with this water mingling with the oil within the mass, the only original color was a small area in the middle of the boards. It was obnoxious. But now it was cut. I wondered how it would change when dry. Well it changed in hue, but the contrast was still there.
My idea was to replicate the wood getting soaked again to make it all the one color I desired.
There was a couple hundred sets. I wet them and bundled them up, wet. Then stacked them under the eves of the shady side of the house and wrapped them it all in an old holey tarp, so that they wouldn’t and couldn’t dry, but would continue to keep getting wet by the 10’ of anual rain. After a yr or more, I opened up a bundle and stickered it to dry.
Nope, didn’t work. Now it was just water stained gtr tops. And still a paint grade top.

I didn’t succeed in replicating the natural color changing process of water, cedar oil and time within the fiber.
Maybe had the boards not been dried first, so that whatever moisture that was there to start, of the oil, the enzymes, the sugars, whatever.

Thats another test.
And We are Actually I’m currently doing just that. Worked up a red cedar log. One end had been exposed for 6-8 months since getting bucked into the log length. The exposed end the darkened red, the inside is the blonde reddish[golden sort]. We’ve set those 2 end rounds [about 4’ diameter]up, blonde side up to the sky, covered with shreds to prevent drying and end checking. Those have been set aside for 4 months now. We will open one up when we need to cut more high grade red cedar tops. But for now We are flush with quite a bit of high grade 3A at the moment with some of the nicest red cedar we’ve seen in quite a few years.

Thats another test.
And We are Actually I’m currently doing just that. Worked up a red cedar log. One end had been exposed for 6-8 months since getting bucked into the log length. The exposed end the darkened red, the inside is the blonde reddish[golden sort]. We’ve set those 2 end rounds [about 4’ diameter]up, blonde side up to the sky, covered with shreds to prevent drying and end checking. Those have been set aside for 4 months now. We will open one up when we need to cut more high grade red cedar tops. But for now We are flush with quite a bit of high grade 3A at the moment with some of the nicest red cedar we’ve seen in quite a few years.

It might be interesting to see what steaming the cut soundboards would do - it might move the oils around some like they do to walnut to color the sap wood.

Yes, it can. But That depends on a few things. The region and The specie of cedar it is. For here in our temperate rainforest, and in the temperate rainforest all along "coastal" Pacific Northwest. The logs/trees protected from the sun under a forest canopy and the heat that direct sun exposure will generate, do last for a looong time. In fact I get my Timberwolf saws for our 42" bandsaws from a shake and shingle mill on the olympic peninsula. Augustine tells me they are actually digging for, as in "mining", cedar. They will find a big mound in the forest floor out in 3rd cutting clearcuts, and find old blowdown trees and whatnot buried under duff and moss. I'll bet they will see some of the most beautiful colors and character. I gotta go there I spose.

Interesting. I was thinking after hundreds of years it would eventually succumb to the elements.

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Pat