Cutting Our Own African Blackwood Sets
Over the past three years we have quietly been working away on sourcing and being able to process our own CITES certified African Blackwood guitar sets from billets - no small task let me tell you but what an incredible journey it has been!
In 2020 we began work on a new Tirga Mhor for Martin Simpson and were very fortunate to source a 100% FSC African Blackwood (ABW) billet for the build from Neil Bridgeland of Feel Good Wood. At that point, we were not equipped to process the billet, African Blackwood is one of the hardest woods on the planet so it’s not something your average bandsaw can handle! Hamish Low of the Fenland Black Oak Project very kindly processed those first billets for us, and did a wonderful job!
Around the same time we began sourcing 100% FSC ABW fingerboards from Neil too which were harvested from a community managed forest as part of the Mpingo Conservation and Development Initiative. The initiative’s goal is to advance forest conservation and community development in Tanzania by facilitating sustainable and socially equitable utilisation of forest resources, such as the timber from African Blackwood (Mpingo) trees. It’s a honour to be able to source and provide ethically sourced wood like this for our instruments! We have found that there’s a lot more life and resonance to the African Blackwood fingerboards when compared to ebony which suits the way we build perfectly. We were also speaking to Neil about sourcing more billets for us to be able to cut ourselves, the whole process took around a year but we were fortunate enough to get 10 incredible CITES certified back and side billets.
The Wadkin DR-30
While we were working on sourcing the wood, we were also working out how on earth we were going to process it. Hamish Low had done a brilliant job before but to ensure we got the most from the wood, we really had to process it in-house.
We needed a bandsaw that would not slow in the cut and could cut the wood perfectly straight to a very fine tolerance. One ruined set of ABW would outweigh the cost of getting the right bandsaw for the job so it was really important to invest some time into getting everything right. After a lot of research, we came across the Wadkin DR series - the Rolls Royce of bandsaws! We found a DR-30 (30 inch wheels) from 1937 which was perfect for the job. Once it was delivered Zachie and I spent our summer evenings stripping it down and servicing every component. We needed to be sure every piece of the bandsaw was working perfectly, there was no point cutting any corners at this stage. We had to take it from the shed next-door where we had stripped it down and piece by piece bring it into the workshop and rebuild the bandsaw in situ. The main casting - or the swan neck - weighs 750kg on its own, so it was quite a thing to move around. Once completed the DR-30, or Bertha as we like to call her, stands at 2.7m tall and weighs around a ton…She’s a beauty!
There was still a bit of work to do after this, ensuring the saw was brought in line with modern safety standards including having the motor braked and linking up to our dust extractor. We got new mounts for the blade guides made by a local blacksmith, Angus Bowden-Smith. The guides are really important in supporting the blade and need to be capable of very fine adjustments, a tricky thing to make but Angus did a beautiful job! We also had to create our own sliding carriage to allow us to cut perfectly parallel to the blade, while compensating for the blade’s “drift”.
First Cuts
We had bought a load of ABW offcuts from Neil to allow us to test our set-up before committing to cutting a billet. We basically tried out loads of different blades, tensions and feed speeds until eventually we were happy, it was finally time to start sawing!
We loaded the first side billet onto the carriage, took a deep breath and went for it. Thankfully all was well, we managed to get all of the 8 sides we had planned to get out of the billet and went ahead and loaded up the back billet, and got straight back to sawing! It was a long process as we had to change blades often and re-adjust after every cut but the results made it all worthwhile! We managed to get enough wood out of these first billets for 4 extraordinarily beautiful guitars, we’d done it! Since then we have been fine tuning our setup and have some new blades which allow us to get consistent cuts of 3.5mm across the whole face of the wood!
African Blackwood trees are relatively small and take many years to mature so it's very rare to find pieces of wood large enough for making acoustic guitars, and finding wood of this calibre is getting increasingly more difficult. It’s virtually impossible to buy sets like these at the moment. Since leaving Europe, the required paperwork for import has become more stringently checked and enforced, which on the whole is a good and necessary thing, but it has made it even more difficult to source wood like this. Thanks to Neil, we now have 40 sets of African Blackwood which is fully CITES certified. We have ultimate control over how that wood is cut, stored and dried. It has given us an intimate knowledge of how the wood works and how it will behave in the future and as we process it, we know we are making the most of such a precious resource. It’s been a huge project but the longevity and credentials of our own African Blackwood going forward has made it all worthwhile for us.
You can watch a video of the first guitar we made with a set cut from the first billet below.