It started with me wanting to clean a shelf. One thing led to the other. Now the entire stock of fretboard blanks is sorted by quality, a couple of new drawers from IKEA mounted on one of the shelves and about 200 bracing blanks are about to be ready. There is still a lot of cleaning left after that, but I will have to postpone it to the future.
When I was cleaning, I came across a banana box with splintered spruce blanks of 100-year-old spruce. They came from an old house where about 60 cm long wooden planks were placed loosely in a panty bottom with wood shavings over as insulation. Most of it was in pine, but there was a lot of spruce as well. All plank pieces were sawn from old forest, some spruce planks have such dense grain that you have to use a magnifying glass to be able to distinguish the direction of the grain! It is noticeable that it is old wood, the spruce is mostly light and a little brittle as old wood becomes. I don't really know if I dare to use it in a top. Some are still strong though. Everyone has a great tap-tone!
My friend Björn Sohlin splintered the wood many years ago, but not everything got the final shape for a brace blank. To take advantage of the splintered spruce pieces, I must first give each piece two flat surfaces at 90 degrees to each other. It was made with a long planer tightened in my vise. When doing this it is important to make sure that you get standing wood in the piece you are planing. Then all the pieces were roughly sawn to 9 mm thickness in my small electrical saw bought from Jula. I think it is awful to use it as it is both dangerous and loud, but better that than hand sawing all the pieces…
The box now contains about 200 brace blanks that still need to be shaped further with a planer and drum sander to my standard 8 x 15 mm. But half the job is done anyway. I filled two garbage bags with shavings and there will be more. What is left is just a fraction of all the wood I started with!