Osage Orange

[Bikewer]

Just another item of trivia...... The osage orange is also a premium wood for making bows. As mentioned above, the original French name means "tree of the bow"....By which they mean the longbow.
It was prized by Amerind tribes long before Europeans got here.

It requires special handling as the wood consists of hard, durable "late growth" rings and softer, spongy "early growth" wood. A stave intended for a bow must be reduced so that a single "ring" of that hard wood forms the back of the bow.

I built one several years ago; turned out very nicely.

[Treenewt]

This has got to be one of the most interesting and informative, and GAS inducing, threads I've ever read!

[ronmcc4]

This is cool. I knew Osage Orange was a very desirable wood for making bows (as in archery) but didn't know it was a tonewood. Fascinating.

[barley]

Originally Posted by Wade Hampton

We had a line of hedge-apple trees (as we called them) in our backyard in the Kansas City suburbs when I was growing up. As kids we had epic hedge-apple fights with the softball-sized green fruit they produce:

The wood also makes magnificent firewood, though now that I know how good it sounds when used for making guitars I regret how much of it we burned in our fireplace. But we reveled in it, frankly, because it's so dense and resinous that one or two good-sized logs can last and burn brightly for an evening.


whm

Lots of great information. Thank you all.

Hedge apple fights! Wade is a genius despite being whalloped on the noggin with a two pound rock-hard fruit as a kid. Just think if he had not received such head trauma: )

We had a load of firewood a few years agon that was mostly Hedge. It burned slow and hot and I'm told the high oil content is what plugged up our chimney.

[rwskaggs]

I have an OO custom made by Acorn House Workshop - like most of you said, it is rich and sustains forever...

Here is the build thread: http://www.acousticguitarforum.com/f...hlight=wingert

[buddyhu]

Originally Posted by ruby50

Here is one that I finished on August. I, too, thought they were scrubby little trees from what I see here on the Eastern Shore of MD. Turns out they were planted for hedgerows. This OO came from Wisconsin where the trees grow very large. The fresh cut color is amazing and it's too bad you can't keep it. The tone is very clear and bright, but since it is a 3/4 size guitar it hard to say what part of the sound is due to what. It is called "Poor man's Brazilian Rosewood".

Ed

https://www.flickr.com/photos/ruby16...7649694134065/

I think that is a beautiful looking guitar! And your description of its tone: enticing.

Great thread! Thanks to all who have contributed.

[fitness1]

Originally Posted by PieterK

Anyone else have pics and clips of an osage orange guitar?

I have a couple of originals posted on the McKnight media page with the Osage/'59 Sitka OM. Sarah's Peace and Your Smiling Face. Not up to my current standard for recording quality, but it will give you an idea.

http://www.mcknightguitars.com/media.html

[Ruppster]

One more bit of useless trivia about Osage Orange, a biologist I used to work with says the green "fruit" is a natural roach repellent. Just put a couple in your cupboard. Never tried it but he was a wise many who knew quite a bit about many things...

[Treenewt]

Originally Posted by fitness1

I have a couple of originals posted on the McKnight media page with the Osage/'59 Sitka OM. Sarah's Peace and Your Smiling Face. Not up to my current standard for recording quality, but it will give you an idea.

http://www.mcknightguitars.com/media.html

Todd, those pieces are wonderful! Thanks for sharing them! And I don't think you have to downplay the recording...the playing alone is enough!

[Neil K Walk]

For what it's worth, as a closet connoisseur with champagne tastes on a peanut butter and jelly budget and someone who's only recently gotten his feet wet with regards to Lutherie I think it's a losing proposition. I'm also not one who is known to have a good business sense but it sounds to me like you're trying to set yourself up as a middleman between a supplier and a manufacturer demographic, But I wonder: have you considered the investment in time and resources that it would take in order to process and store this material for sale? From what it sounds like to me, you have taken the opinion of someone who has an interest in the marketing of Osage Orange from the perspective of a supplier not a consumer.

I have also played Tim McKnight's Osage Orange guitars - and though I'm not a customer of his I like to think that we have a good relationship - but I think the appeal of Tim's guitars has more to do with his workmanship and design over the quality of one particular material among a variety that goes into any guitar - though I confess he has a pretty good ear and his wife has a pretty good eye for details with her decorative contributions. From the perspective of a guitar player with three decades of experience making noise with and ruining guitars and an educational background in the visual arts to be honest I just don't like the look of the stuff. It's practically fluorescent and visually uninspiring. Not that I totally dislike the stuff; I think it makes a wonderful alternative for a bridge plate material.

In your case, I would try to hook up with a Tonewood supplier and see if you can sell the raw resources to them with the hopes of getting something akin to a finders fee. Or you could sell it directly to a luthier who has connections that would allow him to process the raw material and thus be able to work with it. Either way, I don't see you getting a big return on this find.

I'm sorry if that sounds a bit pessimistic, but this is a forum frequented by consumers and in my experience when you ask for free advice sometimes you get what you pay for.

[fitness1]

Originally Posted by Treenewt

Todd, those pieces are wonderful! Thanks for sharing them! And I don't think you have to downplay the recording...the playing alone is enough!

Very kind of you - thanks!

[barley]

Good advice Mr. Clodhopper. Thank you.

[Alan Carruth]

I measure the properties of the wood I use, and OO is, as far as I can tell, a drop-in replacement for BRW in terms of stiffness, density and damping ('ring'). I also thing it's more stable in it's reaction to humidity changes; more like Indian rosewood in that respect. I've certainly been happy with the instruments I've made of it. One of them is, or was recently, on consignment by it's owner at Gruhn's.

OO darkens quite a lot with exposure to light and air. A friend of mine mistook an old plank of it for BRW once, and was disappointed. Finish slows that down quite a bit.

I would hope that, as the use of tropical hardwoods becomes more hedged with restrictions, we'll see more instruments made from OO, and all the other great domestic woods.

[Wade Hampton]

Originally Posted by Ruppster

One more bit of useless trivia about Osage Orange, a biologist I used to work with says the green "fruit" is a natural roach repellent. Just put a couple in your cupboard. Never tried it but he was a wise many who knew quite a bit about many things...

Well, that bit of folklore is something we heard back in KC, too, so my friends in my neighborhood and I tried putting some in our basements. I couldn't tell you what effect the hedge-apple fruit has on cockroaches, but there's some little bitty bug that thinks hedge-apples taste MIGHTY fine. They were some sort of little black mites, and after a week or two they showed up on the hedge-apples - I think they were breeding and laying their eggs in them.

My mother was NOT pleased when she found out what my friends and I had done, and neither were any of the other mothers...hedge-apples were banned in every house on the block after that.

I think I was six or seven when we tried that.

Anyway, Barley, the kids across the fence from our backyard lived in the old farmhouse that the hedge had been planted for. Cary Groner was my age, and he had two older brothers.

They were deadly at hedge-apple fights - after two or three recreational hedge-apple skirmishes with the Groner boys my sister and I decided that discretion was the better part of valor, so we chose our opponents more carefully after that.

The hedge-apples aren't exactly rock-hard, but they're ARE heavy enough that once you've been hit with one you can still feel where it landed for a long time afterwards.


Wade Hampton Miller

[PieterK]

Originally Posted by fitness1

I have a couple of originals posted on the McKnight media page with the Osage/'59 Sitka OM. Sarah's Peace and Your Smiling Face. Not up to my current standard for recording quality, but it will give you an idea.

http://www.mcknightguitars.com/media.html

Really, really nice playing, and pieces. Lovely!

Without having a sonic reference point (same room, same mics, same pieces, different, familiar guitar, etc.), it's hard to precisely gauge the contribution of the woods and guitar, but boy it sure sounds beautiful. There's a kind of ringing sonority to it I really like a lot.

Thank you for sharing this. Wonderful work all around!