element256
Active Member
"Heathens do not beg their gods for help. We honor them with our actions."
At first it doesn't look like much - maybe an ebony top or really strong black stain. But this is the most insane timber I've ever used. Preserved Irish bog oak - several thousand years old. The guitars are twins - six and seven string, and they are Viking Cimmerians. I wanted to use a Nordic timber - what better than Oak? But with Irish bog oak, this timber was actually in the ground when the Vikings were raiding Ireland, and when they were pushed back at the battle of Clontarf. Ultimately I would have wanted to use Scandinavian Oak - but the Vikings chopped it all down to make ships - ship timber was actually on the list of things to be acquired from trading or raids towards the end of the Viking period. I have seen the Viking ship in Gothenburg museum and this timber looks very similar.
I normally wet the timbers before I photograph them to make the grain pop - but these are dry. This timber is very sensitive to moisture. The drying process is complicated and a massive proportion of it is lost through splitting and shrinkage when planks are prepared. These pieces were cut, kiln dried, selected and examined by Dave Dyke - all the time checking to see how the timber was responding to loosing its moisture content. If you compare this to how we've been treating the Mary Rose in Portsmouth for 30 years, there are similarities. Do it wrong and you loose everything. But this timber is much better preserved in the oxygen poor peat bog than the Mary Rose was at the bottom of the solent. This bog oak is very hard. Very tough. But if you put water on it, it seems very thirsty, and fibres lift - like its trying to return to its original volume and torturing itself. Better to carve the guitar and seal it in a timber formulated polyester basecoat.
To me the timber looks like a dark sky reflected onto a black rolling sea, extending to the horizon which is black and infinite. This is why I like it so much - the Vikings had the courage to sail into the unknown.
These are inlays into Macassar ebony and are not paintings onto a fingerboard. I am a painter so I think like a painter and I've spent the last ten years working out how to paint with wood instead of paint. I went through many fingerboards at the wood yard to find the ones I needed. The actual ships are normal jet black ebony.
The sails and shields are bloodwood and the metal is iron and brass. I prepared both ships as sketches which where then scanned into the computer. The laser cavitated the fingerboard accurately and cut the interior dark ebony pieces, but about 70% of the detail was actually cut by hand using the pin out of an old spray gun that I filed with a diamond block down to about 0.05 millimetres, and craft knife blades.
The untextured brown material is a sculptors resin, everything else is natural timber. A few tricks the laser offered was to cut the bloodwood shields, and cavitate the main hull, so I could make the shield rims just using the thickness of the laser beam that had left a void when it did the cutting. The tiniest details such as the chieftain and the berserker with the red eye were cut using the spray pin.
At first it doesn't look like much - maybe an ebony top or really strong black stain. But this is the most insane timber I've ever used. Preserved Irish bog oak - several thousand years old. The guitars are twins - six and seven string, and they are Viking Cimmerians. I wanted to use a Nordic timber - what better than Oak? But with Irish bog oak, this timber was actually in the ground when the Vikings were raiding Ireland, and when they were pushed back at the battle of Clontarf. Ultimately I would have wanted to use Scandinavian Oak - but the Vikings chopped it all down to make ships - ship timber was actually on the list of things to be acquired from trading or raids towards the end of the Viking period. I have seen the Viking ship in Gothenburg museum and this timber looks very similar.
I normally wet the timbers before I photograph them to make the grain pop - but these are dry. This timber is very sensitive to moisture. The drying process is complicated and a massive proportion of it is lost through splitting and shrinkage when planks are prepared. These pieces were cut, kiln dried, selected and examined by Dave Dyke - all the time checking to see how the timber was responding to loosing its moisture content. If you compare this to how we've been treating the Mary Rose in Portsmouth for 30 years, there are similarities. Do it wrong and you loose everything. But this timber is much better preserved in the oxygen poor peat bog than the Mary Rose was at the bottom of the solent. This bog oak is very hard. Very tough. But if you put water on it, it seems very thirsty, and fibres lift - like its trying to return to its original volume and torturing itself. Better to carve the guitar and seal it in a timber formulated polyester basecoat.
To me the timber looks like a dark sky reflected onto a black rolling sea, extending to the horizon which is black and infinite. This is why I like it so much - the Vikings had the courage to sail into the unknown.
These are inlays into Macassar ebony and are not paintings onto a fingerboard. I am a painter so I think like a painter and I've spent the last ten years working out how to paint with wood instead of paint. I went through many fingerboards at the wood yard to find the ones I needed. The actual ships are normal jet black ebony.
The sails and shields are bloodwood and the metal is iron and brass. I prepared both ships as sketches which where then scanned into the computer. The laser cavitated the fingerboard accurately and cut the interior dark ebony pieces, but about 70% of the detail was actually cut by hand using the pin out of an old spray gun that I filed with a diamond block down to about 0.05 millimetres, and craft knife blades.
The untextured brown material is a sculptors resin, everything else is natural timber. A few tricks the laser offered was to cut the bloodwood shields, and cavitate the main hull, so I could make the shield rims just using the thickness of the laser beam that had left a void when it did the cutting. The tiniest details such as the chieftain and the berserker with the red eye were cut using the spray pin.
