High quality Engelmann Spruce trees from the Revelstoke area are milled locally by Boltwood Tonewood for guitars manufactured around the world. Owner Dan Boltwood estimates his small operation makes about 75 per cent of the world’s supply of its kind. Here’s how.
When he was a younger man Dan Boltwood built logging roads in the hills between Revelstoke and Mica. After many long, dirty days and cold nights in camp away from his family, he realized it wasn’t going to be forever. He started looking for different opportunities on the horizon.
It came in the form of a guitar-fanatic friend. In conversation, his friend told him of the finer points of guitars, including their tonewood. The word can refer to all wooden parts of acoustic guitars (and violins and mandolins, etc.). More specifically, it’s the top face of the guitar. The softer tonewood face creates the sound with the strings as it’s echoed off the harder back of the guitar.
Knot-free, medium- to old-growth spruces such as Sitka, Adirondack, European and locally-available Engelmann Spruce were prized, he learned.
“I’m making a road through big spruce like that right now,” Boltwood replied. And the seed was born.
After doing some research, making contacts and partnering with a distributor in California, Boltwood took the plunge. He bought a used saw from Downie for $1,500 and set up shop in 1993. After 18 years in the business, new machines and some processes he pioneered himself, he estimates he supplies about 75 per cent of the Engelmann spruce guitar tonewood faces in the world.
The Engelmann spruce is prized in guitars for several qualities. It’s the lightest in colour, with a pale yellow-white quality. It’s known for its weight-to-strength ratio. It’s fine-grained and smooth in texture. Each variety of wood is known for the unique tone it produces. Engelmann has been described for its open sound, creating pronounced highs and lows.
The factory is fairly compact. A mill room, a kiln room and a sorting area. It’s all located on the side of his rural property overlooking the Big Eddy. His house sits at the back, a horse paddock to one side. (Boltwood is one of the owners of those giant Percheron horses that are featured in local parades.) Rows of high-quality spruce logs in the front and a growing pile of sawdust in the back give away the milling operation.
The logs come pre-cut and are then bucked into smaller pieces, with blocks extracted from the core. They’re run through a roughly 10-foot high automated bandsaw, then the pieces are milled through a secondary machine. The result looks like large, long even roof shingles.
They are dried in a walk-in kiln, graded, packed onto shipping palettes and then out the door.
On a good day, they can make 1,500 guitar faces. Each face is two pieces that are expertly joined together by the manufacturer. So, 3,000 pieces a day. The operation employs four full-time and three part-time employees.
The tonewood makes its way all around the world. Predominantly to Asia, including manufacturing operations in China and Indonesia, to name some of the major manufacturing centres.
Boltwood tells me the supply of appropriate Engelmann spruce is dwindling. He wonders if his operation can continue for another generation. At the current rate, the right kind of timber supply could dry up in 20 years. Even now, better logs are harder to find. (The ‘perfect’ log is, “Real rare,” he jokes. “I haven’t seen that one yet.”)
