Another Bunker Guitars Best, Fine Guitar Tone Wood For Top Quality Guitars

Many guitar manufacturers of guitars and guitar type instruments, use a tremendous variety of wood grades and species for their guitars in their guitar shops. Because there are so many different grades of wood it is important that you know what you are buying, and that the tonewood used is a quality tonewood that has been properly cured and dried to perfection.

Bunker Guitars knows that the quality of the Tone wood used to in their top guitars, top basses, touch Guitars, etc. makes a marked difference in the sound which they produce. Bunker finds, harvests and mills the very wood they use in what is termed the 'Stump to Stage®' process. The term Sump to Stage representing the fact that at Bunker each fine instrument is started literally from the heart of the forest, and is then delivered to the customer ready to play on stage. Each quality guitar Bunker Guitars crafts is made from a hand selected piece of tonewood!

Premium Grade Guitar Tonewood and Guitar Top Wood Now Available Direct From The Mill!

Bunker has been using their own wood for many years now, and only recently has decided to make this wood available to the public. Bunker currently has many high profile customers that they supply including Gibson, Ed Roman Guitars. This premium tonewood is now available to custom guitar shops, guitar manufactures, hobbyist, wood workers etc. Another advantage of Bunker tonewood is that like Bunker's line of premium Guitars and Bass Guitars, it is available direct from Bunker. There is no middle man.

Hand Selected Guitar Tone-Wood Cured to Perfection For Perfect Tone

Dave Bunker, President and CEO of Bunker Guitars has been harvesting and curing guitar woods for over 50 years. From the finest Spalted Maple, to the deepest quilted or Flame Maple, at Bunker you will find only the finest quality wood in a Bunker Guitar! Bunker Guitars does not ever hurry the wood we use for any reason. It is properly dried at the proper temperature changes, time and moisture is released properly so as to maintain the integrity of the wood. When you receive a guitar crafted from the Stump to Stage process the difference from an ordinary run of the mill (no pun intended!) guitar will be incredible. Your guitar will have better tone, and more sustain throughout.

Over 50 Years of Guitar Tone Wood Experience

The Bunker family's roots stem from a quaint rain soaked logging town in the Pacific Northwest known as Forks (now made famous by the pop culture movie/books series 'Twilight') where most of the family was involved in the logging industry.

My first knowledge of guitar woods began at a Weyerhaeuser Mill in Enumclaw Washington in 1955. I had taken a job on a sorter chain and was working for a boss who would rival a grizzly bear in temperament, yet in time I would deeply respect him for his insight into people. One day at the end of a very hard shift, he approached me and said, someone told me that you were a studying musician. I said yes I was, and that I was starting to build some guitars which I had invented. He asked me what I knew about wood and I said, only how to put a choker around one and to throw one off of a sorter chain when needed. He said, come with me. I have something to show you. We walked over across the mill site to a building, and he pointed to a large stack of wood which was under a covered deck. He said I cut that maple wood over 12 years ago and always thought that someday it would go for something worthwhile. Do you want it? I said wow, yes. This wood was the maple I eventually used in my first line of guitars and basses, very air dried and very stable, with a sound I haven’t duplicated since.

In my early design days I pretty much took for granted that all wood was the same and that surely others had researched out the good, the bad and the ugly of what made good wood. I soon found out that in most cases they hadn’t. A family which I got to know about this same time was the Neil Tebbs family, who just happened to have a large music spruce processing facility in Sumner Washington, then my home town, and just happened to be the largest producer of spruce tops for guitars in the world.

What a find! They supplied all of the tops and much other wood to Martin guitars, Gibson and others. The wood you find in the most collectible guitars in the world came from their fine company. They were so nice to me, this young wild and crazy dreamer of guitars, and supplied me with all of the spruce I needed to build my first 50 Duo-lectars, now the Touch Guitar. What was exciting was how they talked to me about how important it was to have just the right wood and that it had to be picked and cut just right so that all of the tone would flow from the sound box of the guitar through the top and to the world of listeners who would eventually enjoy the music. It was a wonderful circumstance in my life.

When Leo Fender started building the solid body guitars, which weren’t the first but were the first mass produced, many artisans scoffed and criticized solid body guitars with no tone chambers, stating that now it was just the pickups and the string that you were hearing. How wrong they were. It was true that you didn’t have the reflective tonal sound of an acoustic guitar but sound still could be generated by the resonant quality of the woods and other features that were incorporated in the building process, as is proven in fine electric guitars of today. I have taken this a step above the norm by researching, findings, curing and processing my own wood to what I know will be a better quality for not only longevity but for special tonal characteristics.

Drying and curing wood is an art which I do not claim to have a monopoly on by any stretch of the imagination, but one which I have spent much of my life learning about. The one thing that I have learned is that a piece of wood can be ruined very easily in the curing process by improper procedures. They can be cut wrong for appearance, mismatched to other woods, unevenly dried causing hard

and soft spots as well as varying moisture content and many other results, too many to mention. Put a different way, wood is a sensitive material and will react just the way you want it to if you present it with the right direction. I’m not going to give away my prescription for how I have found to best cure wood, what I do know is that if you want your guitar bass or other musical instrument to sound the best, carefully select the wood you use, as the great Tebbs and Sons did in the most long lasting collection of guitars in the world.

What we do at Bunker Tonewoods is to carefully select the logs we procure and follow a procedure which makes them perfect wood for instruments they will be built into. We do not, and I repeat “do not” hurry the wood we use for any reason. It is properly dried at the proper temperature changes, time and moisture is released properly so as to maintain the integrity of the wood. Try it, you’ll love it! We call it Stump to Stage.