Piano Recycling: Wanted Junker Pianos!

As you may know by now in my quest to build the world’s most sustainable guitar I have begun to use exclusively repurposed wood.

Today I have begun to take advantage of the high quality, aged tonewood found in old pianos. It’s hard to believe, but there are hundreds of pianos being thrown out every month in Canada. The mechanism of these pianos are so worn out that it simply is not cost effective to repair them. Every time one of these old pianos is tossed – a huge chunk of valuable sitka, red or engelmans spruce end up in the dump. The old growth spruce required to make a new guitar (or piano) will run out very soon. The same quality (the quality required for a fine guitar) will NEVER grow back as long as we continue our present rate of logging. So why not re-use this incredible sounding wood?

***UPDATE*** January 18, 2011

This piano is now the father of a brand new baby guitar. Wait, does that make me the mother? I guess so! That’s weird. I think I’d prefer to think of myself more as Dr. Frankenstein, taking the dead and bringing to them new life.