Jutt77 said:
Nice! I love the old Martins, but Martin (and all of the other makers who used BR combined) didn't make a dent in it compared to what the Danish furniture makers did. The Danes almost always used veneer to economize on the wood (that's why my coffee table plank is so rare), but they had a penchant for quarter-sawn figure, so no rotary veneers cutters there, just sawn veneer for them. Lots of logs, lots of waste.
Interesting bit of Martin history...
The folk music boom in the 60s had guitar makers scrambling to meet the demand. Big companies like Gibson cranked out cheap guitars, and didn't really care about the quality of the wood or the construction. Martin OTOH really didn't know how to make a cheap guitar. They didn't have any crap wood, either. They actually had their own sawmill and a huge lot full of logs, and they sold wood to other makers like Gibson, Guild, and Epiphone. Of course, they reserved the finest wood for their own guitars. While Gibson was unashamed to use Brazilian rosewood veneer (like on my old "Blue Ridge") in place of choice solid wood, Martin had always used the very best quarter-sawn Brazilian they could get. And now, thanks to the Danes, they were running out of the bigger logs.
Martin production jumped from 6299 guitars in 1963 to 7404 guitars in 1964. Pre-order status showed they were on track for over 10,000 guitars in 1965, so something had to give.
Thus was the Martin D-35 born. The "D" series of guitars was Martin's largest offering. It was almost 16" across the widest part of the back, and that required planks at least 8" wide to be resawn into book-matched sets for the backs. Somebody there came up with the idea of making the back of three pieces instead of two, thereby allowing the use of narrower planks - something they had a lot of at the time. The first D-35s rolled off the line (well, you could hardly call Martin's handmade guitars back then "assembly line" instruments) in '65, and they were well received by enthusiasts. They had a handsome back of three triangular pieces of straight-grain BR glued together with a narrow decorative strip inlaid over the glue seams. But 1966 pre-orders showed sales would be up around 13,000 units, so they decided to economize and replace the center piece of some of the guitars with a piece of West Indian rosewood instead of Brazilian. Soon came two Indian pieces surrounding a single Brazilian piece, and by the end of the 60s, virtually all of the fine Brazilian rosewood that Martin prided itself on for over a century had all but disappeared.
Martin's production total for 1970 was 22,637 guitars - nearly 400% higher than it was only seven years before. Not only was Martin's beloved Brazilian rosewood a thing of the past, so was martin quality. The high production numbers proved to be the death knell for fine handmade guitars coming out of the Martin workshop. They continue making superior guitars to this day, but the days of the handmade, hand-adjusted, individually braced and tap-tuned Martin guitar ended back in the early 70s.
Here's a YouTube video featuring one of the last all-Brazilian rosewood guitars Martin produced back in 1967 - a D-35 in impeccable condition. It doesn't have the spectacular vertical-grain wood Martin was always known for, but it's a beauty nonetheless. And BTW, this is what a fine acoustic guitar is supposed to sound like. Listen to this sweetheart ring! Just totally freakin' awesome.
