THE STORY
Sound of the underground:
Dejawu Guitars Presents guitar made from 7500-year-old SINKER wood!
An absolute dream it is; to be a guitar builder and then by chance dig up a perfectly preserved, completely discolored maple trunk, that turns out to be 7500 years old! This happened to Wu Dongming & Derk Jan Lievers. An extremely rare and unique discovery, that can only be used for one thing: building a guitar!
THE DISCOVERY
Years ago, we made the most astonishing discovery a luthier could ever ask for. During some construction work, Dongming stumbled upon some wood that had been hidden in the riverbed. The master luthier and wood lover immediately recognized it as something extraordinary and decided to dig it up. The wood was exceptionally well preserved and the color indicated it had been buried for an eternity. A true treasure for a luthier! Of course, this left us with one big question: Can we build a guitar from it?!
THE AGE
“I immediately knew I had something special in my hands, but who would have thought it was prehistoric!”
Needless to say we were eager to learn its age, so we sent some samples of the wood to the Leibniz-Laboratory for Radiometric Dating and Stable Isotope Research of the Christian Albrechts University in Kiel, Germany. When the results came in, we were totally blown away by the outcome. The tree died between 5474 BC. and 5316 BC. Meaning that it is around 7400 years old!! We could not believe our eyes. The tree is a prehistoric tree that grew in the Neolithic, right in the middle of the hunters and gatherers! (read more)
The Wood Quality
So, the wood must be fossilized and very brittle, right? No, on the contrary! The wood is preserved perfectly and the quality of the wood is truly fantastic. After thousands of years of being buried in very wet conditions there are no juices or nutrients left in the wood. This makes the wood suffer much less from tensile and shrinkage cracks and makes it less susceptible to fungi and bacteria. Furthermore, the wood grain is extremely dense, which improves its acoustic properties and makes it particularly suitable for guitar building. (Read more)
The Color
7 vs. 7500-year-old maple.
The dark color of the maple is very exceptional and has developed completely naturally. Over the millennia, the wood fibers have absorbed the minerals and acids present in the soil, resulting in a dark brown, sometimes almost black color. A unique combination of (lots of) time, water, a lack of oxygen and particular soil conditions contributed to the wood being the way it is today.
The Wood type & SIZE
Although a large number of wood species can be used for guitar building in general, only a few are suitable hand-carving a semi-hollow body guitar using the traditional construction methods we do. This log turned out to be maple. Perfect! The size of the trunks is also very rare; finding a piece large enough to build a violin would already have been extraordinary. It’s an incredible stroke of luck that our trunks are large enough to build several guitars out of it!
All in all, quite a history, which results in a series of historically stunning and rare hand-crafted instruments. Building guitars and doing business requires passion, perseverance, craftsmanship and above all lots of time.... After waiting almost 7500 years, the time has come, meet:
