Cutting the fret slots on a Flaxwood neck.

Wood Re-designed
The brainchild of Heikki Koivurova, an industrial designer from Joensuu, Finland, flaxwood was born out of a desire to create an environmentally friendly, recyclable wood-based material to substitute for the exotic tonewoods normally used in building instruments. By definition, the new material would have to be acoustically sensitive and responsive, and be able to produce a tone that would be on par with the best tonewoods in the world.

Wood, by nature, is one of the best materials for acoustic purposes; it carries soundwaves well and has a warmth to it that other materials do not have. However, wood is not a homogenic material entirely, as its natural composition and texture has irregularities that can be tricky to work with.

The grain of wood is naturally arranged in a specific direction. Soundwaves travel best parallel to and in the direction of the grain. Wood also has knots and other irregularities in its composition that can cause a change in the flow of sound. In a best case scenario, the knots may work to an advantage to produce a particularly wonderful instrument with a unique personality, but in the end, they are unpredictable elements of chaos which cannot be controlled.

Humidity is another factor. If wood has not been properly dried, in time instruments built from it will prove imperfect; they may crack or even break entirely, rendering them useless. Even with instruments built from properly dried woods, humidity is always a concern for musicians, often requiring them to finetune their instruments depending on changing hydro-atmospheric conditions.

In other words, in working with traditional tonewoods, while the possibility of creating truly unique instruments is always there, so is the possibility of producing instruments of inconsistent quality.

Heikki Koivurova reasoned that if wood could be rendered into very small particles, floating randomly in a binding agent, it would then be rid of its grain and its knots; and, as the particles would face randomly in all directions, soundwaves would resonate with equal force in all directions. This would also make the material impervious to humidity, as the binding agent would seal the wood material hermetically.

Enter master guitar luthier Veijo Rautia. A veteran instrument builder with decades of experience in handmade guitars, Veijo persuaded Heikki to research the possibilities that the new material could offer the electric guitar. As the experiments progressed, a wealthy local industrialist and former saw milling magnate offered to put up some venture capital to take matters further. Antti Vilenius also came onboard with years of specialized mold-injection production experience. After two years, a new tone material was ready to be introduced.

A natural flaxwood surface on an unfinished guitar

Introducing flaxwood
Flaxwood is at heart a wood-based, innovative new tone material that has been created by breaking the grain structure of wood and injection-molding it into shape together with an acoustically sensitive binding agent. Exceptionally consistent in its acoustic properties, uniformly flawless in quality, and completely impervious to changes in humidity, flaxwood is a new ecological alternative to its peers that are slowly nearing extinction.

Injection-molding is a technology which offers several distinct advantages to traditional instrument building: namely, the capacity to produce objects of fine, highly intricate detail; the capacity to produce products of truly consistent quality; the ability to produce exact shapes and control surface thicknesses down to a fraction of a millimeter, and the ability to produce vast quantities of high quality products. Injection-molding is used to produce the bodies, necks and backplates of Flaxwood guitars.

The artisan's touch
In stark contrast to the high-tech conception of the body and neck elements, the rest of the manufacturing process relies on tried and true traditional methods. As in traditional guitar building, the final touches - the sandpapering, fretting, varnishing, electronics installation and the instruments' overall assembly - are all meticulously done by hand by our luthiers. Veijo Rautia and his team bring decades of dedication and skill to their craft; the outstanding quality of their work more than speaks for itself.