We recently posted about two “heritage desks” built for the Vice President of the United States and the Secretary of the Navy from timbers and fittings from the USS Constitution and several other historic ships. The CBC recently had an account of guitars made from shipwrecked timber:

When Greg Fleming was looking for some old wood to make a new guitar, he knew just where to look. What he didn’t know for a while was just how old that wood was.

The St. John’s guitarist got in touch with a relative to use some old wood that had been in a garden in Renews — wood that had been dredged up from the nearby harbour decades earlier from a shipwreck.

“I cut the first piece of wood open and I’ll never forget it. When I split the wood, I spent about 20 minutes looking at the grain.… It was absolutely amazing,” he said.

After arranging for carbon-dating tests through an Ottawa lab, he was astonished by the results: the wood from the shipwreck was roughly dated to 1661.

Fleming has been making instruments from the wood through his company, Shipwreck Instruments. He says the wood gives the guitar a unique sound and tone … and that there’s no need to be gentle with such an old piece of source material.

“It’s also really good when you want to get loud and rock it out,” he said.

Thanks to Irwin Bryan for contributing to this post.