‘Tone Wood’ Connoisseur Seeks Old-Growth Trees With Timbre : Northwest: Stephen McMinn finds wood for musical instruments, such as guitars and piano soundboards. His craft could help the region cope with limits on logging.

In the Pacific Northwest, where timber is a commodity usually tallied by the acre, Stephen McMinn sees the forest for the trees--one precious gem at a time.

Prowling the forest from California to Alaska, McMinn seeks only the biggest, oldest and finest of trees for the “tone wood” used in crafting musical instruments.

He has packed trees out of the woods on his back, 100 pounds a load. He has crawled over thousands of logs, inspecting subtle bumps and twists for clues to whether treasure lies within. Once, in Alaska, he literally sniffed out an old Sitka spruce, homing in on the spicy aroma of pitch while bicycling down a logging road.

“I’m a woodhead,” said McMinn, who runs his small business, Pacific Rim Tone Woods, out of this hamlet in the North Cascades. “Sometimes I wake up in the morning and think, ‘Does wood really exist?’ It is such a marvelous material!”

There was a time when McMinn could pursue his passion in obscurity, scavenging a good log here and a fine tree there, nibbling at the edge of the industrial timber machine.

But now that machine is slowing down. President Clinton’s plan to protect the northern spotted owl would reduce logging in the Northwest’s old-growth forest to a third of its 1980s peak. The region’s challenge is to do more with less, and people like McMinn are helping point the way.

Businesses like his, using a small amount of old-growth timber to make high-value products, are the darlings of politicians and economic boosters hoping to breathe life into moribund timber towns.

Even some environmentalists cautiously support such enterprises, seeing them as a way to provide jobs while killing fewer ancient trees.

“It’s a lot better than turning them into 2-by-4 studs,” said Jim Pissot, Washington state director for the National Audubon Society. “It’s about time we realize big old trees are worth something.”

Suddenly everyone is paying attention to what McMinn calls the “funny little uses” of old-growth timber, from canoe paddles to zithers.

When Olympic National Forest managers tore down an old bridge recently, they decided to auction off its timbers instead of leaving them for firewood scavengers. Wooden-boat builders, desperate for material, snapped up the wood for $4,000.

Responding to demand for tone wood, the Washington Department of Natural Resources last May sold a single, blown-down Sitka spruce for $22,726. In the past, the 450-year-old giant likely would have fetched far less as part of a larger timber sale.

“Our harvest levels are down now, and we’re looking at recovering a higher value for the trees we do cut,” said Rick Cahill, a forester with the state agency. “These trees are worth a lot more money than other trees.”

McMinn knows that. When he started dabbling in tone woods 12 years ago, storm-felled trees could be had for the price of a firewood-cutting permit. Now he’ll drop $50,000 for a few good logs.

In 1988, McMinn had a chance to buy a six-foot diameter Sitka spruce from the U.S. Forest Service in southeastern Alaska. The price was just $60, but McMinn passed, worried the tree might have rot inside.

This year, the same tree went up for sale again. McMinn bought it, this time for $5,850, and he was happy to get it.

McMinn has absorbed some of the price increases by improving efficiency. With careful sawing, he can transform a single big tree into as many as 20,000 guitar tops, his company’s specialty.

But customers also bear a share. Top-grade spruce guitar tops, which retailed for $20 each in 1980, now go for about $50.

Instrument-builders have no choice but to pay.

Over the years, many crafts that once used the Northwest’s old-growth trees have switched to other materials. House-builders now use lumber milled from smaller, second-growth timber. Boat-builders use fiberglass.

But the makers of stringed musical instruments have found no substitute for the strength, beauty and tonal clarity of the Northwest’s old-growth conifers. Wood grown here is coveted by craftsmen worldwide.

Each species has its own use: Sitka spruce for piano soundboards and violin tops; Sitka and Engelmann spruce for the tops of steel-string guitars; Western red cedar for classical guitars.

Only ancient trees, 200 to 1,000 years old, will do. Slow-growing and tight-grained, they have a durability and resistance to seasonal shrinking and swelling that fast-growing, younger trees do not.

It is estimated that of all timber cut, less than one-tenth of 1% is suitable for tone wood. And even that fraction is not always acceptable to McMinn’s discriminating customers.

They will rummage through his shelves, inspecting, flexing and occasionally sniffing guitar tops. They will hold each board by the corner and tap it, listening with furrowed brow to each thunk and bonk .

One builder, who insists on wood with “the summer fluff and the winter meat,” will point to imperfections visible only to him and declare, “I can’t work with that! See?”

“They want something that may or may not exist in the real world,” McMinn said.

His talent is finding out if it does. With one college degree in the classics, another in woodworking, and a lifetime spent working outside, McMinn appreciates both the delicate sensibilities of artists and the hardscrabble reality of yanking trees from the forest.

At age 39, he is lean, muscular, and constantly in motion. His sandals slap the concrete as he dashes around his shop, showing off a motley assortment of one-of-a-kind machines, conveyors and laser-guided saws.

It is equal parts high tech and Rube Goldberg, all working together to precisely cut and re-cut rough chunks of wood into smooth boards, three-eighths inch thick.

The 25,000-square-foot shop is a far cry from McMinn’s back-yard beginnings. He and six employees produced 100,000 guitar tops this year, selling them to overseas manufacturers as well as U.S. builders including Martin and Gibson.

The decline in logging threatens big lumber mills. But McMinn, who uses as much old-growth in a year as they do in a day, expects scarcity to work in his favor.

When wood was more plentiful, he explains, people took it for granted, and it was too easy for gems of the forest to end up as toilet paper. He believes there is abundance yet in the Northwest--if one uses a small enough amount of wood and a large enough measure of brains.

The forest is vast, logging is sloppy, and McMinn is confident there will always be the odd tree hiding in the woods.

“If it becomes scarce enough, you make it known to every logger in the region that you’ll pay X amount for logs. If you do that, there will be logs.”

He paused, then added: “Of course, you’ll pay for it. There won’t be any deals.”