Resch & 3 band sawmill—that cost approx. $500,000—is composed of two major components: a stationary guideway, where the log rests, and a moving sawhead.
The wood that becomes a guitar top doesn't begin its life as a plank. It begins as a log: alive with character, full of possibilities, yet finite.
At Pacific Rim Tonewoods, we've spent over 35 years thinking carefully about that reality. There's only so much wood in the world that meets the standards required for fine instruments. The stands of Sitka spruce along the BC coastline, the figured maple of Washington's Skagit Valley, the koa groves of Hawai'i—these are not unlimited resources.
That means every decision we make at the mill matters. Not just for quality, but for stewardship.
Utilization—the practice of extracting maximum value from each log that comes through our gate—isn't a side consideration at PRT. It's a core operating philosophy. It guides how we sharpen our saws, how we cut, how we power our facility, and even what we do with wood that can't become a guitar top.
Here's how it works in practice.
Our Commitment to Complete Utilization
Selection of the Log
Utilization begins before a saw ever touches wood. It starts with the log itself. And with the experienced eye that knows what’s hidden inside it.
The diameter, the grain, the way the bark lays…these details tell a story about what’s inside, if you know how to read them. Most people don’t. That knowledge takes years to develop, and it’s the first place value is either captured or lost.
From there, every step in the milling process is a value point: splitting the log into blocks, running those blocks through the headrig to cut on-quarter and navigate around defects, then grading the final boards to lock in the right size and specification for each customer. By the time a board reaches grading, most of the intellectual work is already done. The decisions made at the log yard and the headrig determine everything that follows.
That’s where the utilization story really begins.
The Sharp Saw Philosophy
PRT’s very own Steve Farrell sharpens a bandsaw blade
Most people don't think much about what a saw blade takes out of a piece of wood. But at a mill like ours, the kerf (which is the width of the blade's tooth, and therefore the width of each cut) is one of the most important numbers in the building.
A wider kerf means more sawdust. More sawdust means less yield. When you're working with wood, which is a finite resource, every millimeter counts.
That's why our saws are sharpened every single day, across multiple machines, by our very own Steve Farrell, a longtime employee at PRT. We use CNC sharpening equipment on-site (Swiss-made, built for repeatable precision) that lets us maintain razor-thin kerfs cut after cut. The blades carry stellite-tipped teeth, the kind used in aerospace and surgical tooling, because the margin for error here isn't wide.
The result isn't just less waste. It's more accurate cutting. Our customers have come to trust that a board leaving our mill is dimensioned to within a hair's width of spec—roughly .010-.015 inches tighter than the industry standard in many cases. That accuracy allows us to cut thinner without sacrificing the structural integrity of the final piece.
Less waste, more wood, better products. It's the goal we all strive for at the millsite.
Four-Piece Tops: Stretching the Resource
4 Piece Sonic Sitka Vault 5866
Four-piece tops aren't new. When C.F. Martin Sr. began making guitars in the 1830s, other luthiers on both sides of the Atlantic were already making guitars with three- and four-piece tops (examples exist from the 1840s well into the twentieth century). During WWII, when materials were scarce and every board foot counted, four-piece construction became a practical necessity for many luthiers. The craft adapted to the resource.
That history here matters because it reframes the conversation. Four-piece tops aren't a compromise; they're a proven approach that the industry has returned to whenever it's been honest about wood scarcity.
Today, the pressure is familiar. Large, wide-grained spruce billets suitable for traditional two-piece tops are increasingly hard to come by. Not every log yields them, and not every block that comes off the headrig is wide enough to qualify, even when the acoustic properties are exceptional.
This is where four-piece tops come in.
By bookmatching two pairs of narrower billets, we can capture a top with the same tonal properties and visual symmetry as a two-piece, just with one additional join line down the center. Once bracing is installed on the underside of a four-piece top, there’s no practical difference from a two-piece in how it converts kinetic energy into sound waves. Even Martin Guitar's own R&D team, after rigorous testing, found they couldn't discern a tonal difference.
The advantage for yield is real: billets that wouldn't have made it through a two-piece-only selection process become viable soundboard material. It's a small design adaptation with meaningful impact, and one with deep roots in the tradition of the craft.
Don’t take our word for it; browse our four-piece soundboard sets to see what we mean.
Bracewood: The Log That Keeps Giving
Custom Bracewood
When a log comes through the mill, not every block that emerges becomes a soundboard. Some pieces are too narrow, have grain that's slightly off-quarter, or fall just outside the dimensional requirements for a top. In the past, this material went to the waste pile.
Worth noting: Bracewood itself has never been optional. Every guitar needs it; it's the thin, lightweight spruce that braces the soundboard from the inside, and without it, the top wouldn't hold. It's always been made from spruce, and it's always been structurally critical. What changed wasn't the need for bracewood; it was recognizing that the part of the log that isn't quite big enough for a two-piece top (or suitable for a four-piece) is exactly the right material to make it. Thirty-five years ago, that wood was scrap…
Now, it becomes bracewood.
Bracewood is acoustically sensitive as well as structural. The species, stiffness, and grain orientation of the brace material affect how the top vibrates and how the instrument ultimately sounds.
As the requirements for bracewood quality evolved, we adapted our process to accommodate them. The result: what was once a waste stream is now a product line. One that effectively adds roughly 20 extra logs per year to our usable yield—logs we never had to purchase, source, or transport.
Today, we ship 300–350,000 pieces of bracewood to luthiers around the world every year.
That's utilization at its most elegant: a change in thinking that turns byproduct into output, and waste into value.
Check out our bracewood collection in the shop.
Solar and the Energy Question
PRT’s new solar panel system, which employs bifacial panels, increases energy yields by up to 20 percent.
Energy is one of the great pressure points facing small manufacturers right now. Demand is rising (electric vehicles, heat pump conversions, shifting away from propane and gas) while supply from the grid remains constrained. Hydroelectric power in the Pacific Northwest is increasingly sold on the open market. Basically, local availability tightens even as the grid expands elsewhere.
PRT's response has been to invest in solar generation at the mill. What began over a decade ago with 36 rooftop panels has grown into an 814-panel installation at the Skagit Valley facility in Concrete, producing roughly 390,000 kilowatt hours of electricity per year, about half of PRT's annual usage.
For PRT’s co-owner Steve McMinn, it's both a values decision and a practical one: "I'm a great advocate for renewable energy. Our solar project helps us better utilize our natural resources and helps ensure future jobs in the communities we live and work in."
Surplus power generated on weekends and holidays feeds directly back into the grid through net metering, a power-sharing arrangement that offsets PRT's annual draw without the cost of battery storage. "It's much better than storing the energy in expensive batteries," McMinn says, "and it allows us to offset our own power use."
For a company whose entire philosophy is built around reducing waste and maximizing yield, solar was a natural fit.
As McMinn puts it: "It helps us move towards a better, greener, and more peaceful world."
For PRT, that means less input. More output. The same philosophy at every level.
Spalts and Hogzilla: Closing the Loop on Waste Wood
Tub grinding PRT’s waste pile
Even with the sharpest saws, the most thoughtful cuts, and the most creative repurposing, a working mill produces waste wood. Edge trimmings from the headrig. Off-cuts from the chop saw. The slivers and end pieces that fall away as blocks are shaped and squared.
We call these spalts—the small slabs and slivers of waste that accumulate as the sawyer works through a block. Conveyors carry them away into bins, which we empty about 1–2 times a week. The pile can grow impressively fast.
Once a year, we bring in a machine we affectionately call Hogzilla (a heavy-duty tub grinder that processes all of it into chips). Those chips don't go to a landfill. They go to local nurseries as bark mulch, or to larger mills with cogeneration capability, where the material is burned to generate electricity. The waste from our mill becomes either garden beds or kilowatt hours.
Nothing that can move through a system stays in a pile.
It's not glamorous work. But it matters. And it's part of how we think about what it means to run a mill responsibly.
Seventh String Bowls: When the Wood Has More to Say
PRT turns wood into finely crafted wooden bowls, adding value to every log that passes through the mill
Not all the wood that passes through our mill can become a guitar. Some pieces have character and figure that don't meet the visual or structural requirements for instrument sets.
But beautiful, interesting wood doesn't stop being beautiful and interesting just because it isn't quite right for a guitar top.
That insight led to Seventh String Bowls—a venture born directly out of PRT's commitment to full utilization. Wood that can't become a guitar has new life as a bowl: carefully selected, shaped by craftspeople, and finished into objects that carry a story.
The bowl blanks come from our mill. They’re then cored and cured on site at our bowl mill; some are sold to bowlturners with the rest becoming part of the Seventh String Bowl collection.
There's a satisfying logic to the bowl mill: the waste stream from the main mill becomes the raw material. And then the waste from the bowl mill itself is minimal.
Coring bowl blanks is a precise process. So what comes off the lathe is shaving and dust, not usable wood. The resource has already been stretched as far as it can go. What's left is the bowl, and the story it carries.
Visit seventhstringbowls.com to see the work.
The Philosophy Behind the Practice
It starts with the log. Knowing which one to select, how to read the grain before the first cut, and how to quarter it to expose the best wood.
That's where utilization either begins or gets left on the table. Everything from there on depends on those early decisions.
From there, it's a chain: precise cuts reduce kerf, tighter kerf means more usable wood, more usable wood means bracewood from offcuts and four-piece tops from narrower billets. Solar generation keeps the energy costs lean. And what still can't become a soundboard becomes a bowl blank, chips for a nursery, or mulch for a garden bed.
The same thinking shapes how we source. We work with First Nations landowners in BC, invest in koa reforestation in Hawai'i through Siglo Tonewoods, and cultivate figured maple in Washington's Skagit Valley through the Utopia project.
You can't build a responsible mill and then walk away from a responsible forest. The commitment has to run all the way through.
Browse our full tonewood collection. Every piece in it is the product of this process.
