Thermo Treatment

Tonewood carefully selected by us goes through a strictly controlled process, resulting in Thermo Treated tonewood with various superior properties. The treatment affects to the cellular structure of wood – by changing it nearly identical to timber that has naturally aged for decades.

There are several benefits – the wood stabilizes (ability to absorb moisture decreases), stiffness increases, the weight drops, sound velocity increases, the wood colour deepens and the wood resonates better (partially because of the increased sound velocity).

VOODOO?
From the guitar maker’s point of view, the best and most apparent affect of Thermo Treatment is the increased stability of the wood. Simply, this means less adjusting for necks and more relaxed pieces of wood to start building from. The increased stiffness improves the tonal behaviour of the guitar as well, making the necks more evenly resonating, which eliminates dead spots. Tampere Technical University has studied Thermo Treatment for musical instruments in co-operation with a group of instrument manufacturers. The study lead to a 75-page report published in 2002, which includes lots of laboratory reasuments of various wood species before and after thermal treatment. In a nutshell – these studies show that ThermoTreatment is no “voodoo” – but a real thing.

IT JUST SOUNDS BETTER
The tone issue is a more difficult one to give simple answers to. Facts are, that resins in the wood cells vapourize or crystallize during Thermo Treatment. This is one of the crucial reasons for that the sound velocity in the wood increases – resulting as a better resonating guitar. A “new-guitar-syndrome” is very often about the lack of low mids and bass, and as a result the guitar sounds thin. We work together with many professional players, and the common opinion – shared also by several guitar magazine reviews – is that the Thermo Treated Ruokangas instrument does sound different from “just another new guitar”. It rings more – louder and better balanced.

“Thermo Treatment was primarily developed to make wood more stable in large scale industrial use, and it is used quite extensively by other fields of wood industries in Finland – wood floors, solid wood furniture manufacturing, construction wood and so on. Each of these industries profit from the wood being more stable. They don’t have to care about the tone really, but nevertheless, they would never use Thermo Treated wood if there wasn’t some genuine profit in it – fewer warranty issues and so on. This fact in it’s own right proves that the stability effects of Thermo Treatment are very real.”
- Juha Ruokangas

For more detailed information of Thermo Treatment and the study of Tampere Technical University, please read the ToneQuest Report article from January 2006.