Custom guitars and speaker cabinets are made of HempWood
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Silver Mountain Hemp is a boutique musical instrument company producing custom guitars, guitar cabinets, guitar straps, ukuleles, guitar picks and volume knobs - all using hemp as a main ingredient in the manufacturing process.
 
Silver Mountain founder Morris Beegle told Westword that he uses two different groups for manufacturing - one of which is the Kentucky-based HempWood. 
 
One takes a [hemp] fiber mat — a real fine-bast fiber mat. They compress that into a composite board with a biopolymer. So you make this fiberboard, and then it's molded around the core, sanded down and then finished. That's one specific way of doing it. And then I've got another group that's just created the first hemp wood in a Cannaboard guitar. It's a strap model that has hemp wood that these guys in Kentucky from hempwood.com created, so we're using their material on the outside.
 
HempWood's15,600-square-feet factory officially opened for business in Kentucky last August. Made from compressed hemp stalks and sealed with a soy-based adhesive, HempWood offers significant advantages over traditional lumber - including a higher availability, a much quicker grow time of five to six months, and a 20 percent higher density. It can be used in furniture, flooring, and other woodworking projects.
 
HempWood was our biggest online story over the entire year of 2019.
 
Speaker cabinets are made of hemp-pressed particle board and paired with a choice of Tone Tubby HempCone and Eminence Cannabis Rex speakers. Straps are made of hemp, and picks and volume knobs are made of a hemp/corn composite.
 
On top of making guitars, Beegle also produces a podcast on hemp, hemp paper, hemp clothing, and one of Colorado's biggest annual cannabis conferences NoCo Hemp Expo. See the full Westword interview here, where Beegle talks in detail about the materials needed, more on manufacturing, and the role COVID-19 has played so far.

 

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About the author
Robert Dalheim

Robert Dalheim is an editor at the Woodworking Network. Along with publishing online news articles, he writes feature stories for the FDMC print publication. He can be reached at [email protected].