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Recently I received a heads-up that a B120 would soon be coming up for sale. Based on the stellar reviews by B120 owners on this forum I let the owner know I was interested. He sent photos and described the instrument as being in excellent condition. Turns out he was absolutely correct.
Like many B120 owners have noted, this is a really easy playing instrument, and has that classic jazz guitar tone. Definitely a keeper.
AKA
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03-03-2026 10:27 PM
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Congrats!! Enjoy!
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Is that the one that was on Reverb last week,if so you got it at a great price.Enjoy my friend.
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Yes. Thanks.
Originally Posted by nyc chaz
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AKA,
A big congrats ! Wishing you many years of enjoyment.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
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May the Borys inspire your playing for many years to come!
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This is bad news for any other guitars you might own! Enjoy!
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AWESOME finish color!
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Always fancied a Borys, not least because of the name!
Cherish each other.
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Nice! Congratulations AKA, you scored! Enjoy!
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Yes. I am really amazed how easy this guitar plays. Is it the 24-3/4” scale? The neck angle? I wonder if Borys uses a standard fretboard radius? Mine seems pretty flat - 14”? Whatever it is, I love it. Originally Posted by vinnyv1k
Beautiful flame on that B120. Roger just did me a solid. I bought a new one and it shipped in the dead of winter. The lacquer checked.
Roger had me return it so he could fix the finish. I get it back this Friday. They do play like butter.
BTW - The gold plated tailpiece you commissioned is nice.
AKALast edited by AKA; 03-05-2026 at 03:32 AM.
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That's a beauty! Play it in good health for years to come!
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Beautiful finish and guitar!
Mine is a B160, so 25" scale, but also plays very easily.
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Welcome to the club !
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I generally don't pay too much attention to NGD'S but I DO love that finish. Beautiful guitar.
Edit:... don't know how I screwed that up ..... did not mean to say.. don't... love it. I do love that top. That's why I commented.Last edited by MiniMerckx.22; 03-07-2026 at 12:43 PM.
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I do love that finish!!!
Please ignore above mis-type.
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Interesting that he misaligned the veneers in the book matching. You don’t often see that but due to the straight grain, he could get away with it.
I actually prefer it.
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Why would you book match a laminate top and back? Originally Posted by Archie
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Enjoy in good health!
Arnie..
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Have you ever seen perfectly bookmatched flamed maple? I haven't. Flame is random and impossible to make symmetrical. Originally Posted by Archie
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It’s not random. The phenomenon that causes what we call “flame” or “ripple” or “fiddle” is a more or less a repeating wave in the fibres of the wood. Originally Posted by FourOnSix
Think of it like cross stitching where you go up through one whole and down through the next and so on.
That is why the flame that you see is a wave. On the crest of the wave, the colour is light, in the pit of the wave the colour is darker. That is why you get the light/dark/light/dark striping effect.
When you make veneers (re-saw) from a single block/billet, the blade of your bandsaw will cut through the billet. When you open the resulting consecutive leafs and book match them, on one side you'll get a light/dark/light/dark wave pattern and on the other side, you generally get the opposite, you'll get dark/light/dark/light. That is because you have cut the wave cycle in half. Imagine an oscilloscope, that is what you're seeing.
That is why the majority of time you see book matching, the fibres causing the wave pattern, do not align. They are book-matched but they are in opposing cycles. On one side you’ll get a light crest and the on the other, on the same latitude, you’ll get a dark pit.
What Borys has done is aligned the dark pits and the light crests so the they colour match. This normally wouldn't work because the figured wood is usually rift or crown cut and so the grain moves from left to right; Borys’s wood here is straight grained. This means he can slip match the crests and the pits, and not get a jarring effect from the grain being way off becuase the grain never meets at the seam.
This may or may not be what he was aiming for but that is what happened, I was just observing it. I could be wrong entirely but given my experience with veneer making, this is my assumption.
BTW sorry if you know all of this.
Here is an example of typical bookmatching where the light and dark peaks are opposing each other. Now go back and look at Borys’s, the dark and light waves match.
Last edited by Archie; 03-08-2026 at 08:45 PM.
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Why not? Originally Posted by Stringswinger
You’re familiar with Gibson so it’s a fair question. Gibson’s figured veneers are knife cut from logs that are rolled in a big machine and cut like paper. Toilet paper is a good mental image (although very high quality cushioned tp of course). .
This means their figured veneers can cover 16” or 17” guitars in one go. They could cover a 200” guitar if they wanted to without needing a join (you get the point).
Most manufactures however don’t have access to this type of never ending figured veneer and Gibson is special in this regard. It’s one of the reasons only they can make 3 ply figured laminate plates, whilst everyone else makes 5 or 7. Gibson clearly has a lot of clout in the veneer making industry.
Most companies buy in figured veneers that have been cut on a slab, not roll cut and so their veneers are usually dictated to by the size of the tree. Trees are grown quicker, they are thinner and so the width of veneer gets narrower and narrower. The veneers sellers then start selling thinner strips of veneer (especially figured). So if you want to make a 16” guitar and you can only buy 9” wide figured veneer, you’ll join two sheets together to form one 18” sheet, which you then trim down.
That is why you book-match laminate plates and Gibson doesn’t. Borys’s guitar here is a classic example. figured Maple top and back, (likely 1mm thick). Same for boutique and all mass produced archtops.
When veneer cutters who run the industry for construction (not guitar making), cut the veneers they keep the leafs in order so you can buy consecutive leafs, just as you would cut them on a bandsaw. A diligent maker using this method would buy two consecutive leafs and book match them. Otherwise you'd just have two random figured veneers glued together which would look odd.
So when you see a laminate archtop with a book matched flame back and or top, that is because the company cannot buy them in roll form and so they have no choice but to join them. Sadowsky Archtops are a classic example. They're all book matched laminate plates. You can tell because there is a centre seem on both top and back plates, where Gibson (and historically Guild) do not have centre seems.
Book-matched figured Koa veneer Sadowski.
Figured non book matched (because there’s no joining seem) Gibson. This means though that you will almost never see a straight grained veneer on a Gibson because the angle of the knife and the rotation of the log means at almost all points, the veneer is being crown cut (lots of squiggly grain lines that look like water stains). That’s the theory but could be proven wrong. Gibson’s figured maple veneers are incredibly high quality, some of the best in the industry and unavailable to almost all other makers. I suspect they have vertically integrated forestry and veneer making many years ago.
Last edited by Archie; 03-08-2026 at 08:49 PM.
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Good info Archie. Guild, Epiphone and Heritage seems to have had the same machine that Gibson does because those companies have made many 16-17 inch Lam plates for their guitars over the years. And many of the Asian companies do as well. I am guessing that smaller workshops like Borys. Holst and D'Aquisto had to do the bookmatching because they lack the economy of scale that a larger manufacturer has. Originally Posted by Archie
Why not?
You’re familiar with Gibson so it’s a fair question. Gibson’s figured veneers are knife cut from logs that are rolled in a big machine and cut like paper. Toilet paper is a good mental image (although very high quality cushioned tp of course). .
This means their figured veneers can cover 16” or 17” guitars in one go. They could cover a 200” guitar if they wanted to without needing a join (you get the point).
Most manufactures however don’t have access to this type of never ending figured veneer and Gibson is special in this regard. It’s one of the reasons only they can make 3 ply figured laminate plates, whilst everyone else makes 5 or 7. Gibson clearly has a lot of clout in the veneer making industry.
Most companies buy in figured veneers that have been cut on a slab, not roll cut and so their veneers are usually dictated to by the size of the tree. Trees are grown quicker, they are thinner and so the width of veneer gets narrower and narrower. The veneers sellers then start selling thinner strips of veneer (especially figured). So if you want to make a 16” guitar and you can only buy 9” wide figured veneer, you’ll join two sheets together to form one 18” sheet, which you then trim down.
That is why you book-match laminate plates and Gibson doesn’t. Borys’s guitar here is a classic example. figured Maple top and back, (likely 1mm thick). Same for boutique and all mass produced archtops.
When veneer cutters who run the industry for construction (not guitar making), cut the veneers they keep the leafs in order so you can buy consecutive leafs, just as you would cut them on a bandsaw. A diligent maker using this method would buy two consecutive leafs and book match them. Otherwise you'd just have two random figured veneers glued together which would look odd.
So when you see a laminate archtop with a book matched flame back and or top, that is because the company cannot buy them in roll form and so they have no choice but to join them. Sadowsky Archtops are a classic example. They're all book matched laminate plates. You can tell because there is a centre seem on both top and back plates, where Gibson (and historically Guild) do not have centre seems.
Book-matched figured Koa veneer Sadowski.
Figured non book matched (because there’s no joining seem) Gibson. This means though that you will almost never see a straight grained veneer on a Gibson because the angle of the knife and the rotation of the log means at almost all points, the veneer is being crown cut (lots of squiggly grain lines that look like water stains). That’s the theory but could be proven wrong. Gibson’s figured maple veneers are incredibly high quality, some of the best in the industry and unavailable to almost all other makers. I suspect they have vertically integrated forestry and veneer making many years ago.
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My 1959 Hofner committee laminated one piece back.
Vintage Hofners have very good laminates and veneers. (IMHO)
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Yes and no. Not all roll cut knife veneer is equal. Originally Posted by Stringswinger
Gibsons figured veneers are 1.2-1.5mm thick. This means they make their own from the source of manufacturing because figured veneer in the wider industry, is almost always 0.5mm thick. it’s this thin because that is as thin as they can possibly make it before it becomes unusable in gluing (the glue just seeps right through). @0.5mm it is paper thin.
Boutique makers from D’Aquisto to manufacturers like Collings to Sadowsky and pretty much all Japanese manufacturers (who do have purchasing power), still buy 0.5mm figured veneer because the industry (which is geared towards construction; think giant laminated wall panels), dictates what the veneer cutting companies do.
It’s also and primarily a way of maximising the return on a figured log. The thinner you make the veneer, the more you get £££.
So almost all companies/luthiers who use roll cut figured veneers and any figured veneer roll cut or otherwise, use paper thin ones that are 0.5mm thick. This is what separates Gibson from the rest in this regard.
Borys tries to use thicker figured veneers at around 1mm thick. I’m going to send him some later this year.
This is why I’ve gone to great lengths to cut my own figured veneers. I can dictate the thickness where almost everyone else has to use paper thin 0.5mm. The only problem I have is sourcing large planks which have slipped through the beady eyes of the resellers (people who work with logging companies and buy all their figured logs).Last edited by Archie; 03-09-2026 at 07:57 AM.
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