About

Fiddleback Woodshack is a small yet substantial woodshop and sawmill located at the alpine edge of the high desert in Sunriver, Oregon, run by walnut lover Felly Smith. With 30+ years in the Pacific Northwest, Felly sources some of the finest material from all of Cascadia and west to the Pacific coast, and hauls it back to the high and dry climate of Central Oregon for precision milling and expert drying. Air dryed Redwood from Northern California, Western Red Cedar from Northern Washington, Myrtle from the Southern Oregon Coast, Claro Walnut and Bigleaf Maple from the Willamette Valley are his specialties. Air drying takes time. He’s not in a hurry.

“…in the mid-2000’s I was building percussion instruments for many of the world’s top hand drummers….members of the Grateful Dead, Santana, Los Lobos, String Cheese Incident, Zakir Hussain and all of Planet Drum and Global Drum Project, people who played with Miles Davis, and more. Various studio guys were using my instruments to record for film and tv soundtracks. It was amazing and I had a lot of fun but after about 500 drums and a lot more glory than income, and a new family, I began shifting over to milling the overflowing stockpile of outgraded 12/4 claro gunstock slabs I’d been collecting, throwing sets up on eBay, and its just grown from there…”

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Back then I was lucky enough to acquire 2 jaw-dropping runs of Claro…

“The first wasn’t even claro, it turned out to be bastogne but I didn’t know that until it was almost completely gone years later. In 2007, when I got it, the word bastogne wasn’t thrown around like it is now. These were 8/4 slabs, 18” wide and 16’ long, fully fiddleback and with all the carmels and colors of bastogne in heat, and I had 8 of them. It was the last holdout pile of the old Dr. Gary Goby walnut operation in Albany, Oregon before he sold the business to the current owner who moved it to Portland. Then, in 2011, I got in on a highly figured claro out of Eugene, a rough cut quarter section face of which is pictured on the home screen of this website. While we were cutting, one of the guys kept talking about sawing “them other” logs. And so, at least the slabs I got off it, became known as “The Mother”. And so it goes…