Two world-famous builders of musical instruments work at Hämeenlinna region. Pekka Helanen (Kumu Drums) and Juha Ruokangas (Ruokangas Guitars) both use birch (Betula pendula) as a material in their instruments. Helanen uses plywood and Ruokangas uses flame figured birch. The aim of this thesis was to find out how these builders use birch, and what kind of requirements there are for the materials. In addition, it is found out what kind of challenges there are to obtain good birch material, and how forest owners, wood industry and other actors in the business could do to help in obtaining of good birch materials.

The information was gathered by interviewing Pekka Helanen, Juha Ruokangas and Tero Siromaa, teacher of guitar building from Ikaalinen College of Crafts and Design. Also some specialists in forestry and wood industry were interviewed in shorter discussions thereafter.

The production of plywood has a long history in Finland, it has also been made for drum veneer for decades and has a good reputation worldwide. The attainability for drum veneer is good and its production and attainability has no threats in nearby future. The attainability of larger stems used for guitars and other instruments is a real challenge. Finding them from Finnish forests is difficult, because they rarely grow to sufficient dimen-sions without having flaws in their quality. Most often they are used for other purposes. If forest owners and sawers could identify these stems, they could be sawn in proper ways for instrument building. In long term it could be possible to obtain more flame figured birch if forest owners would start planting ice birch (one form of silver birch), the saplings of which will be available in the autumn 2016 for the first time.