I'm building an all western cedar guitar as part of a build-along on a guitar luthier website. A Canadian cedar and spruce harvester/dealer sponsors the site and he provided wood for the guitars. In addition he sent me enough cedar and spruce to make a couple of test rims. I made three rims from the wood he sent. One all cedar, one all spruce, and one a combination of both woods.
I've got the all cedar rim hooked up to a Gold Star long neck that has been hanging on my wall for a while.
I put a couple of coats of TruOil on the outside of the rim. Gives a very nice light chocolate color to the rim.
I put a sound sample on my music page. It's the Cedar Rim Demo:
http://www.banjohangout.org/myhangout/music.asp?id=5299
I decided to use just the wood rim without a metal tine ring to get the real sound of the wood.
This setup sounds a lot better than I was expecting. Not as mellow and funky sounding as I thought it would be. Fairly loud and bright. Some of that is because of the white plastic head like on bluegrass banjos. If I had used a real skin head or a fyberskyn head ( looks like leather but is plastic and paper - kind of like tyvek) it would have had a mellower sound.
Now I will transfer the neck and hardware to the next rim and see what it sounds like.