Welcome to my world of making musical instruments. I have spent most of my adult life chasing that elusive sound or tone that would put me in a place that no other had achieved, but alas, I am still climbing that mountain. I have come close on many occasions, to achieving terrific results, but something tells me I should not stop here. The number of combinations of wood types, coupled with instrument sizes, and instrument types, means we can go on ad infinitum. It is a never ending quest to build the ‘perfect’ instrument. I am going to help people to learn to build a guitar by showing various procedures, whether it be by video or still pictures.
This is the first time that I am building a guitar with the truss rod adjustable from within the soundhole. It is a little tricky, so watch your step. While you learn to build a guitar, it is one of those variables that keep cropping up. There are pluses for both styles of truss rod insertion. The advantage of having the adjustment at the soundhole end of the neck, is that the neck/head area will be stronger.Unfortunately, a small section of the soundboard has to be removed to accomodate the truss rod.
I am mentioning this now, because we will need a hole through the first cross brace that we will glue on. This cross brace is 1/2″ x 1/2″, and depending on the size of the truss rod adjusting nut, this will determine the size of the hole.It should be in the middle of the brace, and when the brace is glued on, the hole should line up with the soundboard centerline.
I use a curved template to mark a 15ft radius on the gluing side of the brace. Go to the disc sander and fashion this curve. Place a thin flexible gluing caul under the soundboard, and clamp the brace down. Look at the photo to see this in action.Use at least 5 clamps to secure the brace. Leave to dry at least 2 hours if you live in a warm climate. While this is drying, you can be cutting the other main ‘x’ braces to length, and mark and sand the curve to the underside. If you have one of the 20ft dishes that the luthier supply places sell, then you would use the dish to fashion your bracing curve. I use a single 15ft template to draw my curve. I use the measurements at the end of the braces to help with the curve drawing. The longest brace will subtend the biggest vertical distance (about 3/16″) at its end. When drawing the curves on the back braces, you will see these vertical end measurements of the 4 braces will vary according to their length.
Using a pattern to mark the outline
It can be quite a task making your first guitar. I found that the more books I read, the easier it became to get my head around all the different processes. To this day, I still run out of time because I forget some of the processes that have to be done, and I run overtime. I will now begin to show the process of building an acoustic dreadnaught guitar.
The first is wood selection, so you have to first decide which woods you will use. Not only will the type of wood be a factor, but the colour scheme of the woods also comes into play. To see a selection of back/side wood and top wood, go to www.desanthony.com/workshop and woods.These are the main timbers that I use, and I try to use wood that is available within Queensland. Soundboard woods( Spruce and Western red cedar), are not available in Qld., but other woods like King Billy pine, Bunya pine, Hoop pine are available in Qld. Importing spruce is not all that expensive if you are prepared to use a lower grade. Soundboards are available from www.stewmac.com and www.alliedluthierie.com and The Luthiers Mercantile. You will be pleasantly surprised at the quality of the lower grade board.These pre-sized boards (thicknessed to 3mm) certainly save you a lot of work. Otherwise you will have to bandsaw the soundboard from a block of spruce, if you were able to buy it like that.
The photo above shows a spruce top that has already had its halves joined to form a bookmatched top. A plywood pattern is sitting on the surface, ready to have its outline drawn onto the spruce. Assuming you have a pre-bought top, you will need to plane and sand the two edges that will be glued together. I use spring clamps at either end to line up the edges, then I put the clamped pieces into the vice and plane and or sand the edge surfaces. After you take the two boards out and line them up facing a bright light, you will see where the light will shine through if your initial sanding wasn’t thorough enough.Repeat the process until no light shines through your join.Careful not to be too gung ho and reduce your overall width of the top, so your pattern overlaps the outer edge.Gluing up these two boards used to be stressful procedure, but for many years now i have used just two lightweight aluminium sash clamps that only cost $15 each, and they sit under the boards at either end.A spring clamp holds the boards together at each end as well at the middle, and a long 500mm klempsia clamp straddles the boards at the mid point.The sash clamps don’t need to exert much pressure, just enough to see the glue squeeze out. Allow to dry overnight before marking out your pattern.