Shake it

One of the problems with prototyping guitars is that you have to play them quite a bit before they fully develop their sound. It can take a while, at least six months of constant playing before they *really* start to sound great. For the first couple of hours, even the greatest guitars I've made sounded quite marginal...

That is a bit of a bummer when you are doing rapid prototyping. Using plywood back/sides & little concern for aesthetics, I can toss together an experimental guitar over a weekend. I won't know well the modifications worked, however, for a couple of months.

I also feel bad giving someone a relatively new guitar and say "here, play this one for a couple of months - I hope it will sound good".

So I splurged on one of these things:

http://www.stewmac.com/shop/Accessories/ToneRite/ToneRite.html

Basically what this does is vibrate the guitar in a manner similar to playing it. If you play a guitar an hour a day, this little gizmo will get a month's worth of playing in 24hours. Just slap it on a new guitar & come back in a couple of days...

It works.

Table legs

Mark Skolnick had some walnut table legs from a desk he had made 30 years ago. It was just enough wood, if I sliced and diced it carefully, to make a guitar body and neck.

The sides are three strips of walnut, the back twelve. I am very, very tired of joining small thin strips of walnut ;-)

Everything except the soundboard & bracing are from this walnut. The soundboard is reclaimed fir siding from the Rebuilding Center & the soundboard bracing is from an old growth fir 2x4 that John King pulled out of his garage.

This guitar uses several of the ideas from the experimental guitars, including the "Tacoma" bracing that wraps around a centered sound hole.

Experiments #2

Second round of el cheapo spruce & plywood. I really like this one.

The main experimental idea behind this one was to see if I could have the sound hole also function as the cut-away.  This helps some, but is not as functional as a full cut-away. It also sounds muffled when playing the guitar (it projects just fine), so I added a small hole on the side - that makes an amazing difference.

Other fun stuff includes a tongue-and-grove neck joint, like a standard guitar, but flipped 90 degrees & bolted through the back instead of from the inside. Easy to make, works well - I may try this again.

I also made the bridge out of purple heart and maple, that should make it obvious how I put those together.

Experiments #1

I got my hands on several sets of reject spruce sound boards for cheap. Toss in a sheet of really cheap 1/8" plywood and a couple of other scraps and you have the recipe for experimentation.

Up first, I had a brilliant idea for a pivoting, adjustable neck. Reality got in the way of the theory, but it worked more or less. Eventually I'll remodel the neck mount & finish it up.

What did work about this guitar was the sound hole. I really like the "Tacoma" style bracing, but many people think the relocated sound hole is strange. I thought it would be interesting to make the braces go around the sound hole, then I could place it anywhere I wanted to. In this guitar, the sound hole is shifted slightly to the left. The right side (treble) brace is fully in tact. The left bass side wraps around the sound hole.

I also tried a different approach to a cut-away. It is functional, but ugly.