Sunday, December 16, 2012

Commision

For the first time I've designed and built a guitar for someone in specific. The requirements for this one was to be as cheap and durable as possible.

The top is scraps of spruce left over from other guitar builds, as is the cherry neck. The back and sides are 1/8" Lauan laminate. Fret board and bridge are purpleheart.

I used my classical mold and used a shorter 24" scale. The top slopes downward, giving room for a raised finger board. The neck sits in a mortise on both the front of the body and on the top - it should withstand some serious abuse.  The upper bout and the sides are reinforced with Lauan as well.




For fun stuff, I started off with a pinless bridge - but it broke. Rather than steam it off and build a new one, I sanded it down the damaged portion and inserted some short stainless steel screws. To make it a bit more attractive, I filled the X's and put on a coat of pearl-essence finger nail polish. I really like this design and may very well try it again. Super easy to change the strings and should help strength the top since the screw sink into the bridge plate.




The bracing is from my favorite 2x4. I opted to go with a Tacoma style Big A bracing pattern rather than the Martin style X. Since there are fewer braces on the A style, I could make them heaver than normal with compromising the sound too much.

But in this case I did not want to put the sound hole in the upper left bout, as is usually done with the A-style bracing. The problem is that putting the hole in the middle means cutting through the braces. So what I did was put three layers of the Lauan laminate around the area where the hole would be cut, more or less extending the bracing around the hole.  Not only was this easy to do and worked well, but I really liked the visual results as well. Next time I'm going to try this, but heavily radius the inside of the sound hole to make a more visible rosette.


The head is a carved, sorta classical style. Hard to see in the photo, but I like the looks of this design.


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