Pieces of the puzzle

 

I'm working on the second guitar of the "Old School" and ran into a couple unique challenges. I had *just* enough of the boards I used to make the the back and sides of the first guitar to squeeze out back and sides for an L-00 sized guitar if I was nearly 100% efficient. I had so much fun figuring that out, I thought I would photograph the process.

Let's start off with the source material.  I want to use two boards, both 4"x1" and the longer one about 50" long.  I cut them both so I had four 4"x1/2" boards, then planed them down to approximately 4"x1/8".  Here is a photo with my shoes for a sense of scale:

The top boards are perfectly quarter sawn, which is great for a guitar top, but are full of nail holes which is really bad for a guitar top.  The bottom boards are rift sawn, which gives a nice grain figure, but the board is just barely long enough to squeeze out a set of back and sides if we are nearly 100% efficient with the layout. The back/sides also are full of nail holes and other defects, but in this case they are good for "character" rather than being a structural liability.

Let's start with the top.  There are three ways to deal with the nail holes, in order of preference:

1. Place them where they will be removed, such as outside the body line or inside the sound hole that gets cut out.
2. Place them where the bridge (on the outside of the top) and bridge plate (on the inside of the top) go: so they won't be seen,  can be filled in, and are sandwiched in between hardwoods and won't be a structural issue.
3. Place them where they can be supported from the underside with minimal impact on the sound of the guitar, such as the upper bout above the sound hole (where the sound board doesn't move much) or lined up with an internal structural brace where the sound board was being reinforced with or without a nail hole.

In this case, the only reasonable option proved to be #2 -- place nail holes where the bridge/plate will be.

For an L-00 guitar, the bridge is 1" thick, 7" wide, and 5-6" from the bottom of the guitar. Here is a photo of a guitar built in the moulds I will be using as an example:

If I align the boards just right, I could get them to line up so that the only nail holes are in a sweet spot. Here is a photo using the mould for visual reference -- the other half of the top will be a mirror image:

Here is the resulting rough layout (you may need to zoom to see the pencil lines)

After being trimmed down, joined so they fit together perfectly, and glued together we get (zoom in to see pencil lines)

After rough trimming and thinning down to the proper thickness,  here is the result. The remaining nail holes on the edges will be removed on the final trimming after the top is glued to the sides.

Next on to the back, which was a bit more involved.  Since I wanted to get sides (two @ ~30"x4") and back (~18"x~15") out of two 50"x4" boards.... there would have to be near zero waste. 

You are going to have to use your imagination a bit, I didn't do a great job of photographing each step so that it would be obvious how I got this to work. If you zoom in on this photo, you can see the pencil marks of the "wings" on the lower half that I cut off and later attached to fill in the gaps in the upper half:

And after rough trimming and thinning, you'll note that if I am *extraordinarily* careful, I will be able to "hide the crimes" committed on the final guitar.  The visible line between the upper and lower "wings" was placed where the waist of the guitar is the narrowest, just dipping into the center boards so that the unsightly line will get cut out.

Finally we have the sides.  I thinned those down to 0.08" thick and steam bent them using my Rube Goldberg homemade side bending contraption. Photo for your amusement, this works just barely good enough that I have not bothered to build a much better Side Bender version 2.0

Here is what the sides look like after resting in the moulds for a day.  Poodle included to give a sense of scale.

The sides stayed in the moulds for a week to minimize spring-back.  As you can see, there were a couple of cracks especially where there were nail holes.  I took one of the 1x3" boards and sliced a long thin strip off it, then cut into 4" lengths.  I then glued these pieces to the inside at 90 degrees to the grain, mitigating the cracks, nail holes, and so on.  Here is a closeup to illustrate how this will work, note the cracks at the nail holes -- most of the cracks at the edge of the board will be cut off:

And here is the result with all of the 90 degrees pieces glued to the inside. I was able to keep the original dark "aged" wood and handwriting:

and here is the outside, when the guitar is done I will stain these to get the original color back:

Finally the sides were trimmed to length and fitted into the mould where they will stay until the top and back are glued on:

Top and back have now been braced, but not voiced. The sound hole will be cut out and the braves carefully shaped to get the best time out of the finished guitar.

 

Up next....  for the sides I'll glue in kerfing + head & tail blocks;  make and glue in braces on the top & back.

Old School

 

Quite literally.... I'm building a couple guitars from an old school.

First, the current "beauty shots"...   now with strings and is playable.  Lots of details left to do + letting it break in.  So far so good, sounds great.

First draft of a classic

 

In the fine tradition of posting new guitars shortly after they are roughed in and first strung up.....  I give a couple crappy photos of my first crack at building a proper classical guitar.

The basic specs are an Engelmann Spruce top braced more-or-less following a Torres/Hauser'ish design.  Nothing too crazy yet. Back and sides are Mulberry, which is uncommon, but hey it sounds great and is very pretty.   Natural tap-tone of the body is F# -- while studying how to construct these things many of the luthiers say that is a good thing.

After that I started to get adventurous. The neck is a essentially an "I-Beam" design.  Thick (1/4") Pau Ferro (a.k.a. Bolivian Rosewood or Morado or Santos) finger board, then a layer of Douglas Fir sandwiched between another 1/4" bit of Pau Ferro.   I more or less took this from the Ken Parker (RIP!) Archtop neck design -- a Douglas Fir core lamented inside hardwoods.   In my case I left the Fir exposed, I really liked the look of dark / light / dark.

For mounting the neck, I did an "internal box" design like many of my other recent guitars. Since this is my first real classical guitar, I assumed I was going to get the action wrong and thus wanted it easily adjustable.  With the "internal box" design I've been using, I can easily put the mounting bolts on the front of the guitar, on the back of the guitar, or inside the sound hole.   This one I opted to do on the front of the guitar & add a new adjustment feature:

The top bolt is basically the "structural" one, and it creates a pivot point that allows the neck to be tilted up or down.  The middle one pulls the neck up (with the string tension), the bottom one pushes the neck down (against the string tension).  So when you want to adjust the action, you loosen the middle one a bit, use the bottom one to set the action, then tighten the middle one again to lock it all in place.  Very quick and easy.  Only gotcha compared to some of the more complicated designs (such as Ken Parker's) is that it does affect the tuning a bit when you adjust it.

A recent "Not a Luthier" video works on a guitar with the same basic adjustment design.  Levon notes that the 1800's Martin, Stauffer, etc guitars were designed to use clock keys to make the adjustment because everyone in those days had wind-up clocks that needed a clock key.  I used the modern equivalent, aka a set screw compatible with the ubiquitous Ikea allen key. 

The mounting bolts are also 1/4" hex keys.  So anywhere you go where *anyone* has ever shopped at Ikea, you will find the tool needed to adjust the action AND you can also completely remove the neck.  I have not tried it with this guitar yet, but I did recently take a steel string version built on the same classical body mold on a flight across the country. Disassembled it easily fits inside a standard carry-on bag.

So how does it sound you ask?  It sounds *way* better than my first classical guitar.   It sounds really good in the hands of someone who knows what they are doing.

The first person who got to play this after it was strung up knows what they are doing. They said that once it breaks in they'll record something on it.  So hopefully more to come.

Manuel Rodriguez e Hijos Caballero 11 Bubinga

I just finished gluing the bridge on my first "real" classical guitar build and couldn't find where I had stashed my nylon strings....  so I stole the strings off my original classical guitar. This is the second guitar I had bought when I was first learning to play:  a Rodriguez e Hijos Caballero 11 Bubinga.

More to come on the new classical guitar, in the meantime I thought I would document the Caballero while I had the strings off it.

If I remember correctly, I paid around $250 for it new, probably around 2008, I vaguely remember it may have been on sale.  It was between this one and a spruce top one from a Canadian luthier, I don't remember much more than I went with the Caballero because if I was going to buy a Spanish guitar, I might as well get the one made in Spain.

The Rodriquez e Hijos guitars have a reputation for being pretty good guitars for the price.  The price on this specific model is rock bottom, so that is a pretty low bar to clear.  It is a great guitar for $250, but you probably won't be mistaking it for a $2500 guitar.

The natural tap tone resonance is A#.  The top is 2.83mm thick, at least the parts I can easily measure -- it might be thinner in the lower bout but at $250 I assume it is uniform thickness with no attempt at voicing what so ever.

Bracing pattern is five straight, uniform cedar braces with two smaller angled braces on the outside. Doesn't appear to have been voiced, which again one would expect at the price point.

Here is a short video of the whole soundboard. The dust bunnies are an aftermarket addition.

One interesting bit is that braces have a big dab of hot glue (the "glue gun" variety, not hot hide glue) at each end.  I peeled one off just to be sure it was indeed what it looks like:

Generally speaking the build quality is good. I spotted only one quality control item, which is not visible w/o sticking a camera down through the sound hole:

An interesting note is that the string holes in the bridge have just enough variation that they may have been drilled by hand. The two on the right especially stand out, the lowest one is #2/B and the highest is #1/E.

I can't quite squeeze my arm far enough through the sound hole to reach the back of the braces. If I could, I might be tempted to thin them down a bit.  I can easily reach the tone bar.....