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.....

 

Black and Gold

I'm always looking for a cheap diamond in the rough, I think I found it with this combination.  Yet another L-OO size guitar.

I ran across a not-quite-bookmatched set of black walnut, I think I paid $25 for it.  It has lovely quilting, with black, tan, and red in one direction, and sparkly gold in another.  In the photos it makes it look "splotchy".   

There was a rather unfortunate incident with a bandsaw which completely tore apart the sides, quite literally.  I'm glad I put the time into repairing it, well worth the effort.  

The top is Douglas Fir, which if I remember correctly I picked up at the ~2010 Northwest Handmade Musical Instrument Exhibit,  Gilmer Wood's booth.   They had a huge stack, selling a steep discount, and telling everyone what a shame it is that more people are not building with Douglas Fir.  Fifteen'ish years later, I whole heartily agree.

I used a Somogyi style double-X bracing pattern, to mix it up from my usual X + fan bracing.

The neck, fingerboard, and bridge were from the "bargain bin" at Goby Walnut.  I think I paid $7 for the whole haul.  The neck was originally plain-sawn, I sliced it up, rotated the pieces 90 degrees, and glued it back together.  Much more interesting looking now, and is quater-sawn. 

 

Quick video where I try to capture the lovely black-to-gold chatoyancy:

The break-in period of a new guitar is always interesting.  This one had a temporary dead-note on the high E twelfth fret.  If I muted all strings and played that specific note, it was loud and clear.  If I allowed sympathetic resonance from the other strings, it was dead.  That lasted about a day, the dead note went away on its own.

Orange (soon to be brown)

 

An experiment that has been in queue for a couple of years....   a mostly Osage Orange guitar.  

I found some inexpensive Osage Orange lumber, enough to make the back, sides, neck, fingerboard, and bridge.  Paired it up with an inexpensive western red cedar top. Cheap bronze colored tuners to finish it off. This was not a spare-all-expenses experiment.

The goal here was to hear what Osage Orange sounds like, I didn't take much care to make it pretty. Eventually it will oxidize into a 100% uniform dark brown w/o much features. 

Rumor has it that from a tone perspective Osage Orange is in the ballpark of Brazilian rosewood.  I don't know what Brazilian sounds like, so I can't comment on that, but I can say this stuff rings like a bell -- tap tone is off the charts. Sustain for days, sparkly overtones abound. 

To quote Han Solo, "She may not look like much, but she's got it where it counts, kid."   I have been playing this one a lot.

You can read about Osange Orange on the Tonewood Data Source database, click here and scroll down to the Osage Orange entry,  and the Wood Database for all of its physical properties.

What I learned is that it is easy to burn when bending, and did get one tear out on the upper bout. If I use it again I'll thin down the sides a bit more. It would have been non-trivial to hide the crime, if I would have been concerned about aesthetics.   Tear out + a bit of burning for your amusement:

Speaking of crimes, empirical evidence is that I didn't do a sufficient job gluing the bridge on the first try.  Nothing a little sanding, more glue, and more clamps couldn't fix.  This shot also shows what the neck attachment looks like. Neck angle is adjusted using shims, held together with barrel nuts and furniture screws...  similar to a "normal" bolt-on neck, but shifted 90 degrees.

Oh, and it is heavy - 5.8 pounds. Hardwood neck and double laminated sides adds some mass.

Out of the basement

 

So this build was quite long and rocky.  It spent many years partially assembled in the basement, had to be forced back into shape, and then was promptly dropped and broke the neck.

Long, long ago I was at a  big box hardware store and as I wondered through the lumber section I spotted a rather nicely figured poplar board.  Into the shopping cart it went, and then promptly was placed into the basement and ignored for quite some time.

Later, merely long ago, I sliced the poplar board up to yield a set of back and sides.  I bent the sides using the mid-sized mold taken off my classical guitar, with a venetian'ish style cut-away.  I vaguely remember being annoyed with it for some reason, took it out of the mold temporarily to work on something else.  About this time I injured myself and took a couple years off building guitars.  There it sat in a dark basement corner, partially done, out of the mold, for many years.

Flash forward to recent times - I was cleaning out the basement and thought to myself that I should see if I could finish that one....   I also had a prototype "Somogyi style" braced top that I had long ago made out of a scrap piece of spruce I picked up on the cheap. Note that the top is one big piece flanked by two smaller pieces. Here is what they looked like at the time they were liberated from the basement:

It took quite a bit of effort to get the body to more-or-less line back up. Over the years it had relaxed, unevenly, into a shape that was no longer possible to fit back into the mold and the neck alignment was not even in the ballpark.  I used my dreadnought mold with a bunch of shims and clamps to at least get the neck to point in the approximate correct direction, gluing pieces of scrap wood to the sides as I went in an attempt to prevent it from relaxing back into the seriously out of whack shape.

After successfully gluing on the top and back,  I promptly dropped it from a decent height onto a concrete floor and broke the neck.  This was one of my first attempts at building a hybrid electric/acoustic style neck mount - I am building them much more beefy these days.  It was a clean break, easy to just glue back together.

I need to finish setting the action up and get it fully broken in.  Out of the gate it sounds good, will probably sound great once it is fully completed. 

In the end it also looks good, certainly unique. I "went with the flow" on the sound hole, fingerboard end, etc to make the asymmetric shape look a little more intentional.   I really like how the color "flows" from the top/sides/back.

Neck, fingerboard, and bridge are all big-box-store oak.  For pore filling on the oak....  Harbor Freight had pack-of-10 superglue bottles on sale for ~$2.  Worked great.   For tuning machines, I tested C.B. Gitty open tuners which work, are very inexpensive, but I can't say at this point I would recommend them -- their sealed gear tuners are much better and about the same price if you are in the market for inexpensive tuners.

 

Hot

Moral of the story:  too hot or too cold is bad,  too high or too low of humidity is bad.

 

Most hand-crafted guitars are made with hide glue or titebond.  Should there need to be a repair, both glues can be un-done by applying heat and moisture. This is a highly desirable trait.

So what happens to a guitar when it rains (high humidity) followed by several days of ~100F temperatures (hot).... and you don't have air conditioning?   This is highly undesirable.

A good idea would have been to de-tune them all to remove stress.

No major trama to report, just a little bit of glue separation on one guitar....

A quick bit of sanding (slide in a piece of sandpaper, push down softly, pull out sandpaper. Flip over and repeat), wick in some fresh glue, clamp.  Back to good-as-new.

Better idea:  bought a small window air-conditioner for those rare extra-hot days.

We already have humidifiers for the much-more-common-around-here cold and low humidity days that help prevent soundboard cracks.  

Interesting note:  one other thing that can happen in the hot-and-humid case is that joints can "slide".  I.e. the bridge might move forward slightly throwing off the tuning, or the fingerboard might move slightly throwing off the action. 

Count to ten

 

Ok. All ten fingers are accounted for and still attached to the same places they were moments before.

Take a deep breath, count to ten again, turn off the band saw, and start to pick up the pieces.

I wanted to trim down the head block to line up closer to the sides.  I normally use a hand plane or a sander, but I needed to trim it down a fair amount and this is edge grain that is a bit of a PITA.  So no problem, I'll just take a quick rough pass on the band saw (which has an aggressive resaw blade on it at the moment)

To get it to fit, I had to retract the safety guard all the way up,  which is a bit scary so I held the guitar sides by the back.....  all of this was not a great idea and the last part especially so.

At this point in the build the sides are pretty flexible.... it bound up on the blade and "spun" out of my hands.   Initially a big chunk broke off, and the whole thing spun right there on the table, striking the blade in at least four different places before it completely shattered and threw pieces in all directions.

It was nearly instant and quite impressive.

Band saws are "relatively" safe compared to table saws, but they can still be pretty damned scary.

It pays off to be prudently paranoid of such tools, better to chew up a piece of wood than a body part.  Even better to not be lazy and get some extra exercise with the hand plane or hand saw.

And in the end there will be a guitar with a story and some scars to prove it.

Back story:  whenever I need to buy any luthiery supplies, I often reverse sort by price and see if there is anything interesting.   What we have here is the least expensive black walnut back-and-sides set I have run across, if I remember correctly it was $15.

The size was a bit too small, but if I was careful I could get a L-00 out of it.  The website noted that it wasn't perfectly book matched, had a crack or two, some insect damage, etc, etc.

But as I was working on it.... I think it is (or at least was) going to be quite lovely and was strongly considering using this for a "good" standard build guitar vs an inexpensive experimental one.    I'm now strongly considering "experimental" ;-)

I've already steamed apart the remnants and glued the bigger chucks back together as much as was feasible. The Plan B will be to bend a new set of sides, probably using 1/8" plywood, and laminate it with the walnut on the outside.  That will ensure it is nice and strong, compensating for structural damage to the walnut in several places (up to and including one side being torn completely in two).

Plan C will be to toss these sides and find some new wood that will match up with the quite lovely (and undamaged) back.

I was debating on what to use for top wood.  Now I'm thinking Douglas Fir, I have a nice piece that I don't otherwise know what to do with.

For the neck, I have a sap wood black walnut board that has some character, and the left over walnut from the previous guitar for fret board and bridge.

We'll see after Sides Version 2.0 is done.