Thursday, July 30, 2009

Free bass guitar plans

This looks interesting: http://liutaiomottola.com/instruments/Tinozza.htm

Monday, July 13, 2009

Pieces and Parts


Lots a nice stuff for guitar 4. Redwood sound board (supposed to sound half-way between Spruce and Cedar), Mexican rosewood back/sides, Madagascar rosewood fret board, and a Honduran mahogany neck.

I've planned down the sound board, back, and sides. That's about it so far. Much work to be done!

Guitar 3, the $5 wonder

So I did a bunch of research for nice and expensive wood for which I'd build guitar 3. I saw a couple very pretty guitars that had douglas fir sound boards. I had read that douglas fir is an excellent tone wood, but for some unknown reason not many luthiers use it.

I ended up buying very pretty Mexican rosewood (Palo Escrito) for backs and sides. Since I didn't do a perfect job of bending the sides on guitar 1, I thought I should practice on some scrap wood. I also had just bought a new planer, and decided to run some scrap wood through that to make sure it wouldn't eat my pretty and expensive wood. I had a couple of cheap 2x4's laying around, which are just the right width for a guitar side, I could slice one up with my band saw, run it through the planer, and kill two birds with one stone...

I was really impressed with how the sides came out. I figured, why not?, and sliced up & planned a couple more pieces & joined them together for a sound board & back. I cut a length in three and laminated them together alternating the grain to make a neck. I then cut out strips to make the soundboard and back bracing.

I tried making a "2x4" bridge and fret board, but that didn't turn out so well. I grabbed a spare piece of oak for the bridge & fret board.

I glued it all together and much to my surprise, this is a really decent sounding guitar.

I had spent $200 just for wood for a guitar, and ended up making one out of $5 worth of wood. The final cost was about $66, 50% of which was the Gotoh tuners (black was on sale ;-).






Update: Cheyenne
Appleby is now the proud owner of this guitar.

Sunday, July 12, 2009

Guitar 2, a.k.a. I hate polyurethane glue

Guitar 2 was quite a bit more adventurous than guitar 1. This one has a western red cedar top, a "scarf joint" style maple neck, "hand made" ambrosia maple laminte back & sides, and a douglas fur "frame" that the back is screwed to (see photos below). The bolt-on-back is very, very handy for working on the guitar - it takes just a couple of minutes to have full access to the sound board bracing and the neck block.

I picked up some very pretty sequenced matched ambrosia maple laminate. I believe it was about $30 for enough to make the sides and back. The sides are all maple, the laminate strips were 3 1/2 inches wide & about 36 inches long, perfect for making guitar sides. For the back, I carefully aligned several pieces of laminate so that the grain lined up, and glued them onto both sides of a thin piece of birch plywood.

To make the sides, glueing together several pieces of laminate is much easier than bending a solid piece of wood (or plywood, for that matter). The only problem is that I used a polyurethane glue, as had read on the internet that would be better than using aliphatic resins (a.k.a. Tite Bond). Lets just say I was not happy with the results. I ended up making several cuts into the laminate with a razor blade and squeezing in aliphatic resin. I'm still not thrilled with the results, but it is tolerable. I don't expect this guitar to out live me.

Still, it is a pretty guitar. As I'm dialing in the action, I'm more and more pleased with the tone and volume as well. It is much warmer than guitar 1, but that is expected using cedar vs spruce for the sound board.





Guitar 1, a.k.a. "beginner's luck"

My first guitar sounds simply amazing. It has crystal-clear tone, great volume, low action, and the intonation is close to perfect (easily corrected with a slight compensation to the saddle). This is a really good sounding guitar. Certainly not the best sounding guitar I've ever heard, but significantly better than any "off the shelf" guitar I've seen (and better than many of the >$1,000 Martins/Taylors/etc I've heard).

It has an A grade stika spruce top & bracing, Indian rosewood fret board & bridge, lauan plywood back & sides, maple/oak laminate neck, and Gotoh tuners.

The top, bracing, fret board, fret wire, bridge, and truss rod were purchased from Steward McDonald. I bought the Lauan plywood at Mr Plywood here in Portland ($5 ;-), and the maple & oak for the neck at Home Depot (~$20 for both). Total cost in raw materials was just under $200.

I don't really remember exactly how long it took me to build, but it was in the neighbourhood of 2-3 weeks.

This is a pretty standard "Martin style" dreadnought, about the only things that a really unique about it is the body is a bit deeper than normal (4 inches) and the neck is bolted on, not glued. I'm a big fan of the bolt-on-neck now, I've done this on all of my guitars. It makes it so much easier to make adjustments, and does not appear to negatively impact the sound quality. I can always glue it later if I wish...

Without further rambling, here are a few photos...



Old School

Being a "tech guy", it is nice to go "Old School" every now and then. My current hobby is acoustic guitars. All analog, all the time. So far I've built two "prototypes", which I'll blog about eventually, and three "real" guitars.

The "real" guitars are essentially prototypes as well, but for the most part they are normal dreadnought guitars.

My first guitar (lovely referred to as "guitar 1", did I mention I'm a tech guy[1]?), simply sounds amazing. I'm growing fonder of "guitar 2" as I dial it in. "Guitar 3" started off as an exercise in bending wood, and ended up as a full-tilt guitar (you'd be just as shocked at how good it sounds as you'll be about how it was built ;-)

My plan is to blog guitar 4 step-by-step. Of course I'm already several steps in, so I've already blown this mission. I guess I'll just have to build guitar 5....

[1] Yes, as a good geek, this is indeed zero indexed. Prototype #1 is guitar 0, prototype #2 is guitar 0.5.