Acoustic Guitar Construction

Tim was this the thread?

viewtopic.php?f=18&t=477

kencierp wrote:Tim was this the thread?

viewtopic.php?f=18&t=477

Exactly, thanks Ken.

Thanks for posting the clarification, Ken.

Ben-Had wrote:I'm intrigued by the bolt on neck design.

It's a bit more trouble to make, but has quite a few knock-on advantages:
1) You can get the neck on/off without messing with glue on the fretboard extension, which most "bolt-on" designs still require
2) You have serious wood under most of the fretboard extension, so you don't get the hump/hinge effect of the fretboard passing over the body joint
3) You can glue the fretted board onto the neck with such precision that you rarely need to dress any frets (which was a significant motivation for me going to this design).
4) If it's ever necessary to reset the neck it doesn't involve heat and steam

The down side (if you want to call it that) is that your woodwork needs to be quite precise to get a good fit and to get all the angles right before the fretboard goes on. But that goes with the territory, anyway.

Fortunately, I think we are now beyond people thinking there are any acoustic compromises, but just to be clear, there aren't.

johnparchem wrote: I do plan to build a falcate braced steel string at some point. My main fear now is dealing with adhesives and carbon fiber at the same time. I still have enough problems gluing a single bit of spruce on a top without making a mess.

Once you get into it, it's not quite so intimidating. Have a practice doing straight runs before you try curved runs, though. Lots of people have tried this now and have enjoyed their results.


BTW, thanks for your kind comments re: the books.

If anyone is considering thinning down their luthier library, I would be very interested in picking up some books - in particular the Gore/Gilet series.
Please PM.

I just received the Gore/Gilet books today after ordering them November 28 (Thanksgiving) which amounts to 4 working days from order to delivery. That's speedy delivery to say the least. They are huge, brimming over with information and color photographs, and very beautifully made. Well worth the $228 cost (delivered via air) - there are a lot of pages, something like 800. The writing, photographing, printing and binding standards are at the top of my git making library, with only Somogyi's books as company.

Of particular interest is the emphasis on the monopole response (top as a whole). The Falcate bracing scheme Gore uses, with or without CF, is no doubt a good way to address it, demonstrated by the test results he supplies. And once I looked at it in relation to the monopole, it was easy to intuit how it facilitates this critical movement. But the simple face that he identifies the importance of the monopole and the permutations of design that can affect it, with test numbers from many other approaches, is just as noteworthy.

Their math has been checked out by Professor Thiele, half of the authorship that produced the famous Thiele-Small equations for box response in loudspeaker design.

As far as laminated bridge design goes (which was discussed elsewhere recently), the suggestion to laminate in a layer of CF towards the top seems like a very good idea whether one uses the low density wood also suggested or not. It would eliminate a lot of repairs later on in the life of the instrument and could be applied to even dense wood to achieve smaller, easier to drive bridges without fear of breaking. The discussion of the importance of string height over the soundboard with respect to musicality is one I have not seen before. It goes well with string height and playability, but suggests even more reason to exert control over neck angle and adjust for soundboard placement as a separate parameter. Ken's Mega Mold techniques would serve this consideration well.

The bolt on neck design, complete with detailed drawings and construction sequence photos, might be worth the price of the books if you make many guitars and worry about returns for neck problems.

Simple but effective rosette techniques are illustrated. In fact, the book abounds with simple and elegant design solutions that are visually more appealing than elaborations such as Martin's 1 millionth - to my eye, anyway. The assumptions regarding shop tooling are reasonable and modest, thus technical explanations of proper use of planes for thinning plates and sizing braces, chisels for cutting notches, etc. are profoundly relevant to anyone just getting started, as well as the more advanced.

I was so impressed that I literally could not put the books down and have skim read both volumes in the 4 hours I have had them.

I'm sorry Rienk, but my copies are not for sale and won't be, ever. I'd suggest anyone at a loss for what to ask from Santa this year consider putting in a request for these books.