Acoustic Guitar Construction

I must confess I tried tapping some soundboards, but for the life of me I couldn't figure out what I was supposed to take notice of. I do know that on two soundboards they didn't sound to brilliant without bracing and with the bracing they sounded totally different. Both guitars sound very good.

The second guitar I built was African mahogany and it can look very nice indeed. It has a warmer sound than Rosewood to my ears, and you may already have played guitars made of this a s it was once dyed brown to make it look a bit like Rosewood. In fact it can look lovely with the right finish. So h...

My complete wood working experience before starting guitar building was assembling a rocking chair kit. It went quite well and you could even sit on it without sliding off if you held onto the arms very tightly and jammed big wedges under the rockers. When I retired I wanted a challenge, something t...

The colour telescope thing was a joke, like the old B&W tellies. Ah, Dave, I did realise in the middle of the night that perhaps I was over engineering it. The new model is a vice attached to the indoor bench and a long stick with a hangar bolt in one end. The bolt can be put through a hole and ...

Well, it seems that the more I build guitars the more tools and jigs I find a need for. At the moment I'm finishing a guitar and I'm getting a bit fed up of trying to move around the guitar body. I need a moveable rotatable vice thingy and I need it cheap, or free, and I need it quick. I've seen oth...

Mineral spirits, otherwise known as turpentine substitute, the stuff you can clean brushes in. Real men use real turpentine to clean brushes, and they have to be real men or they'd faint at the cost.

I like any finish that looks good, but prefer a thin finish. As far as gloss polyurethane and Nitro go, I'll leave them alone. Here's how I teach my grandmother to suck eggs, I expect, but this is how I make my finishing pads for use with Minwax gloss Tung oil and Tru oil. These work a treat and don...