Acoustic Guitar Construction

My Steward Mac clamps are awesome, but they are a little big for some applications. They were made with 1" maple that's 10" long. They have great clamping pressure and are really well engineered. I set out to knock them off in a smaller version. I got all the materials at Lowes except for ...

I put a thin oak veneer on the top of the block and sanded it. It is still slightly high compared to the sides, so I need to very carefully finish sand it flush with the top. I think the problem has been corrected. I'm not sure what to think about mixing woods like that, but I feel the oak is strong...

metrical. If the rim fits better when you loosen a couple of posts -- do so. You do need to replace the material you sanded off the top of the neck block (I still don't understand how that happened)? That angled surface is bad news -- again it should be made (at this point) a right angle, mortise a...

I took detailed photos of every step so far, so I can show anything I did up till this point. Here is a photo of my joint pinning operation of the neck block. NeckBlockJointPins.jpg Here is the guitar when flipped top side up in the mold (black tape is to reduce marring when gluing the kerfing). I u...

"Has anybody else had problems with this?" I've found over the course of a couple years now, that the MM and the instructions are not the cause of any mistakes I've made. Usually, I failed to ask a question before just storming ahead - just my nature, I guess - and then asked for help whe...

kencierp wrote:Perhaps its the camera angle -- but it appears that the tail block has the contour toward the inside?

The contour is definitely pointing the correct way, toward the outside edge.

The angles of the neck and tail block is out just a bit when laying flat on the bench, but not as bad as the sanding error when flipped topside up in the Mega-Mold.