Classical in Spruce and flame maple

[Francis M]

Front view of a classical guitar built from Lutz spruce and flame maple. French polish finish.
Neck is adjustable to suit the players needs.

[ken cierp]

Nice!

Any close ups of the arm rest -- interesting detail.

[Francis M]

Thanks Ken.

Will take some for you over the weekend. The arm rest is laminated, with laminations being pre-bent on a hot pipe and as much shaping done as possible before being applied to the guitar.

Next time I will polish the guitar first then add the arm rest. French polishing around that was quite awkward.

[Dave Bagwill]

Aesthetically wonderful!! Thanks for sharing this.
I would be interested in a diagram or directions concerning the adjustable neck joint!

[John Parchem]

Very nice! I want inside construction pictures. I really like the design elements, well done.

[Bob Matthews]

Lovely guitar Francis and an adjustable neck too! I presume it has an elevated fretboard?

I'm just making an adjustable neck on a concert guitar and using a 'Stauffer' type adjustment, got the hardware from Rubner in Germany. http://rubner-markneukirchen.de/onlines ... anguage=en

What type of adjustment are you using and any chance of a photo or two?


Bob

[Francis M]

OK some project details:
Background.
This guitar is loosely based on an instrument by Gary Southwell (an English luthier) who gave a talk to the Guild of American Luthiers. Notes from this talk were published in a GAL quarterly magazine, contained some photographs with a few more details in one of GAL’s Big Red books (#5 I think). I think Gary Southwell calls this his Model A guitar.
There were no dimensional details given in the notes so I just made a best guess, making them fit a fairly standard classical guitar body mould I already had.
I think GAL’s front and back cover photos of the guitar were what really drove me to ‘have-a-go’ at this because virtually nothing about it seemed conventional.
The photographs of my build show the carbon fibre internal bracing to the body and the curved spruce bracing to the soundboard. As I say all of this was guesswork forming an approximation of the instrument in his talk. I have also shown thickness maps of the soundboard and back plates. The numbers should be read as: 215 means 2.15mm the decimal place was left out for convenience.
The curved braces have been laminated as hot bending the spruce was not very successful (for me) and I found it much easier to make a curved former and bend three spruce strips together with Titebond.
Bindings are also laminated this time in mahogany (4 x 1/16th inch strips in each), likewise a former was used to bond the bindings and the bindings were sanded and profiled off the guitar before fitting.
(Had to split the photo into two parts and the lower one should be above the other...)
The two middle images on the left show the shaped neck block, the recess on the top is for a brass plate that contacts the end of the neck and forms the pivot point for the adjustable neck. A brass threaded bushing is shown in the neck block. This takes a modified stainless steel cap head bolt which is used to adjust the neck angle. The neck block is shaped so that the cutaway can form the same profile as the neck.
The low angle photograph positions on the soundboard show the profiles of the bracing I used on this guitar. Ignore the cutaway line indicators as I changed my mind over the cutaway shape during the build.
Hope this helps.