Numero Quatro

[Will Reyer]

Mas Numero Cuatro
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
10/08/15

The Good:

You guys can play the lottery. Me, I won the lottery in my old age when I unexpectedly acquired a splendid son-in-law and two wonderful little granddaughters. Pam and I went via plane to Texas for 5 days for the first birthday of our youngest granddaughter, on the 4th of October, in Austin.

I gave my #4 guitar build, my first ladder-braced acoustic, to my oldest Texas friend, Gary. He and I met in 1983 doing finish carpentry in a mansion restoration on Hartford St, old west Austin. Worked all winter there. I spent the better part of an afternoon installing a 17th century Belgian mantel on the fireplace in the kitchen.

I went on to do mechanical design. Gary stayed with the building, also doing plumbing, wiring, and tile-setting, though his real forte is residential design. He's world-class at that. I've been retired for 13 years since my last employer closed it's Austin branch, and Gary's still doing it.

He also has an extensive CD collection, is knowledgeable about several various and eclectic forms of music, and knows a lot of people in Austin associated with multiple aspects of the music business, from DJ's to a founding father of the notorious Uranium Savages.

Gary's currently remodelling my daughter's master bathroom, and brings me #4, my gift to him, to play for the 5 days I'm there. The sound has opened up, it's loud, has good sustain, and has an amazingly good balance from bass to mid-range to treble.

I don't have the words, the musical expertise, or the good enough hearing to adequately describe the sound. It's different from my daily-player #3 build which was X-braced but otherwise identical in form and materials. The ladder braced #4 seems less focused, or maybe not as clear in individual notes – not bad, but just different somehow.

Gary has a friend and neighbor, Tjarko (you say char-ko) Jeen, a Dutchman, who Gary tells me in confidence is considered to be one of the 10 best rockabilly guitarists in the world. Tjarko has played my #4 at various times since I gave it to Gary, and likes it.

Tjarko gigs with a flat pick on electric guitars but on Monday after lunch he sits down with #4 in my daughter's breakfast nook and, fingerpicking, launches into an up-tempo, syncopated country-bluesy thing worthy of Blind Blake, which sets Pam to dancing in the kitchen with our granddaughters and puts a big grin on everyone's face. I'm far from thinking of myself as a luthier, but that's about as splendid a validation of my work as one could get. Mp3 of Tjarko playing #4 attached. He says straight into Garage Band, with no effects.

The Bad and the Ugly:

When I play #4 I notice the action seems a bit higher. All I've got is my eyeballs and a tape measure from my daughter's kitchen utility drawer. When I set up the guitar I made the space from the low E string to the top of the 12th fret to be 3/32”. It's now 5/32”. I know blues players that use picks aggressively that would find that action fine, but I play fingerstyle.

The bridge doesn't look like it's coming loose, nor does the bolt-on neck. There's a 1/4” x 1/2” steel bar epoxied in the neck from the tenon 12” up to about the 3rd fret. I put my finger on the low E, first fret, and another at the 14th, and look at the relief at fret 7. When strung up it was about 1/64”, is now about 1/32”. I sight down the side of the fingerboard from the nut toward the body – yup, a slight bow there, all good.

I've seen guitars that have a hump below the bridge and a depression above it, either due to light bracing, heavy strings, or maybe just old age. #4 doesn't seem to have the hump and dip, but it does seem a little higher below the bridge. Doesn't appear to be a concavity above the bridge. I sight across the upper bout in line with the bottom of the fret board just above the sound hole. It appears to be flat, all elements in plane, both sides of the bout and the bottom of the fret board.

I hold the top of the guitar, just below the bridge, up to the bottom edge of the granite countertop overhang at the bar in the kitchen. If the soundboard, just below the bridge, is touching the edge of the countertop, the edges of the lower bout at each side are 1/4” low. When built the rise of the soundboard there was 1/8”, half the current rise.

So it appears to me that the 1/8” plywood soundboard has indeed come up below the bridge. If the string clearance at the 12th fret has risen 1/16”, it follows that the saddle, bridge, and soundboard has come up 1/8”.

It may well be that my evil ways ignoring standard luthier materials and conventions are catching up to me. All my stuff is plain-sawn with exception of the white pine bracing, selected from common lumber for quarter-sawn grain. My instruments may all well self-distruct before I do, but I don't think they will. I think that I just need more or bigger bracing in the lower bout of this ladder-braced guitar.
Whether or not it will tear itself apart or whether I can maybe glue in a shorter, but stiffer lower bout ladder brace just below the current one will have to be seen. Or, whether having done that, it kills the currently pretty-damn-good-for-plywood sound.

And, of course, I looked in my log book to find I'd neglected to write down the ladder brace sizes. I'm soliciting suggestions/chastisements/solutions or thoughts as what to do for another ladder-braced project to avoid this problem, and how to cure this one. Fire away, please. Gary deserves a playable guitar even if he didn't get a real luthier.