Acoustic Guitar Construction

Welcome Hugh

Good stuff -- Thank you

Welcome to the forum Hugh. Thank for posting your reply. I could not do it from my cell phone. I simply do not know how!
For a little more background, Hugh has been a poster at the OLF for a few years and his knowledge of adhesives has been extremely helpful. There is a lot of bad info out there about glue and Hugh has been kind enough to share his knowledge on the topic very freely. He is also a pretty cool guy.

Dave,
If you try the iron trick, please let us know hot it goes. I would guess that if you didn't have enough glue to begin with, it might not help, but it is certainly worth a try!

Thanks Hugh. One question though, can you tell us how TB II Extend compares to Urea-Formaldehyde for purposes of lamination?

Dave,

When I asked Michael Collins about expanding his "light box bender" so that I could do pliage on a top that was already glued up, he said it would work fine, but not to use Titebond for the joint, as the heat might cause it to fail. This suggests that clamping your delaminated sides into or onto a mold with a heating blanket might work very well, if you can arrange it all with construction so far down the road.

As I said somewhere else, when I wanted to radius the dead flat back Michael sent that was glued with U-F, 275 degrees at 20 minutes did the trick, though 20 minutes might have been a tad long.

I have looked at some other forums and have seen some overbuilding that was outright astonishing. Reminded me of a model airplane I built in my youth that I reinforced like crazy, except for the outer 1/4th of each wing. It was so heavy it barely got off the ground and could not go fast enough to keep the control lines taut, so it entered free "flight" if what it was doing could be called flight. It made a turn and headed straight towards me at eye level. I ducked as it went over, then it reached the end of the lines, causing it to jerk around and stall, then hit the ground. The non-reinforced parts of the wings were destroyed as the heavy thing cart-wheeled, but everything else survived intact. Naturally, without the entire wing, it could never get off the ground again. Not that it ever should have in the first place.

The moral, of course, is reinforcement/durability defeated the original purpose.

The top you have above looks about right. Are you going to whittle the braces any after the glue dries? I've never built with redwood, but hear it is a lot like cedar. Let us know how it works out.

Also, thanks to Tony for getting Hugh to join us. This really is the best resource for reliable information about guitar making I've found, the "atmosphere" is wonderful, and it just keeps getting better.

John I agree with you 100 per cent about the quality of the forum. I too belong to a few others myself. But they are guitar player forums. Also a guitar repair forum which is cool. But this is the best forum guitar makers. I've learned much on here. Gotten clues on tools. Now that Hugh is a member as well we have an adhesive expert to help us. How cool is that. We all owe Tonyinnyc a big thank you.

Oh stop it now! I'm just trying to help.