Acoustic Guitar Construction

Dave
The head is 3 1/2 in. wide.

This is great! Love the pantograph!!

Nice looking guitar, but it sure has a big sound hole.

Kevin

Things were going along great till I put all the wood parts and the hardware together, strung it up and cut the bridge inserts down so that I had a playable action height. I found that I had almost no break angle over the bridge. No down pressure, no volume. After some frantic searching thru the kit instructions and studying the round neck plans, I found the problem. The neck heel was at 90 degrees and the plans called for a heel angle of 89 degrees with a thin wedge under the fingerboard extension to get the strings up higher at the bridge and a low action. A 90 degree neck heel would be OK for a dobro setup but not for a round neck. The instructions said nothing about recutting the heel but the plans did. Half my error but half Beard's. I assumed that since the parts were cut so nicely that everything would fit together right out of the box. You know what they say about 'assume'.

I've got the heel angle recut and am doing some sand paper flossing to get the neck aligned properly. Then I will make an ebony wedge for under the FB extension. I've been cleaning up leaves from my yard and I need to go play some tennis this evening (indoors cause this is Minnesota after all), so I'll get back to this kit tomorrow.

I've never made a wedge for the FB extension before, so I made up my own way of doing it. I cut a piece of ebony scrap to about 4 1/2 x1x 1/8, hot glued it to a hunk of wood for a handle, and sanded it to a wedge on my belt sander. I split in half lengthwise, glued it to the edges of the fingerboard, and added another 1/8 in. thick piece in between.

I sanded the edges flush with the fingerboard and here's the result.

I will no doubt copy that process at some time in the future - really looks good.

Now that looks might fine, mighty fine indeed.

Kevin