back brace count

[TonyinNYC]

I know a builder named Mark Hatcher who uses a lattice style of bracing on the sound board and backs of his guitars. His sound boards are the thinnest I have seen in person and the thinnest I have read about as well. His sound boards are in the neighborhood of .085". I have played several of his guitars and they are very responsive and sound excellent.
He also uses the lattice bracing on the backs, which are also very thin, around .070" if I recall correctly. His guitars sound very different when played away from your body versus placing the back of the box against your stomach. The bigger the stomach, the more the sound is changed coincidentally. Or not so coincidentally. In any event, his braces are very tall and thin. He built a jig which allows him to use a router table to cut them to their near final shape, which when glued to the sound board, is an inverted T shape. I have handled his braces, no jokes please ;-), and they are lighter than I would have imagined. Exceptionally light actually. So the combination of a thin, light back and sound board with the tall, thin and light braces, gives him a very responsive guitar. The trade off is that a guitar that is so light can be easily over driven and sound muddy and just plain lousy when strummed too hard. It is great for fingerstyle playing and light to medium strumming.

Edit:
Here is a link to Mark's website. Unfortunately, there are not any good pics of the lattice bracing. However, at the Acoustic Guitar forum, you can find many of his build threads and see the bracing quite clearly.

Second edit:
Here is a link to a build thread for one of Mark's guitars being built with "The Tree" mahogany
http://www.acousticguitarforum.com/foru ... p?t=334296