Acoustic Guitar Construction

And maybe one of those stick-on rosettes could be applied. No routing, install like a pickguard.

Nice to see you do this with local timber. Looks like a parlor andsound like a good one, well done!
Herman

ADDENDUM:

Well, this hasn't been without some pre-production tweaks, but then, that's why you make prototypes.

The next Friday night two of the guys in the group I'm in plus the jefe of the K'zoo Folklife Society came out and played music in my shop with me. I passed the parlor prototype around and all three did a song with it, some strumming, some fingerpicking. All said it sounded good, but then they could have just been tactful, hah!

None of them liked the flat fretboard. I built the first 4 guitars I made with flat fretboards, taking the easy way out, and they don't bother me but I never could do bar chords so sneak by with some triads and partial chords like Django, but subsequent models will have my standard 16” radius. The build proves out the body form, size, and bracing. I would have wasted my time radiusing a fretboard if the sound wasn't there.

I played the guitar all week, liked the neck less and less. It was, again, a quick n dirty job to prove out the sound. Came back from Pam's doctor appointment in Ann Arbor Monday and took off the strings. I unscrewed the neck (one screw is looking like it may prove sufficient, another concept previously untried). Made a quick adapter to my neck shaping fixture to make it function with the tuning machines still on. Spent an hour with rasp, file, drawknife, and sandpaper improving the neck form.

Another coat of sanding sealer, and a couple of wiping urethane, and back together. And promptly broke it. It didn't “pull the tongue” as I always thought possible with my mortise and tenon K-D fastener assembly procedure, but it split. (photo)

And of course, the split was where I'd added one of the little thin maple pieces to increase the depth, and I was liking how they looked. But it was right in line with the cross dowel nut. I'm assuming my glue joint was insufficient. Reglued and reassembled.

The cheap tuning machines were not worth the extra work installing, but like the rest I had them on hand. Going into production I'll use the better grade enclosed tuning machines.

There is a design flaw, however, easily corrected in the next parlor build. I no longer have 2D CAD capabilities with my current version of Windows, so I did the manual, full-scale drafting. It appeared that the soundboard rim could be in one plane and still give me 3/32” string clearance on the low E at the 12th fret, and put the bridge in a useful thickness. Not so in execution.

The OM's I build necessitate the upper bout rim tapering down from the waist about 1/8” toward the neck, like Martin does. The next parlor build will start with an .062” slope, as the prototype ended up with a .25” high bridge and a saddle protruding slightly less than .125” (photo), not my idea of optimum. (photo)

I play in a group called 4 Guitars Alone Together (we play round-robin) The “front man” of our group was absent last Friday when we played in my shop. Here's David today, the “front man” doing a quick strumming sound file from the iPhone Voice Memos utility (Strumming-David_parlor.m4a) and a little fingerpicking from same of Joy To The World (Joy To The World-David_parlor.m4a.

She does sound sweet Will. Trial and error keeps a fella busy but also keeps building interesting.