Contemplating a parlor guitar construction on the Megamold

[Chris C]

Greetings. I am new to this forum and new to guitar construction. I have made a couple of kit guitars in the past that came out pretty well, but a lot of the hard stuff had been done for me. I have this irrational desire to make a smaller guitar from scratch, and to give it the greatest volume I can get out of the construction, and so have ordered the mega mold and the Martin parlor size No. 2 template. My questions are:

1.Has anyone using this forum made a guitar that small using the mega mold and, if so, do you have any advice? (other than forget it{:-)) I am used to inside forms, and haven't really used outside forms very much.

2. Which wood for back and sides would give me the greatest volume and brightest sound, or does that matter? I plan on using sitka for the top.

3. I'll use the bracing placements as given on the KMG no. 2 template, but do height/width of the braces effect the volume and or brightness of the sound? Is there anything else I should be considering in achieving this?

These may be amazingly naive questions. I come from a background of violin making, and I can see that guitars are just as sensitive and challenging a beast to control. I am hoping to get a bit of guidance as I go into this project . Thank you for any and all feedback.

[John Parchem]

While I do not use the megamold almost every builder on this forum does successfully use it. Most guitars are built with outside molds. The megamold is very versatile allowing one to build against nearly every guitar template. If you go through the construction logs you will see a lot of guitars built using it.

I am not one to care about top and back wood pairings. It does matter but especially starting out building guitars there are so many huge things that matter that I think wood pairings rank low. East Indian rosewood is a great sounding and looking back and side wood and is easy to bend. But sure there is a wide variety of woods that you can pair with sitka.

The height of the braces is huge. A good sounding guitar is a balance between mass and stiffness. THe stiffness of a brace changes by a cube relationship . A 30 percent change in height more than doubles the stiffness of a brace. THe width is less important for stiffness, doubling the width doubles the stiffness. So to add stiffness in the most efficient way, relative to the mass of the brace, a narrow triangle shaped tall brace is best. A brace does need to wide enough so that it does not distort the top. around 1/4" for most of the steel string tone braces. Classical guitars have fan braces with widths in the 4-6 mm range.

Have fun building. I have see the logs of a bunch of great looking guitars made follow Ken's on line instructions and using his jigs.

[Chris C]

Thanks John. I appreciate your feedback. Great info.

[John J]

My fourth guitar was a sized 2 done in the Mega Mold using the template from Ken.

http://acousticguitarconstructionforum. ... =30&t=2392

It came out surprisingly loud for a small guitar.
Some finished pics here.

http://acousticguitarconstructionforum. ... =24&t=2432

[Chris C]

Hey, John. That guitar looks great, and I love that rosette. Just went to that link as well to see how to do that. Thanks for the your post. I'll be visiting that a lot.

[John J]

Thanks Chris. I really enjoy being creative with my rosettes. Any questions ask away.

[Chris C]

Hi John, Actually I do have a question for you or anyone else who has some info. I am very curious which radius to put on a parlor top and back. Is there leeway with that , or do smaller guitars need a different radius from the larger guitars I would love to find a source for the various radii used on Gibsons and Martins of various models. As I look at the contoured dishes available, I would like to buy the correct ones for top and back. It would be nice to have just two dishes that worked for both a parlor and say a Gibson L00 model. Chris