The Idiot's Guide to Guitar Building

As I was working on my guitar last night, it occurred to me that I've been at it for almost four months now and, at the rate we're going, it looks like that could be a third of the way there. And, despite my whining and moaning about a lack of progress lately, things are starting to come together. At least it's starting to look like a guitar.

In the past two weeks, I've glued the sides together with the end block and neck block, finished the rosette once and for all (you'll notice I declined to take picture this time - too much bad luck) and added half of the kerfing (that's the strip of wood you glue to the insides so that the top and back has a surface to which they can be glued).

It strikes me that a good deal of the work we're doing requires only modest woodworking skills. Of course it helps to have Ted looking over my shoulder so that he can stop me before I do something really stupid. And learning how to properly use a plane or a chisel is important, but it's not exactly rocket science, either. So I think it's really the tried and true techniques of guitar building that are the most important part of building a good one, rather than the amazing skill of the builder. Don't get me wrong - a fantastic craftsman is going to build a better guitar than mine will be. What I'm getting at is that, so far at least, it seems that a person with modest woodworking skills like myself can build a guitar without too much loss of self esteem. No doubt my having said that will ensure the necessity for me to complete tasks of great skill in the coming weeks. Bring it on, I say!

So it looks like the next steps are to finish the bracing of the front and back, which is extremely important. Once the braces are fixed in place, they need to be shaved down so that they're as light as possible, but still strong. Apparently, this is where the real artistry of guitar building comes in. In the final steps before gluing the top and back to the sides, you're actually "tuning" the guitar - tapping the wood and listening to it resonate, and seeking just the right sound. It's all about balancing strength with flexibility. You want to the wood to vibrate freely but not collapse.

I'm starting to get pretty excited about it all. You know my motto: "If nothing else it will have six strings and make a good drum." And it looks like it won't be long before I have my drum!

Patience, please.

My family would probably tell you that I'm not the most patient person in the world, but they should be happy to know that I'm experiencing excellent therapy every Tuesday night. In the latest two-steps-forward-one-step-back episode, I'm happy to report that I finally finished the outer and inner rings of my rosette.

You may recall from my last thrilling blog entry that I was beating my head against the wall trying to get the outer and inner rings of purfling in, with absolutely no luck. The problem was the purfling itself, so I finally screamed "Uncle!" and ordered the proper type.

It went in like a dream. What I had worked on fruitlessly for almost five hours was completed in about 45 minutes. Another 20 minutes trimming it up and it was looking great. Now to begin sanding the top to thickness. We're really getting somewhere now! Wait....what, you say?

Once in the sander, it became clear that the inner ring also had a problem. It was laid too shallow so that my magnificent rosette was being sanded away.

Okay. I get it. I'm being tortured.

So it's back again. I have to re-rout the channel for the middle ring - the one with the abalone - and do it over again. But no problem. I'm an expert now. I LIKE making rosettes. It's a wonderful opportunity for peaceful reflection. But it will have to wait until next time. I have to order more purfling, so joy of joys - I can look forward to doing it AGAIN.

After this experience is over, if nothing else, I'll be an expert at rosettes (something I always aspired to).

Breathe in....breathe out...

On the positive side, I made good progress on my sides. Both are now bent and one has had the laminate applied. It was a very simple process and, best of all, it worked the way it was supposed to. I think.

Patience, my son.....Patience.

Step By Step

It's been quite a while since my last post, for a few reasons - but mostly because I hadn't made enough progress to write about. One class was canceled, and the last few classes have been spent preparing for the work we're doing now. One thing is certain: it takes a certain amount of patience to build a guitar in only 3 hours a week. Seems I just begin to make some progress when it's time to go home. But step by step, progress is being made, and we're starting to get to the point that some of these pieces of wood I'm messing around with are beginning to look a little bit like a guitar.

In my last post, I was excited to write about the rosette I was working on. Unfortunately, that's been my biggest problem since then. You can see in the pictures from my last post that the center ring looks pretty good. But despite my best efforts (and about 4 1/2 hours of beating my head against a wall) I haven't been able to finish the outer and inner rings. The problem is that we were working with a new type of binding that just didn't work in the end. So we've ordered the old kind and I hope be able to finish that pretty quickly next week.

But I'm happy to say I managed to make some good progress in other areas in my class last week. The most exciting is that I bent my first side. That's a process that's always fascinated me and, in the end, I'm just amazed at how easy and simple it is.

I should first explain that we made the decision to use laminated sides. This would have been unthinkable a few years ago, but many guitar makers now believe that using laminated sides adds strength to the instrument without taking away from the sound quality. So instead of having one piece of rosewood about 90 thousands of an inch thick, my sides will be made of a piece of rosewood about 45 thousandths of an inch with two pieces of mahogany around 20 thousandths each layered inside.

The step you see pictured here is the bending of the rosewood piece. I had always assumed that this step was a difficult and dangerous process that took great skill and many hours. In reality, it was pretty easy and, while we let it sit for a couple of hours, it really only took about 10 minutes to do the bending.

The process is pretty straightforward: you wet the piece of wood and wrap it in tinfoil. Then you heat two rubber mats that have heating elements inside. You place the wood between the mats, cover it with a thin piece of metal, and

insert it over the form. Then you slowly clamp the center of the wood, and gradually pull the spring clamps over the ends until it's the proper shape. And that's about all there is to it. A couple of hours later, and my side was perfectly shaped. Next week, I'll bend the other side and apply the laminate to the inside, which is a pretty easy process.

I also made good progress on gluing the braces for the back of the guitar, but my readers can only take so much excitement in one post, so I'll save that for my next entry.

My Rosette

It seems strange that laying a rosette would come so early in the process of making a guitar, but there I was, toiling away at what one would expect to be a final cosmetic detail.

For the uninitiated, the rosette is the decorative ring around the sound hole of the guitar. Every guitar's rosette is a little different, but mine is pretty standard. It will eventually consist of several rings of purfling, including black and white fiber rings, interspersed with mother of pearl.

The first step is to rout the top so that the rosette strips can be laid in. Epoxy is then applied before the strips are inserted. The black and white binding comes in long, flexible strips which can be cut to the proper length. Once the binding is inserted (a process not as easy as one might think), the mother of pearl pieces are delicately inserted in between. The pieces of mother of pearl are short (anywhere from a quarter to half inch), so the process is time consuming. But after an hour or so, I had finished the middle ring.

And, by the way, the stains you see on the top are from cutting myself in the process. Don't let anyone tell you guitar building isn't dangerous (at least for me).

With luck, I'll finish the rosette at the next class. Then it'll be time to start attaching the bracing. Some day I may actually have a guitar!

My class and the joy of the 25 foot spherical radius

Gluing the top

As it turns out, I'm very lucky. Not only is my class very small, with only two other students, but both have already taken the class and finished their first guitars. That means that our class will be a little more advanced than the last and that I'll be challenged to learn a little more quickly. That's good, right? Uh....I think so.

Actually, I'm sure it's true. My classmates, Ron and Bruce have made me feel welcome in their class and have done their very best to not laugh when I ask stupid questions. I admire them already.

So far, we've made a few important decisions and have already completed some very important steps in the building process. First, we had to decide what type of guitar we wanted to build, and what type of wood we wanted to use. I had already made the decision that I wanted to build a very traditional, standard flat top guitar, so I chose to build a Dreadnought made with spruce top (red spruce in this case) and East Indian rosewood for the back and sides of the instrument. Guitar players would know this combination as very standard - like a Martin D-28, for example. That's considered by many to be arguably the standard in steel string acoustic guitars over the past 75 years or so. You'll find many bluegrass, country, and even rock and roll guitar players playing a Martin D-28 made from spruce and rosewood.

So the first three classes have involved learning a few important concepts and actually beginning the process of construction. For me, I learned something completely new in the first class. In all the years I've been admiring flat top guitars, I never knew that a flat top is not, in fact, flat - at least not in many cases, the Martin D-28 among them. Instead, the guitar is constructed with the shape of a 25 foot spherical radius. (Man, I love that). What that means is that the top and the back of the instrument are actually arched so that if the plane of the top or back continued, it would create a sphere 25 feet in radius. (Think about that for a second and you'll be able to picture it). So building the internal structure requires not only the skills of a craftsman, but a mathematician, too.

And since the top and back are both constructed of two pieces, they need to be glued together. It sounds like a pretty simple process, but planing the edges so that they join together perfectly takes a sharp plane, a smooth stroke, and lots of patience. But with a little time and many adjustments, I managed to get it done, and both pieces are glued and ready for the next step.

The other step we completed was the building of the internal braces for the top and back. This is an enormously important step, since the bracing is one of the most important factors in building a guitar that will be strong on one hand, while still being light enough to allow the guitar to vibrate freely. And THAT is what makes a great guitar. So I won't bore you with the details of our discussions about the bracing, but suffice it to say we spent quite a bit of time discussing the options and finally settling on a system of bracing that's a bit more modern than a traditional Martin would use, but still based on that basic system.

So the idea is to create two pieces of wood for both the top and bottom that create an "x". (By the way, it's somewhat unusual to use an "x" bracing system for the back, but we decided there were enough advantages to use it). [Editor's Note: In the end, and after much discussion, we decided not to use "x" braces for the back, but the standard "ladder" braces instead. "X" bracing will be used for the top]. Each of the pieces of wood used to construct the "x" braces need to be strong, yet light, so we spent a lot of time shaving the pieces down to eliminate any unnecessary bulk. Each piece is a fairly narrow strip of spruce, so they're strong and light and easy to work with. After cutting them to size, we used a jig on the sander to sand them to the proper radius to allow for what will eventually be a guitar with a 25 foot spherical radius.

Who'd a guessed?

First, there was a pile of wood

East Indian Rosewood for the back

I'm not sure exactly when I decided it would be a good idea. I think it was the culmination of a decade or more of experiences that suddenly boiled over into what many would consider a pretty crazy idea. But for whatever reason, one day it became clear to me. I was going to build a guitar.

My love of guitars is definitely not new. I remember the feeling when I got my first guitar as a boy. It was a Tama steel string, and I remember how beautiful I thought it was. I still couldn't play much on it, but I was taken with the feel of it in my hands and the magnificent grain in the wood. Over the years, I've been lucky to own some really spectacular guitars (often to the dismay of my wife, Natalie, who tries her best to understand why anyone would need 6 of them). And while my playing doesn't live up to the quality of the instruments I own, I learned a long time ago, that a fine musical instrument is much more than a tool. It's an object of fine art and craft that can stand on its own, and something that can come alive regardless of the skill of the holder.

The first big step toward my decision came a couple of years ago when I took up woodworking. I managed to acquire a chop saw, which I soon realized provided me with tool that would allow me to make some pretty cool things. My father was an artist and woodworker, so I thought that, while I had never made much of anything with my hands, maybe a talent for craftsmanship was buried somewhere deep in my DNA and only needed to be uncovered. Well, I don't know if it worked out exactly that way, but I did manage to unlock a love for working with wood, and I realized that while my skills were pretty basic, I could learn. And, most importantly, I wanted to. So I kept at it.

The idea of building a guitar was just a crazy out of reach dream for most of that time. I had read about classes for guitar building, but they were mostly far away, they required an unreasonable time commitment, and perhaps the biggest obstacle, large amounts of money that I didn't have. But suddenly the pieces fell into place when I moved to Louisville.

Since I had just left my job as director of Cityfolk, I had some extra time - at least temporarily. So I thought I would take the opportunity to take a woodworking class or two to improve my skills. And while searching for classes, my "aha" moment came when I came across Ted Harlan, a Louisville craftsman who teaches furniture building and - yes - guitar making. And what makes Ted's classes different is that, rather than a concentrated series of classes over a few weeks, they take place over the course of a year or more. It was perfect. An excellent teacher with a proven system; a reasonable time commitment; and it was affordable.

So here I am, three weeks into my new adventure. I'm taking classes every Tuesday for 3 hours, and the goal is to build a fine instrument over the next 12-14 months. Having seen the results of Ted's other students, I truly believe I'll be successful.

So this is the first in what will be a long series of blog posts about my experience. I'm not sure if anyone else will be interested in my progress, but I decided I wanted to document the process. I want to be able to sit, years later, with my finished guitar in my lap, and revisit the process that brought it to life. So here goes!