rlrhett

I have both books, and can say that the Cumpiano book is MUCH mor thorough. I still refer to the Cumpiano book all the time (half dozen builds under my belt.) The Kingkade book lays pretty much untouched. YMMV.

Jaden, I don't know what his set up is, but there is a company that sells endmills specifically for CNC fretboard slots. Check out precisebits.com. Now if only I had the space to build my CNC router!!!

As someone who has been in this hobby for a number of years now, I can tell you most of the people in these courses are Baby Boomers with money to burn and no children in college anymore. Hey, what do they care what it costs if they get to be on an extended vacation/retirement trip to Vancouver and lean some cool new hobby? Unfortunately, they don't need the money and can spend almost unlimited money and time building guitar masterpieces. Then, of course, they all try to sell their guitars. Go to the Heldsburg festival and see what I mean. Heldsburg has 150 luthiers displaying their work and had to turn hundreds more away. These people will sell you a guitar for $1,500 just so they can pay for tools. Hard to compete. Hedge your bets with another career. On the other side, I never hear mention on these boards of the Cabinet and Furniture Technology program at Palomar College in San Marcos, California. It's a real shame people aren't turned on to this program. This is a a comunity college (read VERY cheap, about $150 per class/semester), is one of the best woodworking and furniture programs in the country and... wait for it... has an excellent lutherie class. You could go to Palomar College, get an associate's degree in cabinetry and furniture making, work with excellent woodwokers (Sam Maloof ocasionally guest teaches), and learn the essentials on making an acoustic guitar from a talented instructor. No, he doesn't have the caché of Charles Fox, but he'll teach you the solid fundamentals of guitar making. When you are done you will have all the skills to open a cabinet shop or work in any cabinet/furniture studio you want. You will also be able to build guitars as a part of your portfolio and build up your skills and reputation. Two years, a degree in something more or less useful and only a few grand in tuition, what's not to like? (Just to be fair, I should mention that San Diego has some of the most expensive housing in the contry. A modest little home can easily cost $800,000, so YMMV.)

To the bracing questions: I believe that bracing is where the whole game is. How you brace your guitar will determine 90% of what your guitar sounds like. To put it in electric guitar terms, bracing is like winding your own pickups. Except imagine that there was no real way to acurately count the winds and the guage of the wire varied slightly from pickup to pickup. I have done six guitars and tried most tuning techniques I could find on the internet: "tap" tuning, chaldni patterns, etc. The more I did them the more I realized that it is just a matter of making enough guitars to develop an ear for what you are looking for. That having been said, here are my recommendations: 1) Do not experiment with radical bracing unless you really know standard x bracing and how to get the sound that you want. There is a reason that almost every steel string since 1940 has used this bracing pattern. 2) Look at a lot of pictures of bracing until you get an eye for what looks right. 3) Use the bracing diagrams and dimentions you find in books. Then take about 1/32 to 1/16 off from that. Most factory guitars are made with fairly heavy bracing as insurance for belly bow. It is like BMW detuning their engines just slightly for warranty reasons. If you are not worried about the warranty you can chip the engine and get better power. 4) Tap the top by suspending it on your thumb from the sound hole and knocking it with your knuckles where the bridge will go. You want plenty of resonance and sustain like a drum head. If it sounds "dry" shave a LITTLE more off the bottom x and tone bars. Beyond that it will probably take many guitars before you train yourself to "hear" the tone you are looking for. Oh, and finally, I understand you are looking for a guitar that sounds good with single notes & chords, fingerstyle & flatpick, loud but not boomy, bright trebles & rich base, etc. In the imortal words of Austin Powers, "Yeah, I want a solid gold lue, but it ain't goin to happen baby." If you don't vary from the norm too much and take your time you WILL have a guitar that is at least as good as an off the shelf Martin or Taylor and maybe as good as a nice high end guitar like a Collins or Santa Cruz. Not bad given the joy it will bring you to know you built it.

I took a class. Without it, I think some of the steps would simply not be intuitive. You really have to see some steps being done to understand them(or at least I did). Unless you can find a class I would recommend for the very first one, if you are working alone, you should get a kit. If the sides are already well bent, making the guitar without is mold is certainly doable and saves you A LOT of time building jigs. There is plenty of work assembling the guitar, and a tremendous satisfaction in seeing one done. You really don't need to add the work of milling and preparing the pieces as well. As far a side bending, a side bender is WAY easier than doing it by hand. I have done both and can say that hand bending on a pipe is an exercise in frustration. "Ooops, too far." "Shoot, not far enough." "Now I've bent and rebent so much it is starting to look like washboard on a dirt road" "Do amoeba guiars sell well?" etc. Finally a modern neck tenon and head block assembly is very straight forward and definitely NOT the hard part. I'm not sure how you would make a truss rod work with the Spanish heel, although I'm sure it's been done. Regardless of which you choose, my best advice is to follow the traditiona construction and design of the guitar you want to build as much as possible. With a few guitars under your belt you can begin to experiment on other techniques. Often times I think I have a better way just to find out, "so this is why they do it this way." Good luck, and enjoy. I find an acoustic is significantly more work than an electric, but as a result my pride when I'm done is an order of magnitude greater!

The MIMF website has archtop specific luthiers group. There are some REALLY talented builders that specialize in archtops on that site. Custom guitars are, of course, rarely cheap. But if you have a reasonable expectation I think you can't go wrong there. Of course, Myka guitars are great. Just giving you some options.

I'm curious about the CNC for inlay. I can see where the CNC would cut very acurate slots for the inlay to fit in, but isn't that backwards? At least in old fashioned hand inlay you cut the inlay material and then scribe around it, right? So is the CNC cutting out the little pearl/abalone/stone pieces also? If so, can you post a picture of it doing that? I just can't imagine how you would keep such small pieces of shell imoblie and fixed to a work board as you have a machine rout out the edges.

Taylor has a pretty big repair department at their Lemon Grove plant. Seriously, if the mar is causing you anxiety I would suggest having them fix it. After all, they KNOW that guitar, its finish and how to match it.

For what it's worth, I have used GFS for both Fender style single coils and PAF humbuckers. They were fine pickups for the money, but I ended up replacing them both. The single coil pickups were just too bright and jarring. Ironically the PAFs were a little muddy. They are fine pickups, and an improvement on stock pickups that come with most low end guitars. However, you will probably not be "amazed" by these pickups. Just my $.02

Yeah, they kinda confused me too I dunno, call it boredom! Just wanted to play a little. Notice that I went with NO face dots on the acoustic. I guess I am just going to have to learn how to do inlay if I want more creative fingerboards in the future, I'm running out of dot permutations!!!

The electronics on the 300 are very different from the 5-6-700 guitars. The more expensive guitars have the processor as a separate unit much like active electronics pre-amp. The volume, selector switch, etc. are wired to it. To save money, LINE 6 uses an integrated circuit board for the electronics in the 300. As a result the 300 is one large block with nobs and everything. The electronics from the 500 can be rear mounted on a guitar and placed pretty much wherever you want. The 300 must be face mounted and requires an enourmous pickguard to cover it up. As such, the 300 greatly limits what the finished guitar is going to look like. I don't know why everybody bashes the Line 6 Variax so much. The guitars they put the electronics in are as cheap as many Chinese guitars that are bought all the time, but the electronics are a wonder. The settings really DO sound like what they purport to sound like, and with their software you can virtually create any combo of pickups and any placement you want. It will never be as good at emulating a PAF as having a really good PAF in your guitar, for e.g., but it sounds as good as the mid-line pickups found in most factory guitars. A good friend and pro musician played the variax under headphones and was amazed. We plugged it through and amp and he said, "it sounds like a really good recording of me playing through and amp." That seemed to sum up the sound perfectly.

Thought I would post pics of a guitar I recently completed. It is a Spruce/Sapele small bodied acoustic with zircoted bridge and fingerboard, paduk and holly rosette, and holly binding: Paduk and Maple Headstock Paduk and Holly Rosette Zircote Bridge Ribbon Sapele Back Holly Binding with Died veneer Purfling Here is an electric I built at the same time. It is a flat top, single cutaway with an ash body and a maple top. Full Guitar

Thanks! Yeah, I was thinking of posting it here as well since there are so few acoustic guitars. I just couldn't get the picture posted. Maybe I'm over doing the bragging, though One web site is probably enough!

I am trying to post an image and all I get is that error. Posting a link to that address brings you to the image. What should I do? The URL is: http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/rlrhett/deta...jpg&.src=ph Thanks.

I hear you. I've got guitars all over the house because I am addicted to building them. From that perspective its easy to say, "eh, next one." But I went 15 years with just one guitar because they are NOT cheap. If you got the cash for a custom guitar it may be your last. Get what you want. Inlaying a fretboard is NOT a trivial task. As a result, the awesome inlay people who do custom work charge a fair, but not trivial, amount of money. You can easily spend as much for the inlay as you will for all the hardware and electronics. If this is a dream guitar for you, I say go for it. That Shark Inlay cSuttle did is OUT OF SIGHT! Pay someone to press the frets in after they do the inlay and I think you run very little risk of your friend not gluing the fretboard to the neck right.

I hate to be the wet blanket in all of this dreaming of patents, but as an attorney who works a lot with start-ups, each with the "GREAT" idea, let me say: 1. Getting a patent is not cheap. A reputable attorney in So.Cal. will charge you between $8K and 15K for a mechanical device, more for chemical or biological. 2. The prior art is literally mind-bogglingly broad. The examiners always make you work to prove that your invention is non-obvious and novel. This takes time, money and a strong stomach. Imagine investing hundreds of thousands of dollars (see below) while your patent is pending just to get an action letter from the examiner rejecting all your claims. People have had nervous breakdowns for less. 3. Once you have the patent, you have no guarantee that you will make money off of it. How much will someone REALLY pay to use your invention, even if it is useful? How much would YOU pay to license the invention? 4. If you are going to manufacture the invention yourself, it can take literally hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions, to bring a product to the US marketplace. Do you have the money for prototypes, tooling, facilities rent, travel, marketing, etc.? 5. If someone rips you off, do you have the resources to sue them? What if they are in China selling your doodad on the internet distributed by some guy in a warehouse in LA, or Detroit or Charlotte? You could spend $35K on a lawsuit just to have them disappear once you finally have an injunction. Yep, sorry to say, the guy who thought of putting a brillo pad on a mop probably didn't make any money off of it either. The guy with a million dollars and the know-how to market to supermarkets and big box stores is the one sitting pretty. Unless you really have the resources to market your invention, I suggest sharing it with the community, getting the props you deserve, and feeling good about contributing to your fellow luthiers is probably the best option for most people.

I posted this question on another board, but nobody seemed to have ideas. Maybe it's impossible, but if anyone knows here goes: Does anyone know how to increase the "swing" of a drill press? (distance from center of chuck to edge of support column). I'm finding it hard to reach string holes in the center of the guitar with my 10" drill press. It has a swing of about 4 1/2" (yeah, I know, if they call it a 10" drill it should have 5" of clearance. Since when are tool manufactures honest in their names ) In order to reach the center of a 16" guitar I would need a 17" free standing drill press. Not only don't I have the cabbage, I don't have the space. I have an appartment wood shop and heavy free standing equipment is not an option. Suggestions?

I'm not sure on the fret slot cutting. It seems that the smallest bit they have is 1/16" or 0.0625. That is way to big for fret slots. Doesn't seem like the software is terribly robust yet either. But... looks like it might work to make compound radius fretboards. Pretty cool!!!

Russ, What riser block did you get that fit the Harbor Freight band saw?

Post your impressions after you've used it a little. I am very interested in this little band saw but was scared away from it by other guitar builders. I think there is a problem of tool snobbery on some of these guitar sites, but you just can never tell. Someday I will have a large stationary band saw that will re-saw 8-1/2" planks to make tops and backs. Until then, it seemed to me that having a small table top band saw would be great for cutting the rought outline of guitars into MDF for molds, fabbing up pieces for jigs, cutting necks and peg heads, cutting binding and rossette material, etc. Let us know what you end up using it for and how you like it. Also, to others who have bought the little Delta, what do you use it for and how do you like it?

You want laser Interferometry, here you go: http://www.astro.cf.ac.uk/groups/acoucomp/MAGHolography.html Interested in node tuning using glitter or tea leaves, here you go: http://www.mimf.com/library/plate_tuning.htm (you may need to register to see this link) or: http://www.beatley.ie/MODES.HTM Now, if you understan any of this and know how to put it to use, PLEASE report back. This went beyond anything I was likely to do.

Wow, nobody knows? I'm going to give this one bump to see if somebody has some experience, but I am really surprised no one has answered yet.

Does anybody know how to dye veneer so that the color is even all the way through? I have some maple veneer that I would like to use as purfling and would like to create a color pattern. I know I can buy dyed veneer, but I already have a lot of scrap to use up and want to match colors I already have. I have tried dying it by boiling strips in a water/dye solution. The dye never penetrates the veneer and the slightest sanding or scraping removes the dye. The commercial stuff all claims that it is "pressure" dyed. Could I cook the veneer in a regular stove top pressure cooker? I have one of those "food saver" vacuums, would that work? Anybody know a home shop way of doing this? Thanks.

Of course they are using the money to keep execs on the golf course. Those are the same execs that say they "have" to lay off 1,000 workers and ship the jobs to China because they "can't afford" the expensive cost of American craftsmen!