tirapop

Looks kind of like the Bender Distortorcaster

the only thing you cant do if you were to do that method would be an arm scoop, like on a strat.

No, you can. The arm relief is planar. It's a flat surface that meets the flat surface of the front of the guitar with a radius. A sheet of veneer can follow that contour.

I've got a Warmoth body with a laminated top. They take an 1/8" thick top and bend it over the contour of the arm relief.

You can't bend the veneer into the belly cut. If the belly cut was made on a conical surface, you could use a second piece of veneer to cover that surface with a seam where they meet. There are other tricks you could do, but, it's on the back of the guitar.

Go to school on this thread.

I think you're right... the body material colors the sound, but, most of it is coming from the cone. Bodies get made out of wood, steel, aluminum, plastic, and plated brass. One might be a bit better than the others, but, they all seem to work.

I checked this great book out from the library...

A coffee table book with over 300 pages of gorgeous color picks of guitars from makers you've never heard of. I need to buy this book and add it to my library.

I also checked out "Dangerous Curves: The Art of the Guitar". It was part of a museum show about guitars. It has some great guitar pics... some are artsy tease shots that only show a small part of a guitar. Not as broad and detailed as the other book, but, still worth owning.

Check out Brad's Page of Steel.

This is the review from the frets.com site.

Padding lacquer sounds like French polish. Maybe try googling on French polish? I think people FP acoustic guitars, violins, cellos, basses, and large pieces of furniture.

Playing solo acoustic, Richard Thompson is absolutely amazing. Two hands, six strings... who needs a band? It isn't extreme technique and a blizzard of notes. Bass lines and melody sound independent, like there are two guitarists. In the novel, "High Fidelity", one of the record store geeks describes him as England's finest electric guitarist. He started back in the '60s, so, no tapping or emphasis on speed.

He's a brilliant songwriter too.

You could try making your own mold, maybe casting it in aluminum. Do you have an injection molder to force the molten plastic into a mold? You could build your own.

It sound like a lot of work/hassle. If you could find the same color plastic in sheet form, you could vacuform it.

They have them at Costco, in Seattle. I think they were labelled as Coleman Coldheat.

I was looking at the specs for the Clapton series Strat and it said that it had a "blocked" classic synchronized tremolo. How do they block a trem? It looks like you can disassemble the bridge from the spring block thingie. Do they just screw that down to an un-routed or plugged body?

I'd guess they use a blocked trem, over a hardtail for style points.

Is there a downside to just unscrewing the whammy bar, putting on all the springs, and cranking up the spring tension to immobilize the bridge? Do you get more sustain or better tone with a hardtail?

Truck bed paint is a brilliant idea... much better than gluing on vinyl or fiberglassing.

I like the idea of kerf bending plywood, so that the sheet that forms the top/bottom can be folded to form the front and back sides. The carcass could be made from two pieces of plywood and 4 smaller pieces of wood to close out the left and right sides. It would be shaped like the old Fender Tweed cases.

Somewhere surfing on the net, I saw a pic of a case with a small amp built in. Maybe someone into speaker design knows if there's enough room in the case, around the neck, to put in a labyrinth/folded pipe/resonator something to boost the sound from a Smokey amp.

My problem was that the blade was out too far, that the angle was too sharp.  I found that by barely having the blade out did a world of good.  I was able to shave the wood better.  I'm still no pro, but at least I feel that I can use the thing now to some degree.

Hey Bill!

Like everyone says, make sure the blade is sharp, and adjust the depth and throat opening to get those fine shavings. If you skew the plane to the direction you're pushing it, you effectively reduce the blade angle. I have a cheap Stanley that I've tuned up and I can get those paper thin (see-through) shavings most of the time.

Fine Woodworking has a couple books on planes. They have articles on tweaking block planes and building wooden planes. There's a really cool article about a guy who made a brass soled plane out of plate, by hand.

If you're going to go through the trouble of making a wooden plane, you ought to get a better blade to build around. Hock makes thicker blades that are more suited to wooden bodied planes. A few of the mail-order woodworking houses carry them.

Just curious, I thought hardwood and softwood didn't necessarily refer to hardness of the wood, but it referred to how or when it grew, or leaf type or something.

Softwoods are all from coniferous trees (needles, no leaves) like pine, fir, spruce, cedar, etc.

Hardwoods are from deciduous trees, the ones with leaves.

The terms have nothing to do with the hardness or density of the wood.

Torres is the Spanish luthier who set the pattern for classical guitar construction. At the time, there was a lot of debate about the importance of the construction of the sides and back. To prove his point about the dominance of the top/bracing, he made a guitar with paper-mache sides and back. It was said to have sounded very good.

Back and side construction have an effect on the sound of an acoustic, but, it's probably subtler. Most of the string energy and the largest displacements are in the guitar top. The body of the guitar is a resonator and the top is driving the volume of air. The primary job of the sides/back is to support the top, define the shape of the cavity, and help project the sound out of it.

The curved shape of the sides make them very stiff, compared to the top, and they vibrate much less. The backs are also stiffened with bracing and arching. The density, stiffness, damping, and mass of the sides and back affect their response... how brightly they reflect sound, what their own natural frequencies are and how that reinforces or detracts from the guitar's overall sound.

The material for guitar (and violins/cellos/etc) tops has converged on really light, strong, straight grained tone woods. Even on expensive instruments, sides and backs are made of other species of wood which are frequently chosen as much for their appearance, as their tonal properties.

BTW, I'm new to this forum. I recently stumbled onto the site. It's really cool. Some amazing and inspiring stuff is being done here.