Mattia

What Brian said.

Uh, while polyurethane glue may well fill gaps, all that foam has exactly NO sturctural strength whatsoever. If you can't machine accurately enough to get perfect, gap-free joints - required for hot hide, CA, titebond and poly, actually more so with poly, which requires a bit of moisture to really catalyze and more clamping power as the expanding foam will try to 'force' the joint apart a little - use epoxy. That has cohesive and adhesive stregth, and can fill your gaps an provide strength. So, yeah, nice that it fills gaps. But it won't do your neck stregnth any good. I do use polys for laminating things like end blocks for acoustics - anywhere where I might convievably want to steam/heat off a section of the guitar without wanting said section to delaminate while I'm doing the steaming.

Pike or other swiss blades, 3/0 for normal work, 2/0 for coarser stuff, 4/0 for fine, fine lines. No lube, just throw them out when they break or feel dull. They're plenty cheap if you buy them by the gross.

...unless you're recycling scrap, I can get solid wood (basswood, ash, african mahogany) for less per board foot, in better quality, than ply. Don't know about you.

Most elegant is CNC, of course, as you can route curved bottomed slots and have it 'do' the (compound) radius all on its own at the same time. Most cost-effective and time-effective on a budget would be a template. With a miter box (and a Japanese crosscut saw) it takes me about 10-15 minutes to do a 24 fret board.

I got the MCLS setup (from Axminster in the UK, but it's the same thing), and while it won't do everything a pin router will (particularly captive cavities, chambering are a no-go) it's cheap, it's a simple addition to a router table, and it works pretty darn well. Perfectly usable for most of the pattern routing tasks I do (bodies, profiling, truss rods, etc.)

Look up many an old topic. I'll give the same advice I always do: buy a book, decide how to do things, and buy tools as you need 'em. You will need personal protection (ear, respiratory, eye), you will want/need a router, and you'll probably want a rasp. And some sandpaper. And access to a drill press for a couple of things. But seriously, buy tools as you need them - people do things different ways, with different tools, and you may discover a different way to do things that works better for you.

Why anyone would spend that amount of money on a base for a dremel is beyond me - for a good laminate trimmer without slop, with power, and with the ability to use proper bits, sure. For a dremel? No way.

As an alternative, I just popped down to the hardware store, bought myself a fairly simple small-ish steel hinge, inlayed half of it into a slot routed out of the tailpiece, epoxied it in with an (epoxied) cover piece of matching wood, with the hinge area itself free to move and free from glue. it's got enough mobility to provide for more than the required range of adjustment for the carved top semi-archtop thing that's currently awaiting a polish, and embedding the hinge hides away the barrel efficiently. Before gluing, I reshaped the bit that's going to screw into the butt of the guitar with a sander and a small grinding wheel, then (again) made a cover of matching wood and inlaid it into it, rounded the edges a little, and drilled through the two screw holes. One will be for the end pin/strap button, the other as an extra reinforcement. Hides away all the metal bits nicely. I'll try to get some pics some time this week.

Re: if it's all in the pickups, why bother? Because it's not all in the pickups. I think it was Perry who said something like 'every aspect of guitar design and construction affects how the instrument sounds. The question is: which bits make an audible difference?' My experience and feeling tells me that yes, construction (chambered, solid, etc) and wood type certainly do make a difference, as does scale length, string choice, but pickup selection (and amp selection, the other half of the guitar as an instrument) make a huge, massive difference. Vintage-style pickups (lower output) and single coils seem to be more sensitive to subtler changes (wood choice, construction, etc) than active EMG buckers played through a rack of effects.

One has to ask; given the best possible outcome would be a consensus on what sounds 'best' (defined in no small part by the personal preference of the guitarist/listener in question, the amp of choice, etc.), is this really worth all the effort? I mean, really? Grab a random two dozen guitarists with various musical backgrounds (metal, country, rockabilly, rock, indie, bluegrass, britpop) and ask them to define the 'best' sound. All kind of depends on the situation, doesn't it? That warm, resonant, easy feedback vintage pickup ES 355 may not be the ideal candidate for master of puppets riffing. Designing a proper experiment isn't primarily about methodology - first and foremost you need to decide what it is you want to measure, how you want to measure it (and then validate the way you're measuring it), and then set up a nice blinded experiment to 'prove' whatever you're setting out to prove, with sample sizes of sufficient size to power the study for the effect you expect to find. Having a robot arm pluck a string consistently and analysing the waveform isn't going to do a whole lot of good if the ultimate application is, y'know, playing music on a guitar.

Same as DC Ross here, although I do find I tend to refine the shape of the carve with hand tools (a violin plane, gouge and a variety of scrapers) every time. The power tool approach is fast, provides a LOT of control, but not quite the same level of fine control the hand tools give.

Plywood's great for certain things. It's pretty stable (mostly - although it's not made of premium grade wood, not necessarily of perfectly dry wood, and warps worse than any of the kiln dried lumber I've got, if we're talking averages), it's got a ton of constructional strength, but it has a number of major disadvantages. 1) Price. Plywood is expensive compared to a number of tried and tested hardwoods (basswood, alder, african mahogany). 2) Workability. Construction grade ply is not void-free (and is still more expensive than solid wood. Counts double for quality birch ply), and the alternating grain means you have end grain EVERYWHERE, covering 50% of every single edge of your workpiece. I don't know about you, but I'm no big fan of end-grain. Makes scarfing a fairly unattractive proposition, among other things. Lamination is something we all do quite a bit; in necks for stability, in bodies usually for looks. Basically, I don't see any reason to go with an overengineerd, more expensive, more annoying to work with product, and I'd like to point out that you can probably do a lot of the testing you want to do without building all the guitars yourself: buy a cheap plywood strat or tele, build one out of wood (or get a good wooden one), and swap out the hardware and pickups. Voila, you've done the testing. Pete: the 'plywood' applications you seem to be talking about that are most useful are ones that require you to make your own ply, essentiall, by forming the layers over a mold. Perfect way to make material-saving arched tops and backs - although the acoustics aren't the same as a carved instrument, plenty of experiential data on that from the archtop world. Alternative shapes in different directions would work as well, although again, likely not cross-grain, and bent laminations need to be bent and laminated into a shape, can't just grab ply and force it into a shape. I use ply in places I think it makes sense - to make molds, templates and fixtures (although I prefer MDF's workability for templates, and transfer to phenolic/trespa once I have a 'perfect' template), and as end blocks (home-made ply, with scraps of hardwood, because I have them anyway) in acoustic instruments, where the impact and crack resistance is superior to any solid block of wood.

The whole thing's a set for an acoustic guitar. Don't know when I'll get around to building with it, but I suspect it'll be a while...

I have a piece similar to these. I could get a top out of it (center-seamed, not book-matched). How is it to carve ?? I have the feeling that it's going to be a pain... Hard. But OK with my fave tools - an angle grinder and a random orbit sander. Mattia

I'd call that a pomelle figure. Very nice, fairly common (have a few big boards with less figure than this, same type though). Waterfall (usually quilt) looks like this:

One thing to keep in mind is that archtops seem to be a lot more forgiving of 'non-standard' F hole shapes and locations than acoustic guitars because the sound is defined by the arch of the plate, and the bracing is more minimalist. Soundhole area matters, shape and position slightly less so. Acoustics, OTOH, sound like acoustics when their bracing is where we're used to them and their soundholes are in a normal position. Change things around, and the sound is different. That's likely why the 'off the wall' designs don't stick; the old designs simply work well, and the sound we've learned to associate with 'acoustic guitar' and the tone we like are associated with fairly traditional guitar sizes and shapes (major part of tone) and woods and bracing schemes.

Normal. Don't worry.

More or less what folks have said already. Wood (and construction methods, mass and damping distribution, resonance distribution in general) acts as a filter for the string. In an acoustic setting essentially a purely substractive one (it doesn't add anything to the string signal, but only removes information/may reflect some information back, depending on resonances). Electrically it gets a touch more complex, as the amplified sound of the guitar itself also adds vibration/resonance/energy to the body(wood), which can infleunce the strings. The pickups - with their own impedance, magnetic field configuration, bla, bla bla....

A guitar's not a 'simple' helmholtz resonator (it's not rigid; calculating the volume, the lowest the box itself can support as a frequency is something between an A and a G on the low E string, also depending on body size, bracing, etc.). Some feel there's a bass reflex couple going on between top and back, and build accordingly. Others build with a stiff, 'reflective' back. Almost everyone builds with pretty darn rigid (thanks to bending, sometimes lamination, sometimes side bracing) sides, so there's not a lot of flex in there. I do know that the tops/backs on my guitars are definitely 'coupled'. Damp the back in the middle, and the top resonance (on a 'loose' body, in this case) gets damped - doesn't sustain as long. Cover the side sound hole (1.5" diameter in a jumbo sized body) and the main air resonance (helmholtz resonance) drops, uncover it and it rises again by about half a step. I don't think a significant part of the volume comes out of the soundhole. In terms of bass (psychoacoustically) and balance of tone, yes, the soundhole helps shape/define how things sound. But not in terms of loudness, and only some of it is 'pure' helmholtz resonance going on. Most of the sound gets made by the board, near and around the bridge. Ie, the bit that's vibrating most. The rest of the construction and overtones are shaped by the air resonance chamber, compliance of both top and back, and any coupling. Re: size of hole, 4" is fairly standard, but anything from 3.5" to 4.5" is used fairly frequently. Most folks that do side ports/sound holes tend to make the main hole smaller by the surface area of the side port to balance out any helmholtz effects. As far as the boulder creek bracing is concerned, it just looks really, really heavy to me. A wood soundboard will weigh roughly 200-250 grams without bracing, bracing another 60-100 grams, tops (depending on woods, guitar size, etc.). That setup up there looks like it'll weigh a lot more; aluminum is very, very heavy for its stiffness compared to spruce.

Also, in all honesty, the funkiest/craziest/most exotic woods you'll be able to find will be very difficult to find in plank form, and fairly easy to find in pre-cut back/side form. You pay a bit more, but remember you're paying the dealers for sourcing the best of the best of a given wood species, for sawing it to thickness (tools you don't own and cost at least 500-1000 dollars to get set up to deal with it all, often more considering you also need a thickness sander and a big dust collector) and dealing with the fact that many a hunk of wood has flaws in it that will mean the final pieces are unusable. Check out places like allied lutherie or RCtonewoods.com (Bob's a great guy, smallish operation, top-notch product and service). BTW, zebrawood's pretty common/cheap.

I rate Gotoh (their 510 series) as top of the bill, better fit, finish and solidity (they say rock solid string posts, and that's precisely what you get) than Schaller, Sperzel's a close second, then comes Schaller and Gotoh's 'regular' series of tuners (the 30-40 buck ones), then Grover.

Hard to tell, but it looks like there may be a veneer between the stained maple and the body wood, providing an even crisper line.

Unless you're making a 'vintage correct' replica, why would you want to do it Gibson-style? IMO it's inferior in a number of ways (binding shrinkage means gaps far too close to the string, less usable fret surface for playing on, far more difficult to repair/recrown/touch up) and offers zero advantages other than 'that Gibson look'.

Spruce and WRC bodies have been done successfully; Parker Guitars makes a spruce bodied parker fly, Rick Turner's Renaissance has a WRC core with hardwood top/back laminates. A spruce and/or WRC bodied electric has been on my 'to build' list for some time now...