We have been talking about acoustic guitar shapes and the variety there is. Now I am about to embark on drawing yet another guitar shape-that of a 4 string tenor .I have nothing to copy from this time, so I used my smallest parlour  guitar template, drew an outline from it and then downsized from there. I knew the body length I need from the customer, and he actually stood and watched while I drew the new outline. The scale length is 21″, 14 frets to the body. The sound hole size is going to be a full 4″, so that a standard size soundhole pickup can be used for amplification.

The neck has been drawn on this form as well, so now we can see the whole length of the guitar. It is only 34″ long. As this is only a 4 string guitar, I am not utilizing an adjustable truss rod. I will use ebony as a stiffener up the middle. There will be no dovetail joint, but a biscuit joint will join the neck to the body. This is the way I join my ukelele necks to their bodies. This is really an oversized baritone uke.

The first step to get this instrument started was to select the top wood, back and side wood, neck wood, fingerboard wood, bridge wood and edge binding. I have bandsawn the thick redwood topwood into thinner pieces, drum sanded them to the same thickness (oversize), edge sanded the 2 gluing edges, glued and clamped them in the floor clamps. Leave to dry overnight, and it will be ready to sand to thickness.

3/4 inch plywood workboard

hand circle cutter

Dremel router with circle cutting attachment

2 routers and a hand purfling cutter

 This acoustic guitar is going to be made on a plywood workboard with adjustable dowel posts. Any size guitar can be made on this board. The guitar is made upside down. The rosette is inlaid into the top first, the soundhole is then cut out, then the top is turned over and is placed facedown on the workboard.The braces and bridge plate are glued on, then the tailblock and neckblock, then the sides are attached with the kerfing, then the back goes on last. The neck block will have a tenon joint, and this will be bolted to the neck. Special bolts are available from Bunnings hardware, or Stewmac.com. I normally do a dovetail joint, but it requires special jigs and bits. A bolt-on neck is more manageable for a beginner. The hand circle cutter is available from Stewmac, but you have to assemble it yourself. I used mine for at least 25years. It is a great tool. If you can’t get a router, then there is the hand purfling cutter, but be warned, it is very hard going. Of course, you can make your guitar without any binding at all, and it will still look attractive (Takamine comes to mind).

Bandsawing the body shape

Blank joined pieces of hoop pine

                    During the last post, I talked about drawing acoustic guitar shapes.That involved freehand drawing of graceful curves.There is not too much measuring required, namely the lower bout, waist and upper bout. Check out the latest electric guitar shape that I drew from looking at a small picture. It won’t be an exact copy, but it is near enough to look the part. If you learn to make a guitar (electric), you will need to do lots of measuring to get the proportions right. This electric guitar project needed lots of straight line drawing and several opposite edges were either in line or parallel to each other. The key to getting the proportions right was to decide the scale length (string length) of the guitar, and all other measurements of the body had to relate to the fret spacings.

parlour

000 size

dreadnaught

When you learn to make a guitar, you want it to sound good, and you want the shape of it to look good.Guitars of all shapes and colours have been used as a tool to attract attention for some time now. If there is a shape out there that you like, then copy it onto paper or cardboard or plywood. If you would rather have a go at drawing your own shape, then get some drawing paper (newsagents), and begin by drawing a body centerline.The length of this line will basically determine the size of the instrument. You need to mark the upper bout width, waist width, and lower bout width. The parlour guitar is the smallest shown here (photos are not quite to scale), and the dreadnaught is the largest. Once you start drawing freehand, you will soon see how tricky this process is. I was a draftsman for many years, but all my straightline drawing didn’t help much here. You need to draw fluent, elloquent lines.The jumbo guitar size is not shown here, because of the size of the wood needed to make such a guitar. You only need to draw one half of the body, because when you make the wood body template, it is flipped over on its edge to the reverse side to make an identical half.

                          The aim of this blog is to show how to make an acoustic guitar . Before we get into the nuts and bolts of it, we have to look ahead a little , to see what we will need in the way of tools required for the job ahead. It is not my aim to send people broke by investing heavily in big equipment, but rather choose a few indespensible hand tools and outsource parts of the work that requires heavier tools.

                            A solid workbench and a closed in area is a good place to start.My first guitar was made in the tropics, under a house, and I think I could count the number of tools I had on one hand. I had to leave the workbench clean after every time I used it. This first guitar took me a year to make, but it suffered I guess from being moved around so much while still in the construction phase. At that time (’74),there were no cheap benches around, but now there are $120 ones from hardware stores.You just have to assemble it yourself. These benches are plenty big enough to do guitar work on.

                         The quickest way to make progress on making a guitar would be to purchase all the wood precut to approximate size, and then do the marking out and design. The tools you will most need are:

1. Saws: tenon saw, fretsaw, coping saw, razor saw.

2. Planes: block plane,small hand plane, spokeshave.

3. Scraper blades.

4.Clamps: wooden klempsia cam type, metal long reach ‘g’ clamps, camping pegs.

5. Knives: a selection of hobby knives.

6. Drill bits from 1/16″ to 1/2″, brad point type as well as the normal type.

7. Measuring rulers: 12″ long to 36″ long.

8.Machine square, Vernier caliper.

9. Swivelling vice. (Versa vice, USA)

10. Router, with specialist bits.

11. Sharpening equipment: diamond leveling stones.

Most of these tools are available from local hardware stores and hobby shops, but the specialist luthier tools are available from www.stewmac.com or www.australianluthiersupplies.com or www.guitarwoods.com

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Building a new guitar is a great way to get involved in repairing guitars. It is very difficult to make a guitar from start to finish without making a few slip-ups. For instance, if you are making a neck with a dovtail join to the body, then you will be able to see all the ways of varying the neck alignment. When a guitar comes in to be repaired, you will have prior knowledge of the dovetail join and where exactly you can insert steam nozzles to work the joint loose.Once the neck is separated from the body, you will know where to remove wood to improve the neck angle. Sometimes one can go too far in removing wood and you have to glue on small shims and resize the fit. Wood removal can also go too far when shaping the neck, and the final profile is not what was first intended. While the neck is not necessarily ruined, one gets to appreciate the many neck profiles arrived at by being too gung-ho.

Using a router around the edge of the guitar top or back can cause chipouts, probably because of going against the grain. They can often be repaired, and by doing so, gets you ready for all the damaged guitars that will come by your shop. You will learn to colour match various pieces of wood and you will have in your wood collection, lots of scraps that you can browse through. I keep lots of small offcuts of spruce, cedar, ebony, rosewood etc. Bridge saddle slots often need to be filled in, in preparation for a new slot to be cut just next to it, so I keep the offcuts from edge binding and use them to fill the slot.

Before a new guitar is lacquered, the whole guitar is thoroughly sanded, and this is where little imperfections show up, like pinholes and small gaps between the binding and the top or back. Special wood fillers can be used to plug these gaps, keeping the colour the same as the surrounding wood.After the lacquering is done, occassionally the new guitar has an altercation with the doorway, so there is now a dent in the edge lacquer. Now you have a chance to do the repair and because you’ve done a great job of it, you will easily be able to tackle a lot of the damaged guitars that come your way.

After years of making guitars of all types, classical, steelstring,electric,bass, harp etc, I found that there are many more types of instruments out there that are just as exciting to make. I have just completed a banjo ukelele, made entirely of wood, including the head. The power of this small instrument with nylon strings is amazing.People that hear it for the first time burst out into laughter, not because it is comical, but because it takes them by surprise. This instrument has a scale length of 17″, and my next effort will have a scale length of 18″, only because of my customer’s preference. I used spruce for the soundboard and hoop pine for the body and neck. The fingerboard is ringed gidyee. The strings tie on to small brads in the tail of the neck, and rock maple is the wood used for the bridge. I used banjo style friction machine heads for the tuners.

I have made several all wood banjos with nylon strings. They too are a great tool for a musician to have in their arsenal. They can be useful for having as a practise instrument if their ‘real’ banjo is too loud in certain situations.They are much lighter than their counterparts and are very comfortable to hold. Their quality of sound allows it to hold its own in a small ensemble. A contact pickup in under the soundboard would be a good way to amplify this instrument.