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.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 1st, 2008 at 10:25 pm and is filed under Guitar Types. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.