American Lutherie #143 is our Summer 2021 issue. Federico Sheppard builds a copy of FE08, the astonishingly elaborate early opus of Torres. In Part Five of our series on building a guitar with Charles Fox, the fretboard is slotted, crowned, and glued to the neck, which is then shaped. Alfred Woll discusses the development of the Neapolitan mandolin and shows us how to make the arched-and-canted soundboard. Leonardo Michelin-Salomon builds Romantic-era guitars in Norway with local spruce. Mark French shows us how to quickly make a frequency-response curve of a guitar using a hand-held digital recorder or a smart phone. Harry Fleishman makes an inexpensive vise that can clamp to any bench top and can swivel and tilt all over the place. Steve Dickerson’s first uke build used cheap wood from the home improvement store. R.M. Mottola gives not-too-technical summaries of two articles recently published on-line by Savart Journal. Reviews include books on Barrios, D’Angelico, and D’Aquisto; a tracker gizmo; and a video on solidbody guitar making. and much more. See the full preview here.

Scheduled to mail to 2021 members early July.