Posted on July 1, 2022May 23, 2025 by Dale Phillips Questions: Damaged Ironbird Questions: Damaged Ironbird by John Calkin Originally published in American Lutherie #94, 2008 Adam from the Internet asks: I have a B.C. Rich 2003 Platinum Pro Ironbird. Got seriously damaged in shipping. The body has five cracks, in some places that I don’t know are even possible to fix. I play technical death metal, black metal, Gothenburg death metal, and all those styles, my favorite being neo-classical metal. The body is agathis. I have an EMG Zakk Wylde set in it. (I could care less about Zakk Wylde. The set, though, is the standard 85/81 combo.) There is a large crack that goes down the middle of the body from where the neck goes on (bolt on neck — the action is great though), then two cracks around the cutaway near the neck (I need to have that so I can have fast access to the 24th fret). There’s another on the back that’s spread just past the serial number plate. I think I’d just want to fix it so I could play it again. I’m not at all concerned about looks right now. B.C. Rich 2003 Platinum Pro Ironbird. Photo by Adam G. John Calkin from Greenville, Virginia responds: Go to a hobby shop and buy water-thin superglue. Also buy superglue accelerator. Take all the hardware and electronics off the guitar. Mask off the cracks with a heavy coat of good car wax — don’t use tape. Push/tap the broken wood back into alignment and trickle in some superglue. It will wick into the crack. If it wants to run out of the crack into a cavity or out the other side of the guitar, use some accelerator to solidify it at the point of runout, not at the fill point of the crack. Keep trickling the glue in. Work slowly and keep looking for exit points for the glue so you don’t make a big mess on the other side of the guitar or something. Keep wiping the glue buildup off the wax and rewax as many times as you have to to keep the paint surfaces clean. Eventually the wood will be completely sealed inside and the glue will stop seeping in. It’s almost like welding wood. If you’ve been careful, there should only be a line of glue right at the crack to clean up. Scrape it clean with a razor blade, sand level with 1000 grit wet/dry paper, polish with automotive rubbing compound, and you are good to go. I’d bet a lot of money that your guitar will be as sound as it ever was if you do this right. I also have to warn you that I’ve seen guys make a horrible mess of their guitars trying to do this, with glue drips and buildup everywhere. But unless they ran glue into the pots or something, their guitars were fixed. If this sounds intimidating, find a pro to do it. It’s not that big of a deal, you just have to be very careful.
Posted on July 1, 2022May 14, 2025 by Dale Phillips Meet the Maker: Do Viet Dung Meet the Maker: Do Viet Dung by Andy DePaule Originally published in American Lutherie #74, 2003 and Big Red Book of American Lutherie Volume Seven, 2015 Christmas eve, 1965. I arrived in Saigon, age eighteen years plus one week. I had joined the Army on my seventeenth birthday after dreaming of it for two years. I felt lucky when the Vietnam War started to get serious, because it was my chance to be a hero. But the rule was that you had to be eighteen years old to go. OK, I was the classic stupid kid. I ended up doing two tours of duty in Vietnam, by my own choice. I don’t know why, but I loved that place from the first day. That has never changed for me. I did become disenchanted with what we were doing there. These were the “light at the end of the tunnel” days, and those of us on the ground were already starting to realize that this was the first war we would not win. But even when things were rough, there was no other place I wanted to be. Become A Member to Continue Reading This Article This article is part of our premium web content offered to Guild members. To view this and other web articles, join the Guild of American Luthiers. Members also receive 4 annual issues of American Lutherie and get discounts on products. For details, visit the membership page. If you are already a member, login for access or contact us to setup your account.
Posted on July 1, 2022May 28, 2025 by Dale Phillips The Right CAD Curve The Right CAD Curve Bezier Curves, Not Splines, Are Truly Smooth Curves by David Golber Originally published in American Lutherie #72, 2002 and Big Red Book of American Lutherie Volume Six, 2013 Bezier curves, as opposed to splines, have been known since the 1970s. They are supported by AutoCAD and AutoCAD LT, but not by many other popular CAD packages. What are they, and why do we care? It’s easiest to start with an example. Fig. 1 shows the outline of a harpsichord. Look at the curved side. The coordinates of the points are from Kielklaviere,1 which describes the curved side of the instrument by listing the coordinates of points along the side. The curve in Fig. 1 is the ordinary spline through those points. Fig. 2 shows that one of the points is erroneous enough that it clearly makes the curve bumpy. Become A Member to Continue Reading This Article This article is part of our premium web content offered to Guild members. To view this and other web articles, join the Guild of American Luthiers. Members also receive 4 annual issues of American Lutherie and get discounts on products. For details, visit the membership page. If you are already a member, login for access or contact us to setup your account.
Posted on July 1, 2022May 9, 2025 by Dale Phillips An Experimental Tenor Violin An Experimental Tenor Violin by Frederick C. Lyman, Jr. Originally published in American Lutherie #18, 1989 Building a musical instrument always involves making decisions. Even if the instrument is a familiar model that has been built many times before, the actual pieces of wood are unique, and require unique treatment. Obtaining predictable results, even such as might appear to be instances of mere routine uniformity, usually requires a surprising degree of conscious, intelligent control. In respect to quality of sound, the more an instrument is produced by an invariable automated process, the more variable and inconsistent may be the result. That is because we are dealing with subtle differences which add up. The more intelligence that can be applied to the many decisions that have to be made, the better the cumulative result can be. Of course, wrong decisions can also be made. This can happen easily when the project being undertaken is one-of-a-kind, where the lessons of past mistakes cannot be applied to the problems. Become A Member to Continue Reading This Article This article is part of our premium web content offered to Guild members. To view this and other web articles, join the Guild of American Luthiers. Members also receive 4 annual issues of American Lutherie and get discounts on products. For details, visit the membership page. If you are already a member, login for access or contact us to setup your account.
Posted on July 1, 2022May 27, 2025 by Dale Phillips A Different Way of Defining Body Shapes A Different Way of Defining Body Shapes by Mark French Originally published in American Lutherie #88, 2006 As I look through American Lutherie, I am struck by the advances in the tools some of us use to make our instruments. While there will always be the traditionalists who do most of their work by hand, more of us are using computer-controlled machines to make jigs or parts. Even the musical instrument lab here at Purdue (www.metalsound.org) has its own CNC router. Large manufacturers like Taylor Guitars use CNC equipment for the majority of their building operations. An obvious advantage of all this cool stuff is that parts can be made much more precisely. However, the parts can only be as precise as the instructions that are driving the machines. Look through your favorite book on guitar making and find the section on laying out the body shape. Even the best books, like Making an Archtop Guitar by Benedetto and Guitarmaking: Tradition and Technology by Cumpiano and Natelson, offer only the most basic description of the shape. It’s pretty common for the instructions to start with something like “draw a straight line on a sheet of brown wrapping paper to use as a centerline.” Become A Member to Continue Reading This Article This article is part of our premium web content offered to Guild members. To view this and other web articles, join the Guild of American Luthiers. Members also receive 4 annual issues of American Lutherie and get discounts on products. For details, visit the membership page. If you are already a member, login for access or contact us to setup your account.
