Posted on January 15, 2026January 15, 2026 by Dale Phillips Chalk-fitting Guitar Braces Chalk-fitting Guitar Braces by Stephen Marchione from his 2017 GAL Convention workshop Originally published in American Lutherie #140, 2020 First, have a plan. Know what you’re making. It seems like an obvious thing, but sometimes people start a guitar without a good idea of what the brace layout will be. When I design a new model, I’ll often get a piece of aluminum flashing and lay out a bracing template. If you’re building an historical model, you can transfer the blueprint to a template of aluminum or plexiglas. This gives you a clear idea of what your braces are supposed to be doing, and it lets you be sure that the braces end up where they were designed to go. Photo 1 is a closeup of one of my bracing templates. I use the little holes to make pencil marks on the soundboard. On a classical guitar, a lot of builders push the big harmonic bars down into the solera, or dished workboard. But that can cause distortion of the top. Even on a Spanish guitar, I take the time to chalk-fit the brace. That gives a better structure with less stress. I highly recommend it. Become A Member to Continue Reading This Article This article is part of the Articles Online featured on our website for Guild members. To view this and other web articles, join the Guild of American Luthiers. For details, visit the membership page. MEMBERS: login for access or contact us to setup your account.
Posted on January 15, 2026January 15, 2026 by Dale Phillips A Flattop Mandolin Resurrection A Flattop Mandolin Resurrection by John Calkin Originally published in American Lutherie #86, 2006 I don't see a lot of mandolins in my repair shop. There aren’t nearly as many out there as there are guitars, and they don’t seem to suffer the same affects of time and abuse as guitars, perhaps just because it is easier to put them up and out of the way. Archtop mandolins are especially strong and seem to live forever despite cracked plates and loose joinery. Flattop mandolins are a different matter. The combination of a flat top and a lot of down tension on the bridge is a recipe for failure. This particular mandolin, an Alrite Army-Navy style by Gibson, came to the Huss & Dalton shop. H&D only repairs H&Ds, but they kindly shuffle other repairs to me. The Alrite, a WWI-era instrument, had a cracked and caved top and some separation of the back. A rectangle of thin plywood about the size of a business card had been wedged between the top and the back just behind the soundhole to help support the top. The action was playable and the instrument tuned to pitch. It sounded OK but was quiet. Other than the mentioned defects, it was in pretty fair shape. A nice mosaic purfling ran around the top, and the rosette matched the purfling. I felt that the mandolin was a candidate for restoration. The only problem was that I didn’t want to do it. I put a quick repair estimate on it of $400–$450, which probably matched the value of the instrument. I sent it back downstairs with the recommendation that it be left alone. I never met the owner. Become A Member to Continue Reading This Article This article is part of the Articles Online featured on our website for Guild members. To view this and other web articles, join the Guild of American Luthiers. Members also receive 3 annual issues of American Lutherie and get discounts on products. For details, visit the membership page. MEMBERS: login for access or contact us to setup your account.
Posted on July 15, 2025July 15, 2025 by Dale Phillips An American in Mirecourt, Part Two An American in Mirecourt, Part Two Violin Construction as Learned by an Apprentice to René Morizot by Paul Schuback from his 1995 GAL Convention workshop Originally published in American Lutherie #65, 2001 and Big Red Book of American Lutherie Volume Six, 2013 See also, An American in Mirecourt by Paul Schuback Roughing Out the Insides of Plates and Cutting f-holes After the outsides of the plates have been carved and scraped to their finished shapes and the purfling has been installed, the next step is to trace the f-holes onto the top. The f-holes will be cut out after the inside of the plate has been roughed out and the plate is thinner, but this is the time when you establish their positions. Measure 19.3MM from the edge of the plate at the neck end to find the bridge position on the centerline, and locate your f-hole template by referencing off of the bridge position and the centerline of the top. You can play with how they are angled to suit your own tastes. Trace the f-holes onto the top, and check to make sure that they end up an equal distance from the edges by measuring with a divider. The French always carve little hollows where the lower wings of the f-holes will go so that those areas will be recessed on the finished top. So after you have traced the f-holes, you gouge, plane, and scrape the wing areas out a little bit. In the process, you will cut away parts of your lines, so you will need to retrace them. Become A Member to Continue Reading This Article This article is part of the Articles Online featured on our website for Guild members. To view this and other web articles, join the Guild of American Luthiers. Members also receive 3 annual issues of American Lutherie and get discounts on products. For details, visit the membership page. MEMBERS: login for access or contact us to setup your account.
Posted on June 30, 2024May 14, 2025 by Dale Phillips Grading on the Curves Grading on the Curves: Fitting Bars and Bridges on Archtop Guitars by Steve Andersen from his 2006 GAL Convention workshop Originally published in American Lutherie #91, 2007 The first thing I’ll show you today is how I fit tone bars to the top. Then I’ll talk about fitting the base of a bridge to a top, first with this router jig that indexes off the top and gets me really close to the final shape, then moving on to the final fitting. I brought some extra materials if anyone wants to try hand-fitting an ebony bridge or a tone bar. I use the term tone bar, because I think of braces as being structural. If you built a flattop guitar without braces, it would just fold up. An archtop could be built without braces and it would hold up fine. The archtop’s bars are not so much for structure, so I call them tone bars. One thing that helps me in the fitting process is that my arching is very consistent from guitar to guitar. The arching templates for my guitars started out based on a D’Angelico New Yorker, and have evolved over the years to what I’m using today. So while I have several body sizes, they have similarities based on what I’ve found works well for my sound. Become A Member to Continue Reading This Article This article is part of the Articles Online featured on our website for Guild members. To view this and other web articles, join the Guild of American Luthiers. Members also receive 3 annual issues of American Lutherie and get discounts on products. For details, visit the membership page. MEMBERS: login for access or contact us to setup your account.
Posted on June 13, 2024May 6, 2025 by Dale Phillips Experimental Violin Acoustics Experimental Violin Acoustics by George Bissinger from his 1984 GAL Convention lecture Originally published in American Lutherie #7, 1986 and Big Red Book of American Lutherie Volume One, 2000 It was a pleasure to discuss the “secrets” of violins at the kind of meeting that would scarcely have seemed possible in the time of the legendary Cremonese luthiers. As a member of the Catgut Acoustical Society, which is devoted to all aspects of bowed string instruments from the raw materials (gut?) to the finished product (cat?) and its sound (meow?), I can only welcome this shared discussion. The Society has sponsored the construction of a family of eight violins covering the frequency range of 41Hz to 1318Hz (lowest to highest open string), and has a demonstrated interest in all violin matters whether they are purely practical, subjective, and aesthetic, or purely abstract, objective, and quantitative. The talk I gave at this GAL meeting covered a range of topics concerning violins in which I personally have been involved. These topics leaned rather more to the concrete aspects of violin making such as working with student instruments, testing plates of unassembled (or humidity disassembled) instruments, plate archings, bassbar tuning, and humidity effects, but also included discussion of coupling between enclosed air oscillations and plate vibrations in the assembled instrument. 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.
