Posted on June 30, 2024September 17, 2024 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 30, 2024January 6, 2025 by Dale Phillips The MacRostie Mandolin Deflection Jig The MacRostie Mandolin Deflection Jig by Don MacRostie from his 2004 GAL Convention workshop Originally published in American Lutherie #94, 2008 The mandolin world is small enough that if you’re even thinking about building one, you probably already know who Don MacRostie is. Don is an inventor, and he’s done more for Stewart-MacDonald than we will ever hear about. He’s been making Red Diamond mandolins for two decades now. At the 2004 GAL Convention Don discussed one of his research tools and told us how he applies it to his construction process to make the sound of his finished instruments more consistent and predictable. — John Calkin At the GAL Convention in 2001, Charles Fox floated the idea of teaching a mandolin building class at his American School of Lutherie. As a result, I taught a two week class, building A-style mandolins from scratch. The only thing we started with was thickly precarved oversize tops and backs. Everything else we made totally from scratch. It was a great experience. Peggy Stuart, a student in the class, documented the experience in a series of American Lutherie articles (AL#75–AL#79). Tim Olsen asked me to demonstrate and explain the plate-deflection machine we used in the class at this convention, so that’s why we’re all here. 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, 2024September 17, 2024 by Dale Phillips Electric Guitar Setup Electric Guitar Setup by Erick Coleman and Elliot John-Conry from their 2006 GAL Convention workshop Originally published in American Lutherie #98, 2009 Guitar companies can only set up their guitars to a certain level and still be cost effective. So even a lot of brand new guitars are brought to our shop to be super set up. Since Erick works for Stewart-MacDonald and we both work in Dan Erlewine’s shop, most of the tools and materials we’re going to mention today are available from Stew-Mac. We do all the neck work on the neck jig. This jig simulates the guitar under string tension. If you simply remove the strings, set the guitar on your bench, tweak the truss rod until everything looks level, then proceed to level the frets, you may find that once it is strung again your leveling job has gone to hell. You haven’t accounted for the abnormalities that string tension usually puts in the neck, and neither have you accounted for the effects of gravity differences between the guitar lying flat on your bench and the guitar in playing position. So we not only use the jig to simulate string tension, we tilt the guitar into playing position before the jig is adjusted. We use about a 70° angle to simulate playing position, since few of the guitar players we know have a stomach flat enough to hold the guitar at a 90° angle to the planet. 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, 2024September 17, 2024 by Dale Phillips Total Flame Out: Retopping a Harp Guitar Total Flame Out: Retopping a Harp Guitar by Harry Fleishman Originally published in American Lutherie #100, 2009 Falling in love causes people to do crazy things. It made me build a harp guitar using a piece of redwood that was so obviously problematic that I should have run from it. But I fell in love with it for its beauty. I should have been faithful to the wonderful straight-grained wood I’d had such success with. But no; I was blinded by its gorgeous curls. Like a C-street politician, I’m paying the price now. Replacing the top on a complicated instrument is no picnic, I can tell you. The harp guitars I’ve made have no actual centerline and no points of symmetry. But once I made the decision to go forward with the retopping, I remembered a cool description of how Taylor Guitars does it. Bob Taylor has the good sense not to trash a guitar just because it doesn’t sound good. He also has the good sense not to sell a guitar that isn’t up to his standards. He also has a CNC machine and interchangeable parts for his guitars. Not I. 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, 2024September 17, 2024 by Dale Phillips It’s All About the Core or How To Estimate Compensation It’s All About the Core or How to Estimate Compensation by Sjaak Elmendorp Originally published in American Lutherie #104, 2010 Ever since I started playing guitar, I’ve wondered why the saddles in my steel string guitars were set at some magical angle and, more puzzling, why the B string in my Martin D-28 (well, a cheap Japanese replica I have had for forty years now and still outbooms any guitar you want to bring to the bonfire) was about 10% sharp. After having accepted that this was one more quirk of the guitar-building community I had since joined, I got intrigued again when I set out to build a long-scale nylon-string acoustic bass (Photo 1) and, for the life of me, didn’t know what compensation to use. The physics of the problem is very straightforward, but I found the mathematics employed to date rather inaccessible and the recipe for applying the developed theoretical frameworks not very clear. Given the fact that I once was a practicing physics PhD, I had to assume I wasn’t the only one wrestling with the question. Over the course of a long e-mail conversation with R.M. Mottola, for which I am very grateful, I was beginning to see some light at the end of the tunnel. 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.
