Posted on July 17, 2026July 21, 2026 by Dale Phillips Let’s Catch Up With Fabio Ragghianti Let’s Catch Up With Fabio Ragghianti by Brian Yarosh Originally published in American Lutherie #114, 2013 Back in the spring of 2000, AL#61 was published with an interesting and well-written “Meet the Maker” article on Fabio Ragghianti by Harry Fleishman. Shortly after that article was published, I had the pleasure to meet Fabio at Harry’s shop in Boulder, Colorado. Now that I’ve become a close friend of Fabio’s and a fellow traveler on his most recent adventurers in lutherie, I felt it fitting to discuss with him what has gone on in the past thirteen years and what might be in store over the next thirteen. I’m sure there is a lot to cover since your interview with Harry back in 2000. First off, how are you doing? Family good? Besides a few minor health problems due to aging, I guess I’m fine all in all. I still live with my wife Luciana in the same 17th-century house with 80CM thick walls up on a hill in Tuscany. When Harry visited, my shop was here in the basement. Eight years ago, I opened a shop in the nearby town of Pietrasanta, specifically to make it easier for customers to find me. I still do a lot of repair, which pays the bills, and I like it. Repairs, besides the routine stuff, can be very challenging and require creativity, ingenuity, and intuition. But the most important change in my life was the birth of my grandson Milo, in September 2011. 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 July 17, 2026July 17, 2026 by Dale Phillips Archtop Guitars With Italian Flare Archtop Guitars With Italian Flare by Stephen Marchione from his 2011 GAL Convention lecture Originally published in American Lutherie #115, 2013 I lived in northern Italy as a kid, in a town near Cremona called Bergamo. In the town square there was a violin maker who also made some guitars. I walked by his workshop every morning on the way to school. I was eight years old and I would always stop to look in the window. My mom was saying, “Hurry up, you’ll be late for school!” and I was like, “Wow! That looks much better than school!” Venetian Italy or Cremonese Italy is the birthplace of the violin and the archtop tradition. The way that architecture and art is treated and looked at there has some important lessons that can be carried into lutherie. As soon as you get to Venice (Photo 1), you notice that everything is in order and everything is built to look a certain way. You can see that people put a lot of time and effort into first imagining how it would look, and then learning a way to create it that would be beautiful and long lasting. 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 July 16, 2026July 16, 2026 by Dale Phillips It Worked for Me: Magnets Hold Truss Rod Cover It Worked for Me: Magnets Hold Truss Rod Cover by Jon Sevy Originally published in American Lutherie #143, 2021 I use truss rods that are adjustable at the peghead, which requires a cover for the exposed truss-rod nut and groove. I usually make the covers out of rosewood, and have for some time been securing them with several small brass screws. One thing users frequently do when they get one of my guitars, especially when they live in a different region of the country with different humidity, is to remove the cover and adjust the truss rod to get the relief and action to their liking. However, to my extreme vexation, they almost never put the truss rod cover back on after adjusting! I’ve seen photos and videos of several of my guitars being played, and almost always there’s a gaping hole (to my vision) at the end of the neck with the truss rod showing. It finally dawned on me that those little screws were just enough of a PITA for the owners that they decided to bag the covers. And in truth, I found them a bit irritating myself. So I started thinking of ways to affix the covers without using screws. I considered some sort of compression clip or spring that would squeeze into the truss rod slot, but never came up with anything that seemed likely to work, until I saw some little neodymium magnets at the local hobby shop. 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 July 15, 2026July 15, 2026 by Dale Phillips New Frets in Old Nibs New Frets in Old Nibs by Ben Haskenhoff Originally published in American Lutherie #142, 2021 A 2004 Hamer Monaco Elite recently passed over my workbench for a refret. It seemed like a good opportunity to take some pictures of my process for refretting a guitar while keeping the binding nibs intact. Photo 1. There were deep grooves and flat spots on the first several frets, and the wear went farther up the neck as well. 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 July 15, 2026July 15, 2026 by Dale Phillips The $75 Guitar Challenge The $75 Guitar Challenge by Doug Hunt and Mark French Originally published in American Lutherie #142, 2021 Mark: A couple years ago, I was walking around a big home store and started to wonder whether it would be possible to build a guitar only from things I could buy there. Obviously, they didn’t sell tuners, fretwire, or truss rods. However, I thought it might be possible if one had those three things. I decided that, given those parts, it might be possible to make a guitar with $75 to spend at the home store. Thinking it might be an interesting challenge, I suggested the idea to Doug Hunt. Doug and I have been guitar-making friends for years, having met as part of a project aiming to teach technical subjects to high school students through guitar making. (Check it out at guitarbuilding.org.) He was interested, though not looking for one more thing to do at the time. A while later, he suggested that a better idea would be to start with a budget of $75 that could be spent anywhere (he’s a big fan of eBay, as it happens). As long as the money could be spent anywhere, he thought that it might be possible to do the whole instrument for $75. Over some months of occasionally revisiting the idea, we did a little negotiating and settled on the following rules: 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.
