Evolving the Dished Workboard

by John Calkin

Originally published in American Lutherie #65, 2001 and Big Red Book of American Lutherie, Volume Six, 2013



For my money, the dished workboard is one of the most important lutherie inventions ever, making it possible for even rookies to build guitars that are precisely and tightly put together. I’d like to suggest ways to make them more useful. First, though, let’s make it clear what the heck we’re talking about.

Guitars were initially built with flat tops. Classical guitars (and not a few steel strings) were built on a flat workboard that more resembled a tabletop than a piece of movable gear, since it was the size of the entire instrument, neck included. The construction method using the Spanish foot required this size, since the neck became a structural part of the body. Mechanical joints such as the dovetail or bolts freed the luthier to build the body and neck as separate units, and the workboard was reduced to a laminated rectangle the size of the body, and was often dispensed with altogether when the body was built inside a mold.

In 1975 David Russell Young published The Steel String Guitar, the first guitar construction book recommending domed tops. Young, however, made no mention of the dished workboard, but used more primitive methods to achieve the domed top. It wasn’t until the late ’80s that the spherically domed guitar top began to catch on. (Forgive me if I simply call them SDTs.) The easiest way to build SDTs was on top of a spherically dished workboard, which came on the market about that time. (Let’s not call them SDWs; I’ll explain why in a bit.) The merits of SDTs are not at all obvious to musicians, nor are all luthiers convinced that they are the way to go, but an important thing happened here. Guitar backs have always been arched, and fitting an arched back to a set of bent sides equipped with lining and end blocks has always been one of the bugaboos of lutherie. It’s not easy to do in a professional manner. But with one simple step, it became possible to fit perfectly arched braces to a perfectly arched back, and then to fit the entire assembly to perfectly shaped ribs.