I mentioned in a past post that I was going to take a class in guitar building through my local Woodcraft store. The guitar kits they use are from US Guitar Kits. The kits are partially assembled. They have the sides bent and the back attached. They have the bracing attached (though in the 2 kits used in the class, they needed some re-glueing of the braces – minor). The sides and the back are a laminated wood (ours was a light colored outer veneer, the site says is Sapele). The top is solid spruce. The other parts look adequate but are probably not the highest quality. All in all a decent value for a $260 kit (price through the class at Woodcraft).
My hopes are to learn a few of the basics of luthier. With this kit, I get to learn about attaching tops (and bottoms though indirectly since the skills are similar); attaching the binding a purfling (which may give a hint at how to do the sound hold and other decorative elements on the back and heal side); working and shaping the braces; building a fret board including fret wires, nut; attaching the bridge; setup and tuning the guitar. With this class and kit, I DON”T expect to learn bending and shaping the sides; attaching the binding around the sound hole; shaping the neck; applying finish to the guitar.
In our class, the first step was to find the position of the top onto the assembled lower body. This required finding centers on the top and body. Once this is done, we can mark the positions of the braces and the rough outline of the body on the top. Next comes shaping/scaloping the bracing. The 4 points of the x-braces and the 2 points of the top brace will have an equivalent notch in the support/bent bracing the goes around the tops of the sides. The remaining points of the other braces get pared down to the top before they touch the sides. The scaloping of the the braces have hills and valleys and the kits come with a template to do these. In scaloping, I found it a little challenging with the grain changes. I believe that I got a pretty smooth result but it took quite a while (you can see some bad pictures at the bottom).
The next step was to rough cut the body using a band saw. I learned 2 things. First, I need to replace my band saw blade. Second, WOW! it is sure easy to cut softer woods. I eventually want to build a guitar using only hand tools (for this step, it might be a bow saw).
Next was cutting the matching notches for the x-brace and top brace points (6 in all). The teacher recommended a double sided skew chisel and this did make things easier than standard flat/single sided paring chisels. With a few attempts at dry fitting, I needed to make a few adjustments with the notches and the end points of the bracing.
Last for this class was glueing the top down. This required 25 or so clamps (see the picture for the style of clamps). It was important to focus on a few key points including the waist, the widest point on both top and bottom and both the heal and neck locations. One last point was using a straight board to clamp just above the sound hole (see picture). This ensures that the location above the sound hole will be flat so it can receive the fret board.
Overall, I learned a lot and had a lot of fun (good instructor).
Ultimately, I hope to build a guitar from the ground up (maybe not quite so far as harvesting my own wood) and doing it with only hand tools. There are suppliers of luthier grade parts that should make this a challenging but fund experience.
