Join me for a tour of the Workshop. I'll show you work in progress, describe my elevated fingerboard design and soundboard treatment, and you can take a look out the window along the way.
Work in Progress... an overview

 

Before I begin to build a guitar the possibilities are limitless. Every step along the way I make decisions which guide the final result in the direction of my imagination, and each step limits the possible outcomes further and further until only one remains. Even then, because of the ineffable qualities of wood, we luthiers are in the business of attempting to control the uncontrollable. Yet with experience, care, the courage to dream, and belief in one's self, something special can happen. I put everything I have into each guitar, then go on to the next with the conviction that I can go even further.

Tools

I use the basic tools you might find in any woodshop, and a number of specialized tools and jigs designed to complete tasks unique to lutherie. Every luthier finds his own balance between the use of power tools and hand tools. Mine is somewhere toward the middle of the range of possibilities. Most of the tasks of roughing out the parts I do with bandsaw, planer, and table saw. Power tools prove their worth in performing repetitive tasks. When I make neck blanks or bridge blanks or fingerboards I may make 30 or more at a time.

Conversely, hand tools afford a direct sensate connection to the wood, which is essential, for instance, when working the soundboard. Furthermore, using power tools to make one or two of a part is not very productive because most of the time is spent setting up the tools. Here, hand tools hold their own, unless you have the luxury of a large shop with permanent stations with power tools for each step in the process. But then you have a factory...

I begin with the soundboard. Several times a year I go through my supply of roughcut sets -- feeling, listening, looking -- conjuring up the sound they will bring to a finished guitar. After I select a set I join the two halves and plane them flat to a thickness of about 3 mm. It is then cut to the outline of my plantilla and the rosette is assembled and set in place. When the glue is dry I plane the top surface flat again. Then I turn it over and plane to its final thickness, which might be anywhere from 1.4 mm to 2.6 mm. It is now ready for the various plates, bars, and braces to be added.

First, however, I give my attention to the back and sides. The back, like the top, is usually made of two bookmatched pieces. These are joined with a decorative strip up the middle. After thicknessing, I glue a reinforcing strip of mahogany to the inside of this joint and three transverse bars of mahogany running across the joint. These bars are shaped to a gentle curve along their gluing surfaces and glued to the back in a mold in order to give a side to side arch to the back. When it is fitted to the guitar the contoured sides will give it a longitudinal curve as well. The result will be a slightly domed back with considerably more strength and ability to comply with changes in humidity.The sides are planed, thickness-sanded and scraped to their final thickness before bending. Here the thickness may vary from as much as 2.3 mm to as little as 1.3mm. Though I will insist most of the sound qualities of the finished instrument depend on treatment of the top, back and sides do exert their influences. For a quick, responsive instrument I will make the sides thin. For more sustain and a "solidity" to the sound I will leave them thick.

I used to bend the sides over a hot pipe. Then I graduated to an electric cast aluminum bending iron. In recent years I have delighted in using the Fox sidebender, powered by springs and 3 lightbulbs (very high-tech!). Once bent, they are placed in an outside mold and solid linings are glued on. The linings serve the purpose of providing an interface between the sides and the soundboard and back. This is another step where design decisions can affect the sonic outcome. Linings should be stiff and somewhat massive to give the soundboard a stable perimeter to direct its energy in a productive way.
Mine are two-ply ash or oak, with a third ply added around the lower bout of the top. That third ply makes a total thickness of about 6 mm. It also makes a noticeable improvement in the sound.

At this point I bring my attention to the elevated fingerboard neck, which, in fact, I have already made along with two or three dozen more in a fit of powertool mania. The machine work is done but there is still a long way to go. Now I will index it to my workboard with pins and give a gentle curve to the surface that will eventually go over the soundboard above the soundhole. With the neck in place on the workboard the soundboard can now be safely set in position for bracing.

First, the stiffening plates are added around the soundhole, in the area of the elevated fingerboard-neck assembledge, and under the bridge position. Then I add transverse bars in the upper bout, followed by a fan pattern of braces in the lower bout.

Typically, I add a "treble bar" to make an asymmetrical pattern.This helps me achieve a more even response throughout the frequency spectrum. The number, placement, and shaping of these little struts of spruce or cedar have a profound effect on the outcome. They support the top and help resist the inexorable pull toward oblivion from the strings, while giving shape to the frequency spectrum that defines the sound of the guitar.

When I have reached a satifactory resolution of this process, I am ready to fit and glue the sides. I attach an outside mold to my workboard and slip the sides in place. To make the proper fit it is necessary to have anticipated the swoop of the upper bout in the initial shape given to the sides. This fit is refined as mortices are cut in the linings to receive the big transverse bars. When the fit is "perfect", the sides are glued in place and blocks are placed fore and aft.

 

Soundboard Species

Each species of wood used for soundboards has merit, and each imparts its own unique sonic character to the finished guitar. The differences are largely manifest in the first few milliseconds of the plucked note and are often felt as much as heard (it is easier to tell them apart when playing them than from out in front). The most commonly used species are Western red cedar (Thuya plicata) and two of the spruces (Picea excelsa, P. engelmanni). It is dangerous to generalize but I find spruce tends to paradoxically have a more opaque yet clear sound; often with more sustain and a greater range of timbre. Cedar is often quicker and darker, with more "headroom" in the treble register.

They also differ in how they mature. Cedar tends to be more developed from the start, but spruce typically has more potential for growth in the future. A young cedar guitar may be more open and louder initially, but with time a spruce will often match and occassionaly exceed it. Players adapt their touch to the subtler qualities of their personal guitar and often need time to adjust to a new one. Ultimately, which species of soundboard wood a player prefers is a matter of taste. And taste is often like baseball: the team of your youth is likely to be your team 'till the bitter end.

To complete the interior, corbels are placed over the exposed ends of the big transverse bar below the soundhole to lock it in place. Now is the last opportunity to make any final adjustments to the interior. A wash coat of shellac is applied and the sides are morticed to receive the back. Here again, it is necessary to plane the edge of the linings that mate with the back to the subtle curve that defines its arch. When the fit is right, it too is glued in place.

Excess wood is now trimmed from the edges of the soundboard and back where they protrude beyond the sides, and the sides themselves are scraped clean. At this point all that remains to complete the box is to cut the rebates around the edges and add the bindings and decorative purflings.

The rebates can be cut by hand, but most luthiers use some sort of router arrangement. Typically, the guitar is stationary and the router is hand-held. This is a very dicey and stressful proceedure. For me, a better solution is to keep the router stationary and move the guitar through it. This is especially true with the elevated fingerboard design, which has a soundboard that is decidedly not flat. Here the router moves up and down to follow the contour of the top of the box and is always oriented properly with respect to the vertical sides. Two passes are enough to cut the rebate for the binding and one more completes the stairstep needed for the purfling. An added bonus is that prior to routing rebates, the back and soundboard are easily trimmed flush with the sides. Likewise, the assembled bindings and purflings can be quickly and accurately trimmed flush and rounded over.

The bindings are usually offcuts from the sides. The decorative purflings are all made in my shop from veneers and plane shavings. Each guitar has about a dozen different kinds ofwood in these decorative elements.

 

 

The box is complete and the stage is set for assembly and shaping of the neck and fingerboard. The assembly process uses the box as a template. The heel is applied to the neck after being fitted to its eventual position on the box, and with the neck clamped to the box, the fingerboard is glued in place. The fingerboard itself is ebony. The fret slots are cut in advance of assembly but the frets are not pounded home until the guitar is almost complete. For an extended description of all this you can go to the elevated fingerboard design page.

Once the neck has received its final shaping, the finish process can begin. Almost all my guitars are French polished. This is a process whereby shellac, dissolved in alcohol, is applied with a fabric muñeca and rubbed on the surface of the guitar until the cows come home, or until a kind friend yells in your ear "enough already!" It begins with filling the pores of the rosewood and mahogany. For this purpose fine pumice can be applied with the polish. When the surfaces are nearly filled, the neck and box can finally be joined. I glue them with a spline joint to add strength and index them to one another. Once done, the final stages of building up the gloss in the finish can commence.

Double-hole Tie-block

The bridge tie-block on my guitars employs a double-hole system. With good reason this has become popular with a number of luthiers in recent years. It increases the string angle over the saddle, which on many guitars is beneficial, and it eliminates the notorius 4th (D) string breakdown problem, since the string no longer is looped around itself between the saddle and tieblock. It is important to tie off the strings properly so they won't slip.

Meanwhile, the frets are set and dressed. And just as the polish is beginning to look acceptable, one more bit of wood needs to be hovered over and pampered for a while: the bridge. Most of its shape has been determined in the dusty, noisy powertool phase, where it was fabricated along with all its brothers and sisters. Now it is selected to be applied to the guitar and the final hand shaping brings it to its final dimensions and weight. The soundboard is domed under the bridge. To fit the bridge to this I use a scraper. Once fitted, the polish is scraped clean where the bridge will go and they are glued together with the help of a vacuum pump.

As the glue dries and the guitar slowly comes to equilibrium, I typically work on the nut and saddle. These are bone, and I shape them to specifications determined by my research on intonation. Once these are completed, or nearly so, it is difficult to wait any longer before adding tuning machines and stringing the guitar for the first time. If I am patient I will find other things to do until the day after gluing the bridge. Even though I might do it sooner, a truer picture will emerge later... There is always more polishing to do.