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Tag Archives: guitar

Making rosettes for a classical guitar (3)

The rosette below is made from laburnum, arranged to show the striking contrast between the light coloured sapwood and the dark heartwood. It’s rather more complicated to make than the spalted beech rosette shown in the previous post and a fair degree of accuracy is needed throughout.

The starting point is a small piece of laburnum. This one has been air drying for a couple of years and I reckon that it should be pretty stable by now. I’ve scraped off the wax that covered the endgrain while it was drying.

The first step is to decide how many individual sector shaped pieces to use to complete the circle. I’m planning to use 20 for this rosette, which means that the sides of the billet must be planed to converge at an angle of 18°. That’s hard to manage on the bench top and it’s worth making a cradle to hold the wood while you plane it to size and shape. Go slowly and carefully because it’s important not only that the angle is right but that there’s no taper along the length of the piece. In addition, the width must be right so that the line between the sap wood and the heart wood ends up where you want it to be in the finished rosette.

Having planed the wood to a near perfect prism, it’s sliced on the bandsaw.

The pieces are numbered as they come off, so that they can be put together again in consecutive order.

Here the rosette is being assembled ‘dry’.

It may be necessary to make some fine adjustments with a shooting board and a block plane.

Here, the first piece is being glued and clamped into position on its plywood base. The base has been marked out in pencil to aid positioning of the individual pieces.

As the pieces are glued into place, the rosette nears completion.

Cleaned up and levelled with a finely set block plane.

Capo for lap steel guitar

A while ago, a friend bought himself a lap steel guitar – the sort with a hollow neck, square in section – but became frustrated because he couldn’t find a capo that would fit it. He couldn’t use the usual type of capo, of course, because the hollow neck of the guitar was too thick and too fragile to allow the clamp to work and because the strings were too high over the fingerboard. So I made him this device, which is easy to fit and adjust and works well.

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In case anyone else has a similar problem, I thought it might be worth explaining how it’s made. You’ll need a scrap of hardwood roughly 2.5 x 1 x 3/8 inches in size; a piece of bone or ebony to make the inverted nut; some cork or leather to damp the strings on the headstock side of the capo; a 2.5 inch length of round bar in brass or steel of 1/4 inch diameter; a short length of threaded rod of 1/8 inch diameter; and a small piece of wood or metal or plastic to make a knob with which to turn the threaded rod. You’ll also require a matching tap to cut a thread in the hole of the brass bar.

The photographs below should make the construction clear, so I’m not going to give details. If you have any queries, please email me at info@finelystrung.com. The only thing to watch out for is that the threaded rod that pulls the bar against the underside of the strings shouldn’t be too long or it may damage the fingerboard.

To fit the capo, loosen the screw holding the metal bar – but not so far that the bar becomes detached. Hold the capo with its long axis parallel to the strings and insert the bar between the two middle strings. Then rotate both the capo and the bar through 90 degrees, making sure that the nut side of the capo is orientated to face the bridge. Slide the capo to the desired position and screw it up just tightly enough to produce a clear sound from all the strings.

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Zebrano guitar

The guitar that I have been writing about in my last few posts is now, more or less, completed. It’s finished with French polish, which will benefit from a final burnishing in a couple of weeks time when it has got fully hard. But I couldn’t wait any longer to string it up and hear how it sounds. The back and ribs are zebrano and the soundboard is European spruce. The binding is Rio rosewood and maple, and the soundhole rosette and headstock veneer are spalted beech. I’m pleased with how it has worked out, though perhaps I got carried away when it came to the rosette, which might have been more elegant if the diameter had been a little less. Below are a few photographs of the completed instrument.

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More on the V-joint

Looking around for more on V-joints, I found Gary Demos’ site where he describes not only the construction of the joint but how he made a copy of a Panormo guitar. It’s a fine looking instrument and there are a few mp3 files that show that it sounds very good as well.

Cumpiano’s website has a brief discussion of the merits of the V-joint versus the scarf joint too. (You’ll need to scroll down a bit to find it.) I enjoyed his comment:

If you use a v-joint people will shower you with praises for your skill and those in the know will guess that you don’t have to make a living at making guitars.

There’s probably some truth in that. I’ve always admired Cumpiano’s down to earth approach to guitar making and his refusal to subscribe to anything that can’t be properly explained. See, for example, his courteous but uncompromising dismissal of the mystique of tap tone tuning.

Still, in the interests of historical accuracy, I’m going to pursue the V-joint a bit further. It seemed worth shaping the neck and headstock of my trial joint to get an idea of what it would look like on a finished instrument. In reality, it doesn’t look quite as good as the photographs suggest. At this resolution, glue lines, which in places are wider than they should be, don’t show up. But I’ve discovered two useful things: first, that the joint isn’t impossibly difficult to make and second, that it’s certainly strong enough.

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V-joints for guitar headstock

Following on from my recent experiment with a small guitar, I’ve been thinking about going a stage further and making a copy of a 19th century guitar of the sort for which Panormo is famous. There’s one in the Edinburgh University collection of historic musical instruments and, rather helpfully, there’s a measured drawing available. The collection’s website has fierce warnings about all the content being copyright so I haven’t posted a photograph, but you can see the instrument by clicking here.

The neck of this guitar joins the head in a traditional V-joint. This isn’t a technique that I’ve ever used before so I’ve been trying it out, partly to get my hand in for making it and partly to reassure myself that the joint is stronger than it looks. There’s a good illustrated article on making V-joints on the Official Luthiers Forum, although you may have to register with the forum to get access. The geometry of the joint isn’t really very complicated but, on the other hand, it isn’t entirely straightforward either. The article explains it well.

The photograph below shows my rough first attempt being glued up. Hot hide glue is the correct stuff to use but, for this trial run, I substituted Titebond.

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Here it is with the clamps off.

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And after cleaning it up.

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And trying to break it.

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I wondered, in view of the endgrain gluing surfaces of the joint, whether the joint would be strong enough. So I played around, first by loading it with a 20kg weight and then by putting it in the vice and pulling on it as hard as I could. I couldn’t shift it and now feel entirely confident that it’s up to the job.

Preparing the binding

The binding is made from sawn veneers of ebony and maple. The photograph below shows a true edge being planed using a shooting board before using the bandsaw to slice off a narrow strip.

Here, a border of maple is being glued to the ebony in a shop-made clamping device.

Below is a strip of the finished binding, bent and ready to be glued into the ledge already routed on the guitar.

Bracing the soundboard

The great photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson, is said never to have re-arranged a scene or cropped a negative. It was, I suppose, his entirely admirable desire to show things as they actually were rather than how they might have been. Of course, being French, he dressed it up in fancy language. “Il n’y a rien dans ce monde qui n’ait un moment decisif” was how he put it.

Why do I bore you with this? Well, because yesterday afternoon when I was about to take a photograph of the struts being glued onto the soundboard, I caught myself on the verge of tidying the bench before the shot. Why on earth did I think that was necessary? I’m not trying to write an article for one of those wood-working magazines where, if the pictures are anything to go by, projects seem to reach completion without a tool being removed from a rack or a shaving falling to the floor.

Anyway, I stopped myself just in time. Here is where I’ve got to with the guitar that I’m working on at the moment.

Preparing the soundboard

The soundboard is nice piece (well, actually two pieces, of course) of close-grained spruce from Le Bois de Lutherie, which I joined and thicknessed to about 3mm – producing lots of shavings, as you can see below.

Then, using a Dremel mini-router in a shop-made device, I cut a channel for the rosette that I wrote about in a previous post, a few days ago.

Here’s the top, cut roughly to shape with the rosette inlaid.

Scraper plane

The cocobolo guitar back that I showed in an earlier post is now jointed and I spent some time yesterday bringing it down to a thickness of just over 2 mm. The grain of the two halves runs in opposite directions after ‘book-matching’, which makes it difficult to avoid tearout along the centre join. And even without that, cocobolo is hard and difficult to deal with. The tool that solves these problems is my Millers Falls scraper plane.

I bought it several years ago in a second hand tool shop and never found it worked well enough to be useful until I replaced its thin cabinet scraper blade with a thicker one from Ron Hock. This transformed its performance and, although I suppose you could do the job with a cabinet scraper by hand, I now think of it as an indispensable tool.

Since it works with a negative cutting angle, a scraper plane doesn’t remove much material at a time. So, if you’re starting with wood that is way too thick, you need something that’s faster, even if it leaves a rougher finish, to get down to somewhere near the final thickness before switching to the scraper plane. A good tool for that is a smoothing plane fitted with a modified (toothed) blade but I’ll save that discussion for another post. Pictures of the scraper plane below.

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