Australian/New Zealand Luthiers Forum

Kahikatea is the best option for a soundboard

It’s shellac - French polished with ye olde pumice pore fill… another thing I’m curious to see the performance of in the tropics!

Hi all I recently made a guitar for a friend who promptly upped sticks and moved to Darwin. I’ve used hide glue for most of it so when he told me he was moving to the tropics I was curious to see how things would go! He messaged me the other day saying the binding was floating a bit (see attached). ...

One reason why you get drift is that the gullets are filling up before they reach the bottom of the cut. The feed speed needs to be right for the tooth size and the depth of cut. Different woods have different ‘sawdust expansion factors’- that is, different woods fill the gullets at different rates....

That’s a fantastic graph Dave! Thanks very much. It would be also very interesting to plot the stiffness to weight ratio against n.

I think I follow...

So it’s a bit like saying, in order to see if you can tell the difference between Granny Smiths and red delicious (blindfolded perhaps), then first let’s make sure you can tell the difference between apples and bananas?

It’s an interesting topic, and I’m curious Peter; what would be the control that the study design omitted? A control group, in my high-school level understanding of science, is the experiment run the exact same way but without the variable that is being tested. Here the variable is back wood species...

Whelan's Wreckers (part of Delta group) stock it, in Port Melbourne (not far from west gate bridge)

Maybe it amounts to the same thing... like if I take a wheel off my bi-cycle it's now a uni-cycle... if you phase align the two poles of a dipole then you have a monopole...?

I have another probably quite dumb question. When I wire my lounge speakers wrong, they're 'out of phase', but this refers to the polarity of the wires. It does mean that as one speaker moves forward, the other moves back (assuming perfect amp output linearity etc). However, phase linearity of the s...

I was always under the impression from my old beaters that the top's distortion over time was mainly a buckling in front of the bridge from the mostly linear tension of the strings. The smaller rotational force on the bridge ensured that the buckling was a dip rather than a bulge. If you cancel the ...

Judging by what everyone is saying, the answer that you give to this question seems to be related to the answer that you would give to a previous thread, "what is handmade?" The more your guitars are 'handmade', the more time they take, perhaps. So maybe when you are asked, "are your guitars handmad...

Would love to hear how you achieved that beautiful FP in one day!

It would only suit those of us with 'correct' left hand thumb position... eg not me..!

That's a great idea; the Mile End Guitar Shop in Montreal are doing a similar thing I think. It might be worth getting in touch to see how they work it. https://www.facebook.com/pages/Mile-End ... 4922310026

I don't know about torrefied wood but as a hack builder I can offer a triggerfied top:

Really interesting! Thankyou.

Thanks, interesting read.

Two other advantages of hand planing: it is quiet, so you can listen to the radio while you work; and it creates no dust, just a pile of shavings.

Really nice, cool to see such a good combination of the 'purfling' rosette with the 'inlaid pretty veneer' rosette. (for want of a better term)

I've also been thinking about this lately - thinking only, so my comments are only theoretical! But if you thickness the sides to 2mm, then cut the bindings off with a blade whose kerf matches the width of the purfling, then continue to thickness the sides down to 1.5mm, then you will only need to m...

Cheers guys (or should that be 'chur bros'), this one is my sixth attempt. I'm trying hard not to agonise over every little mistake (and there are many) but to learn from each and apply the lesson next time! Easier said than done...you experienced builders are a rare breed - I admire your mental tou...

Not the old-time guitar brand, but a guitar I made for my daughter Stella! The rosette is based on 'starburst' clocks from the mid-century modern era. The top is kahikatea, sides and neck are recycled mahogany bedheads, bridge is totara, binding is kauri and the headstock veneer is Australian lancew...

Thanks for the tip, I'll give it a try next time I use the scraper - the neighbours' lemon tree is just over the fence from the shed...

Since it's the strings in the middle that are breaking, I wonder if the radius on the saddle is too small for his right hand style. Perhaps flattening the radius would help to spread the load, so to speak, over all six strings. ..or will that mean he starts breaking all six?