Australian/New Zealand Luthiers Forum

A fantastic looking guitar and great workmanship. Well done. Only your second? Wow!!!

I'm pretty sure that filament tape is available at Officeworks.

I have processed bone for nuts and saddles but I enlist the services of my pet Labrador, Nelson, to do much of the preprocessing work. He is an expert at this and gets the bone nice and clean then he leaves it in the sun to bleach. It took very little training for him to do such skilled work.

I must have been lucky with the spruce I got for my first falcate built as it bent easily. I clamped the end of each 1.7mm strip to a form of the appropriate shape, draped a damp cloth over it then ran a hot clothes iron over it to press it onto the form. Then I clamped the piece in place for a shor...

What an outstanding instrument. I'd love to hear more about the building process. It seems to be way more complex than most acoustic guitars.
Well done.

Darryl at Wheeler Custom Lutherie has a lot more wood than he advertises in his online store. I have bought EIR from him a few years ago. Give him a call.
http://www.wheelerguitars.com.au/

Jack, From your original post, I understand that you have tried to obtain the long and cross grain E values (and Glc) for the wood of the top and back plates and have used both the tap testing (spectrographs) and deflection tests. Both methods are described in "the books" but with the main focus on ...

Very impressive work. Well done.

The value of f for all frets except fret 1 is calculated using pythagoras' rule using only the fret position values in column 2 and the action values in column 3 (as in equation 4.7-30 in the black book). For fret 1, there are two slight differences. There is no action value, as such, at the nut, so...

The binding should be secure. Most likely it was glued into place. If it does come a bit loos where you do your surgery, it can always be easily fixed with CA glue superglue), particularly if you're not concerned about the appearance after the surgery.

Thanks for your response Wayne. I don't think the heat marks occurred on the fox bender as the sides looked clean after that. I wrapped them in damp paper and heated to 300F. It's most likely they occurred while fine tuning the shape on the bending iron although the outside faces only would have bee...

After final scraping and sanding of the Pau Ferro sides of my current build, there are still stripe marks that I assume have originated during the bending process. They are on the non-cut-away side, which I bent using a fox style bender and then fine tuned on a bending iron. I tried to remove them b...

Speaking of retarders, I once had a problem with blushing of a nitrocellulose finish. I googled for help and found some advice from a "finishing expert" (which I am not) to spray lightly with retarder. I did that and the blush disappeared instantly and completely (as far as I could tell). I have no ...

I am nowhere near as experienced in sunbursting as other posters. I have used a Star LVLP detail gun for spraying a sunburst Stratocaster, mixing the wood dye with the lacquer. However, I have just finished a sunburst "dye stain" on a mandolin using an airbrush (for the first time) and it came out q...

Would another approach to this problem be to glue the CF tow to the sound board, wait until it dries, then glue the brace on. The CF tow and epoxy can be flattened to a minimal thickness (I would imagine 0.1 to 0.2 mm) and flattening with a small plastic trowel is a good way to ensure that the fibre...

I locate it on the guitar shoulder but I glue a curved off-cut from the guitar side to the inside face to act as reinforcing. That way the material I screw into is at least 4mm thick. You could glue in two reinforcing layers if you wanted the extra strength from 6mm thick timber.

I was thinking along the same lines (putting a groove in the braces) after discovering the difficulty of getting the correct amount of epoxy during my first falcate build. Too much glue and the CF tow floats out. Too little and the brace may fail or not achieve full composite action between the wood...

Thanks everyone for your tips and advice.

As my manual skills are pretty poor, I kind of get a kick out developing jigs (or modifying those invented by others) that give near perfect results when making parts that I would probably stuff up if I tried making entirely by hand. So I get a bit of joy rather than frustration.

Like Rocket, I decided to "broaden my horizons" by building a couple of mandolins. During some over exuberant planing of the plastic binding with a violin plane, I gouged some chips in the European spruce top and red maple back. I would appreciate advice on the best method to repair or conceal them....

Thanks for the information of Affinity Designer. I also believe that using CAD and similar programs can be very useful for a luthier. Setting out neck, string and bridge geometry is one example. I have also found printing out component drawings and sticking the printout onto the wood for cutting out...

Happy Birthday Bob.

Martin,

Oops. I didn't see that one. I thought I usually got an email notification of a pm.

Anyway, I'm happy to help if I can. I'll look into it tonight.

An outstanding 12 string, John. Great workmanship as usual.

I'm glad the bridge rotation worked out OK. ( it would have been embarrassing for me if it didn't).

collinsguitar wrote:Looks wonderful John. I'm not sure about anyone else, but I for one would love to hear the results!

I would love to hear a sample of the sound too.

What saddle and nut compensation did you do, if any?