Australian/New Zealand Luthiers Forum

On the sinker redwood, it probably didn't have different characteristics than other redwoods felled at the time. Most sinker logs were simply pushed into the mud at the bottom of the river as they were being floated out by other logs behind them when something impeded the whole group from proceeding...

I agree it would be an unusual veneer but not impossible. The two pictures I included are of a couple of trees between 8 and 10 feet in diameter. Take one half again as big, give it some ground swell and think about how they would handle it. Early loggers would notch in a couple of toe boards and sa...

Those of us who live here also call it the Pacific Northwest. I have seen similar figure in fir, though not quite on this scale but a tree cut at about that time could very well be enormous. By enormous I mean up to 15 feet in diameter or even more and If it came from an island near Vancouver B.C. i...

Being in the USA I have seen a lot of guitars like this one. The sides are almost certainly solid and probably thinner than most guitars now. The kind of separation you see on the top and back is nearly universal on guitars which have been stored and not played. They can sound pretty good, especiall...

My personal guitar is a dreadnaught I built over 10 years ago with a Douglas fir top, Martin style x bracing. It is loud and has a very full sound. I thinned the top by feel, that is I didn't measure thickness as I worked. I just took it out and measured the thickness of the top. It is 0.08 inches t...

I don't know what you have available there but here in the states we have a thing called blue painters tape. It is a lower adhesion masking tape meant to protect against lifting old paint when masking between walls or a wall and a ceiling. I have used it many times and never had a problem with it li...

Yes, I have seen this before. I'm not sure what causes it but I have sometimes been able to draw it out with naptha, or failing that, acetone. And sometimes not. Its worth a try although I think it is a great excuse to do a sunburst top. (which I have never done)

Yes they were there and I thought I had a couple of nice closeups of them, but as I said, the camera battery failed me. Loved the design and the execution. There were some pieces by others who post here on the forum in the Australia exhibit which is right next door. This is another instrument at the...

Yes, it is a Swedish keyed fiddle and though it is hard to see in the picture the keys are in three rows. Four paired strings but some can play two notes at once, sort of a pianolin. In the mechanized instrument section there was a machine that played a similar instrument but the strings were bowed ...

I was in Phoenix last week and was able to spend a day at the Musical Instruments Museum. It is an amazing collection of instruments, some crude, some simply strange, some awesomely crafted, some famously owned, and some beyond description. My camera battery died just as I reached the Australia/New ...

I've done the Frank Ford fix on spruce using carving tools to make the cuts. You can get very good results in a light colored wood like spruce. In a dark wood, done well, I think it would be almost invisible.

Thanks for the comments, guys. You grow some awesome woods. I have enough to make another uke like that and a spruce topped one also.

While I await a video from my son and his friend I thought I would post a few pictures of the latest uke which I mentioned in my introduction. Blackwood body, spanish cedar neck, cocobolo fingerboard, maple, walnut and padouk rope binding, rosewood bridge.

I have been on the forum for a while now and it is high time I introduced myself. My name is Phil Pearson, I live near Seattle Washington and my main job is delivereing the mail. About 25 years ago I decided I needed to build a guitar. That guitar landed me a part time job as a a repair person for a...

Both guitars look very nice. Am I right in saying that the back of the walnut guitar is a bookmatched crotch-cut piece? I just finished a tenor ukulele with a crotch-cut walnut top and back, the figure is spectacular. My only concern was the stability of the wood and obviously that would be even mor...

I built a steel string guitar 20 years ago using the David Russell Young book. The neck is glued on with just such a heel joint. I used long set epoxy on the heel and titebond to glue the fingerboard to the top. It has been strung up and played every day for twenty years. It has not moved at all. Ep...

I think the whole difference we have here is semantic. What you wrote to me as an explanation is exactly what I said. The deflection is dependent upon the length of the brace and the distance from the ends. The original question was whether the crossing point of an x brace was the weakest or the str...

If you move the weight to a different point along the x it will be more stiff. Not because there is more bracing, the same two braces are still each carrying half the load, and not because of the angle between the braces because each of the two braces is at the exact same angle to the load as at the...

Let me try this another way. A brace does not support an area simply with the mass directly under that area but spreads the load. If the point of crossing simply halved the strength at that point due to its having half the mass all you would need to do to make the brace full strength all of the way ...

Since we assumed a perfect joint and the deflection is of the entire brace the stiffness of the bracing at the intersection of the braces is exactly the same as at any other point crossing the braces. That is exactly the total of the strength of each individual brace added together. Since it is at t...

The point of greatest flex will be the centerpoint of any span. If that also happens to be the point at which the two braces cross then that will be the point of greatest flex. The fact that the x braces in a guitar are not equally long above and below the intersection, are not freestanding from the...

Perhaps I misunderstand the question. The stiffness of a point is not in question in your picture, the stiffness of a line is. But the stiffness of the top at any point is not carried by a line across the top due to the fact that the top is not made up of independent lines on a horizontal axis but o...

Just to clarify things I am assuming an arch built into the braces(otherwise its flexing inward would require the sides to pull in not push apart) and leaving out any effect of the bridge, which would add to stiffness and help spread load if it is fixed, simply spread the load of the strings if it i...

The point at which any piece of wood will flex the most is at its center. Try bending just the end of a long brace rather than the whole thing to prove it. The midpoint of any brace would be its most flexible point. But the brace is not a free span, it is glued to the top. The top and the brace ends...

Certainly it is purpleheart. Put a finish on it to keep it from oxidising and it will stay purple.