Australian/New Zealand Luthiers Forum

That does look beautiful. I love how you numbered it #0001, meaning that you expect to make enough guitars in your lifetime to need a four digit numbering system. Did you pay attention to the ambient humidity when you were at the stage of gluing braces, and closing the box? If so, you are on your wa...

I read somewhere the adage: “Wet to dry, it will die. Dry to wet, it may live yet” So, like Martin said, if you make sure the conditions are pretty dry when you do critical gluing operations (gluing braces to soundboard or back plates, closing the box) then the guitar will tolerate living even a lot...

That is a beauty! I am imagining the feel and the smell as you carved the Huon soundboard. Did you carve the back as well, or is that flat? The patchwork headstock plate also looks cool.

Those are great. Thanks for the sneak look at your work. It all looks like fun, except the finishing!

Hi Jurgen - come on down! But, as Martin said, be aware of the scale that you are dealing with. how big is Australia.png October is a good time of year in most of Australia, as far as weather is concerned. In the far north it will be getting hot but not yet too wet, and the dangerous stingers that s...

Hi Papatar I definitely second Tom's recommendation of the Gore/Gilet books if you haven't already got them - and I think Martin (Kiwigeo) is selling a second hand copy in the classifieds section at the moment, probably with the added bonus of glue stains and erudite notes added to all of the import...

Ahhh, I get it now. The whole jig slides along the truss nod slot, and the router is screwed down to the wood plate. Nice.

Thanks Cutty. That looks like a robust and reliable jig. Can you show how the router base fits into the cutout slot? What is it that registers on the insides of the cutout?

Could be a good reason to do an oil finish on this build.

That should be fun. I hope it goes well!.
Mark

Very nice Mr Evans! I have bought some nice meranti at Bunnings for a workbench and it had similar colour. If I see some well quartered bits I might think of it for bindings. How deep is that body at the tail, and at the neck? Looks fairly deep, which might boost the voice of an otherwise small body...

I love watching the birth of this instrument. Thanks for the beautiful documentation. Your work looks very skillful and elegant, especially on the neck scroll. I am interested to see that you can graduate the outside arch of the top using the Safe-T-Planer, which would be a great way to hog off a lo...

I am like Martin and cut the back into a “guitar shape” before starting to do the bracing. However, I can’t see any problem with the way that you do it as long as it still conforms to the radius that you intend. White oak looks very pretty. Is it heavy?

Just some of that nice stuff that comes from your neighbors in the Adelaide Hills

Sounds like you have got it well sorted out. It might be a good idea to find some pictures online of the headstock and nut area of the Martin guitar and enlarge it and print it so you can take some detailed measurements of how they do the string spacing. It is interesting that they have updated an i...

Your string spacing ratios at the nut will also be replicated at the saddle and bridge. It works well to put both G strings in the same hole. You have to use an unslotted bridge pin, and cut slots in the bridge at 10 o’clock and 2 o’clock in that hole to guide the strings on different paths. It woul...

I made a 7-string like that, and have also made an 8-string with paired D strings and paired G strings (taking the idea from a Taylor baritone model which I played somewhere once). My plan, which I won't say is the "correct" method but I have been happy with it, gives a little bit more space to the ...

There is a fantastic web resource called the Wayback machine which has archived 928 billion webpages historically, dating back to 2008. I just did some playing around there to see if it can retrieve this thread with pictures. Haven’t solved it yet, but there are 517 entries from ANZLF archived, so m...

But isn't the big orange baby saying that the exporting countries will pay ???? Yes he says stuff like that, and that it will raise trillions of dollars for the US, but the way that tariffs work is that the buyer pays it to their own government. There will be a backlash from Americans who voted for...

Congratulations on the new space Trent. Looks great from what we can see in the photos (please show us more!), and the punters are happy and productive.

I usually find that after it has been strung up for a week the action will get higher, and I usually find myself sanding down the saddle at that stage. Your guitars might be different - but just watch for a little while.

Have you only recently strung it up? If that is how it looks and measures up in the first few days I would wait and watch it for a little while. It will tend to migrate in the direction you want as the top pulls up a little and the neck tilts a bit forward. These changes are more marked in the early...

Wow - very stylish and well executed. I really like how you carried the art deco theme through everything - especially the matching shapes of the pickguard and tailpiece. Do you plan and draw all of that at the outset or does it evolve as the build goes on?

On the OLF forum Ed Bond recently posted a nice photo to illustrate that idea of slightly routing out the centre of the heel and leaving a rim which is the actual mating face against the guitar body. It would be a real pain to try to floss the entire heel block to get the right angles but this makes...

Yes, it is a good idea to hollow out the flat face of the heel - the face that contacts the sides at the neck joint - so that you have a small surface area around the edge to floss for the fitting process. But that doesn't fix your 3mm height issue. To fix that I would enlarge the holes in the neck ...