Australian/New Zealand Luthiers Forum

Hi Kim What did you use to make your nut and saddle? I’ve found that it can make a heap of difference to the sound to replace the plastic nut and saddle on some classical guitars with bone. However a classical guitar that sounds a bit sharp and has a bone saddle and nut can often be improved by re...

An old Gypsy woman told me I would live to see six score years and be active for a century, I choose to believe her.

I’m aesthetically challenged so I won’t comment on that aspect, but I will point out that with the dark in the middle it looks a lot like a crocodile skin.

Well if this from the World Agroforestry Centre is true then it should season well.

[quote]“The wood shrinks so little that products may be carved out of green wood without fear of splitting or warping as the wood dries.â€

Thanks Bob… very interesting
Well that answers the question re monkey pod, will take up the offer from the nice tree removal guy to save me a nice thick hunk of trunk. Will be a few years before I can use it, but I’m only forty odd so I should have a good seventy or so years left in me.

Hi All… The local council here is pushing urban infill (selling off local parks and green space for units), which is leading to many old trees being removed. I watched a huge old mango tree with a trunk diameter over 100cm and a Rain tree with a trunk of about 80cm being removed from a site near m...

The one from the sapwood looks amazing! Could almost be yellow mallee burl. Wonder how it would look against a red cedar top?

Kim I watched a guy I was travelling with serenading (well trying to) a gorgeous local girl from a boat when we were in Pittsburgh (USA). He was a little shellacked at the time and lost his balance dropping the guitar into the river. Dropping the guitar didn’t help him because he fell anyway, land...

Hi Allen I think a thin coat or two wouldn’t be too bad, it would make it a bit harder to repair but the possible benefit from doing so in our part of the world could well a be a repair or two prevent. I suspect that Barry Kerr for Woodtone Guitars gives his an inner coat of shellac. I personally ...

Hi All Just a couple of thoughts on this topic… My experience is very limited and the little formal training I had was from a guy who only built and repaired classical guitars. While I know that the fan braces on a classical wouldn’t be subject to the same strain as those of a x braced steel str...

Happy New Year to all… May it bring many delights, a little tranquillity and lots of fun (and an end to the stupid war would be nice). Yep hangover hell here too, ran out of beer so switched to champaign and when that was gone we got stuck into the red (woke this morning with the endless thirst). ...

For the past 7 years I’ve been a conservation advocate and prior to that I spent 10 years taking on short-term engineering contracts to fund myself travelling around our pretty blue planet doing humanitarian aid work. So my view on politics is an eyes wide open one that has come from dealing with ...

I’ll be using brass because it is cheap, can be forged with a little heat and a hammer, is a piece of cake to silver solder and it looks nice against timber. I did give a lot of consideration to tungsten. It is much harder to work with, any bends would need to be cut and silver soldered. But it's ...

We sometimes line engine boxes on boats with aluminium because it acts as a sound deadener… so maybe some issues there, it also chews out very easily. Most importantly, aluminium and brass are dissimilar metals so they react, a brass fishing swivel can rot through an aluminium boat in a couple of ...

On’ya Dennis… Get down n dusty and keep the innovations coming. It’s always great to see someone willing risk the time, money and effort required to take a new idea off the drawing board and make it real. I think that innovation in guitars isn’t about trying to make them sound like something...

Hi All… Thanks for the welcome and the thoughts. That’s an interesting guitar Dennis! Being one of those engineers who can’t look at a mousetrap without trying to figure out a way to build a better one, I suspect I’ll be experimenting for the rest of my life. After picking around the posts o...

Hi all This is my first post so a bit of background may be in order. I built a few guitars about 20 years ago when working with a very old German Luthier while taking a break from uni. Now all these years later I’m about to embark on a couple of guitars projects as gifts for friends. I’m in the ...