Back and top fitments - thinking outside the square

[simso]

So have a current guy building an acoustic guitar with me (one of our courses we do)

Hes asked a very interesting question, regarding streamlining and simplifying back and top notching

His goal is to eventually make his own line of guitars but is on guitar one under my instruction to learn the basics / tooling and so forth.

We have just made the top and inlaid the rosette and are about to make some braces and fit them,

The question, if the goal is to mass produce a guitar could we not make a template which locates all our braces, this template can then be reversed and used as a routing guide for notching the sides, I have never considered this and am pondering accordingly.

Im old school and simply pen mark the area out and run a router and chisel to do the notch. But this is an interesting concept, I wonder what some manufacturers actually do, I know taylor use jigs and guides for brace laying out

It makes logical sense, because your side notches can be perfect and your braces at contact point can be routed to an exact thickness

Cole clark have the other idea where they actually use a thicker back and machine by cnc the grooves in that the braces will sit into, this could be modified for others with router jigs to replicate.

Ideas.......

[nutsdan]

On one of the Taylor factory tour videos they use a perspex jig to locate the braces for their vacuum jigs during glue up so I guess that you could use the same jig for notching

[jeffhigh]

John Hall has those
I think it is used for brace location during glueup but only for making notch location rather than guiding the bit.

[Richard]

This is one I picked up about 5 years ago from a luthier who was moving overseas. Never put it to use because I've only built one large body acoustic since then (and with a different bracing pattern), but I really like the idea and would definitely go down this route if I were batch producing. The luthier (whose name escapes me) used this one set of templates for OMs, jumbos and dreadnoughts.

It's 5mm ply that simply conforms to the radius, with the notch template designed to work with a laminate trimmer with template guide.

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