Official Luthiers Forum!

I am in the serviced kit camp myself. Handling each of the parts in the form that it ends up in is very important. Build a serviced kit with very little bling and concentrate on the neck angle, fretting, bridge location, and action. If you can understand those things after the first guitar, you are ready to fly. I built 2 completely serviced kits, then added thicknessing, braces, plate joining, inlays, rosettes, purfling, side bending, neck making, kerfed lining making, and now have built #6 and #7 from scratch. The first couple make great gifts at the local music store to young people who can;t afford a nice instrument.

Bill Cory's 2 books are good and they are on sale as a pair on his website right now: http://www.kitguitarmanuals.com

no affiliation, yada, yada, yada

Ed

Another tip... when you have cut the rossette channels, seal them with shellac first. That way whatever glue you use wont wick into the endgrain and cause unsightly and unremovable yellow marks in the spruce...

These are tips i wish i had know before my first... tbh i don't know why there are not more of these in this thread. These are the kind of tips that are impossible to know unless you already know it or made the mistake that it attempts to avoid...

Best advice i read so far was to read as much as you can before hand... watch youtube videos too. Prob better than reading... each time you approach a new task, reaseach the hell out of that task before starting. There are several ways to do everything and some are simply better/easier than others and some might be more suited to you and your shop and what you have available.

FTL

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www.leddingtonguitars.com

Thanks for all the great replies! This ought to be a fun adventure, and it will be cool to play an instrument I made.

If you can possibly do it.... Use the natural seasonal weather in your favor.

Brace up the top and back and glue it to the rims during winter in heated space. Heat in the winter = dry = less problems with humidity sucking the top inside out during other times of the year.

Then - painting your finish in warmer weather lets you do it outside so the stink, drips, and mess is out. It also helps speed up cure/drying times so you don't end up with a sticky mess that sits that way for 3 or 4 weeks...

If you start in summer, you will end up with the top and back sucking in and cracking when the weather cools off in winter - then you will battle cold sticky mush and stink/mess in the house while finishing in winter... Not fun.

Thanks

A challenge for the first several guitars can be the fact that you figure out how to do a step like making the binding channels, but then you don't do it again for many months which makes it hard to remember exactly how you did it and what worked and what didn't. For the first several guitars at least, its tremendously helpful to keep daily notes in a notebook describing in some detail how you did each construction step and the sequence of steps. Include drawings with dimensions for things like braces, binding channels, neck blocks, bridges, end graft designs, and rosette designs. Also record final dimensions of things like the thickness of the top, back, and sides, the dimensions of the neck profile, and weights of the top (with and without braces) and bridge. Record humidity values especially when doing steps like gluing on braces or gluing the top to the sides. Being able to look back at these notes is a very valuable resource to have when building subsequent guitars. If you find yourself having a hard time trying to remember exactly what worked (or didn't work) before, it's right there to refer to. A very detailed daily record of how you applied the finish can be especially useful for later guitars. Taking a series of simple snap shots of various steps throughout a build is also a huge help later when trying to remember things like exactly how you clamped something up that either worked or didn't work. Taking photos is much more helpful than a written description in many cases.

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Once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right - Robert Hunter

Here's one that I felt like the biggest moron on the planet when it occurred to me that I could have done something this way instead of how I was doing it....

When it's time to profile the sides of the rim and install the "kerfed linings...." or what ever kind of linings you prefer do this:

Profile the sides PRIOR to installing the linings..... and then install the linings approx 1/16 - 1/32" proud of the profiled linings. This way when you return to driving the bus (the dish.... ) very little driving/sanding has to be done to add the profile angle to the linings for the radiused top or back. Sheesh.... Before this revelation I used to be driving the bus all day....

The beginner's set from Hibdon doesn't look like too bad of a deal, and if you could get them to switch out the mahogany B&S for plain walnut would be even better (walnut is easier to bend than mahogany). Combined with an inexpensive spruce top (AA grade) it would give you most of the materials to build a fine quality instrument for around $100. Good tuners could double that, but cheap ones will work O.K.. Martin originally built the 17 style guitars to sell for $25 retail. I wonder what they paid for materials back then?
If you build a plain instrument without bindings and a simple ring rosette it will save you some aggravation, tooling,and time. You have to fit the joints a little better, but that is good practice anyway.
I would suggest you skip the bending iron and go to using a bending blanket and form. It seems most builders wind up bending sides that way eventually. You can come back to the iron later if you are so inclined.
Strive for perfection but accept "good enough" Remember that the enemy of "good" is "better". Trying to make it better often makes it worse. If it's good enough, move on, you will do better on the next one... and there is always a next one.