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Hi everybody,
has anyone build a guitar using David Russell Youngs book?
Please let me know because I have a few questions regarding the sides.Shapeetc.
thanks

I built 3-4 guitars from the Young book back in the late 70s era.
I recall the shape in the book was a pretty standard dreadnought shape.
Aside from the neck attachment style- which works but has been superseded in most cases by bolt-on- , most of the ideas in that book would be fine to produce a good guitar today, IMO. It also doesn't demand a ton of jigs and forms.
My memory is pretty hazy on all the details, but I do have a few notes somewhere, so fire away with your questions!

Cheers
John

I still have my old copy, bought when I built my first guitar in '81. As John says, it's a pretty generic Dred shape. You will probably be doing things much differently, with the advent of radius dishes & the like.
Oh yeah... I never did slap the neck heel onto the body with a bit of epoxy! Doesn't sound like a real good idea to me, though David Russel Young said he had built many guitars that way & never had a failure.
I think he had the side shape laid out on graph paper to make it fairly easy to copy the shape. I wouldn't bother with that too much. Just rough shape the back edge, leaving enough to sand to shape on your radius dish. (I am assuming you are using dishes???) You sure don't have to, but it does simplify the whole process.
The colour plates of his guitars & inlays are a real inspiration!

I bought that book last year for nostalgia
There are a number of serious errors in it like "locate the bridge so the centre of the slot is exactly 13 27/32 (35.2cm) from the centre of the 12th fret" this is on a 25.4 scale.
Most today would consider the guitars overbraced.
Spend the money on a better book, your time and the materials you are building with are worth it.

I've still got a guitar I built in 1981 with a Young-style epoxy neck joint and it is fine. And at least 2 others I built in 1979 are still OK as well. But, I do bolt-ons now.


I agree- I have dishes (home-built) now. However a curved stick will do the job, if necessary. With the dishes, I actually use the sanding to 'mark' the high spots and then use a plane to do the 'adjusting' until the final 'touch-up'. A coloured pencil along the linings helps to highlight the low/high spots.


Good catch, Jeff! I don't know how I 'did it right' in spite of the book. I know I routed the saddle slots after installing the bridge in those guitars, but I must have caught the error before I glued down the bridge.
Kinkead or Williams would be my choice for a basic steel-string method these days. I still find Cupiano unnecessarily obtuse, though it is popular.

Cheers
John

My copy came with an addendum sheet that corrected the glaring errors. Not useful years down the road when the loose page would no doubt, be long gone.
Good catch, indeed... I forgot about that issue!