Hi to you all,
If you take a look at my website you will see a page heading:
Lyon Healy Circa 1900s Parlor Plan Download.
There is a free downloadable plan available in a small pdf file format
www.hamleyfineguitars.com
This guitar is a restoration project and the top was damaged beyond repair. As a new top will be fitted once the old one was removed I was able to take some measurements inside the box. I spent considerable time carefully taking dimensions and drew up a hand written plan of the guitar. As most of you know it is not very often you get the opportunity to get close up and personal with such an old instrument like this one so I decided to create a plan of it. A friend and forum member Steve at www.anzlf.com used my hand written drawing and created a full size to scale plan using CAD. I thank him very much for his time an effort.
Please feel free to download the plan as I have gained so much great advice and information from this forum since I started guitar building in 2005 and it is good to be able to contribute a bit back to our guitar building community. The plan is to scale but there may be some dimensions that are not perfect as there were a few specs that had to be estimated.
If you have any comments or questions please contact me at my website.
Enjoy
Cheers
Alan
If you are interested in the restoration project please read on.
The old guitar is very fragile but it is in reasonable condition for its age. It has a serial number stamped on the spruce tail block however even with that information I haven’t been able to ascertain its exact age. If someone knows or can point me in the right direction of further information about the guitar please contact me through my website. The guitar has a spruce top and Brazilian Rosewood back, sides, bridge, head plate and fingerboard. The guitar top has sustained lots of damage and the rosewood is very brittle with several cracks in the back and sides which I will be able to be fix or stabilise. Also the tail block has been split as the guitar at some stage had been dropped on its butt. The machine heads are in good condition as are the frets with little or no ware. Usually these oldies the frets are well pitted especially around the first few frets. The neck is a large V shape and made from mahogany.
The damage at the soundhole area and inside the box to the transverse brace looks to me like it has been caused by a rodent like a rat. The top, transverse brace and tail block are all made from spruce and have been chewed by something. There where no strings fitted when the guitar arrived, the bridge had been removed and there were three handmade rosewood bridge pins still with the guitar. This guitar I believe was built for gut strings and there is no wear from strumming on the spruce top or ware spots where your arm goes over the lower bout when playing. This tells me it hasn’t been played very much. The guitar looks like it has been stored for many years and it has been home for a small animal. My reasoning a rodent lived in the box was confirmed as I found lots of grey hairs inside the box when the top was removed. The machine head screws look like they have never been taken off.
So other than the top damaged beyond resurrection and a few cracks it is in good condition and a fine candidate for a restore project.
If you would like to follow the restoration you can follow it on my website or at this address:
http://www.anzlf.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=5250
Thanks for your interest.
Cheers
Alan