Official Luthiers Forum!

Hi, I was posting on the reranch forum, and I was sent over to this forum for advice on building an acoustic guitar. I just got an acoustic guitar kit from LMII. So far I have profiled and radiused the fretboard and I am going to build a form for the guitar. I do have a few questions however, I don't have a radius dish, and I live in Taiwan, not only a radius dish costs like around $80 I need a bunch of them, and after shipping them in Taiwan I'd probably be spending over $500 just for radius dishes. I have an idea as to how to build them myself but for now I don't think I want to build a radius dish. However I still need a way of leveling the sides and glueing the braces and stuff. I have a set of pre-shaped and radiused braces I got from Stewmac, and according to their instruction you could make a stick with a 5 degree wedge on one side, and a 1.5 degree wedge on the other to sand the proper radius onto the sides prior to glueing them in. This sounds a lot more feasable than actually buying or making a radius dish and I live in a small apartment space is really limited and I suspect the form will take a lot of space already. Also Stewmac says to trace one of their pre-radiused brace into a piece of wood and use that as a caul to clamp the brace down, others used cardboard to form the radius then glue it down. Any comments on any of these method? Also I am thinking of attaching eye hooks to the form so as I am gluing the top/back on I can attach large rubber bands since it seems easier than messing around with spool clamps, not to mention not needing a radius dish is a big plus.

Please go to my website www.rawfisheaters.com for pictures of my build so far... I have not assembled the body yet since I need the form to do that. The sides were pre-bent.

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Cat-gut strings are made from kitten guts, stretched out to near breaking point and then hardened with grue saliva. As a result these give a feeling of Pain and anguish whenever played, and often end up playing themselves backwards as part of satanic rituals.

Typhoon Guitars
http://www.typhoon-guitars.com

Hi, Tai Fu, and welcome to the forum!

You could look here for ideas about gluing radiused braces without a dish. I haven't tried it, but it seems it should work. There's a lot of other information on his site too.

http://www.kennethmichaelguitars.com/contourtool.html

Here's a photo sequence from when I built an LMI OM a few years ago.

http://www.patfosterguitars.com/rwom2/index.html

Pat

P.S. If you were to put your real name in a sig or closing, we'd have an easier time with remembering who you are.

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formerly known around here as burbank
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http://www.patfosterguitars.com

I've done it without a radius dish... but that was before I knew I needed one.

If the kit is preshaped, then this should not be that much trouble. Why do you need so many dishes? Most can make do with one dish, radiused on one side for the back and on the other for the top.

Mike

PS: there is a very good thread going on right now about radius dishes...

Thanks for the idea, the index card thing is a great idea. It sure would be much easier to store than a radius dish and won't warp... I thought you needed one dish for the top and one for the back... just that $80 is a lot of money for a piece of MDF (that will probably warp by the time it gets sent to a climate dramatically different than the shipper)

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Cat-gut strings are made from kitten guts, stretched out to near breaking point and then hardened with grue saliva. As a result these give a feeling of Pain and anguish whenever played, and often end up playing themselves backwards as part of satanic rituals.

Typhoon Guitars
http://www.typhoon-guitars.com

Why do you need a bunch? Two should be all you need and really you could get by with just one 25' dish(use it for the top and back).

Alternatively you can make sanding sticks with whatever radius you want. This site shows you how to make the arch. http://liutaiomottola.com/Tools/BraceArchJig.htm
Also, you could trace one of those pre-radiused braces onto a piece of wood then attach sandpaper and use that as a sanding stick for putting the radius on the sides.

Also consider making a gobar deck. It makes things like clamping braces much easier; and it's cheaper than buying all those cam clamps.

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Jeremy Douglas

I have a "gobar deck", I have a rack I hold stereo equipments that doubles as a gobar deck. I think I might use something like cards or cardboard or something then use threaded rod expander as the clamping device. I can't use the fiberglass rod because it's expensive as hell to ship them here, and even then I only have about 7 inch or so of clearance on my stereo rack (I can adjust the height of individual shelf freely but that means I have to remove my integrated amp which weights half a ton along with some other equipments and the bottom shelf is free so..) so a bent fiberglass rod probably won't work too well.

By the way I did make the following tools:



I made a sliding bevel because I can't really find one around here (I know they're available but they're a little expensive and I just made these up in a jam...) by taking two rulers and drilling a hole in both of them and insert a wing nut between them, then used the protractor to set the correct angle. Sometimes it's amazing what some simple school supplies can do... Also, I found this piece of acrylic that came off of some cigarette POP that has the exact 5 degree angle of the back of the guitar. It's weird but this is very useful for supporting a router for routing the binding but I can also make the angle on the heel and tail block by using a robo sander and using this to sand in the proper angle.

_________________
Cat-gut strings are made from kitten guts, stretched out to near breaking point and then hardened with grue saliva. As a result these give a feeling of Pain and anguish whenever played, and often end up playing themselves backwards as part of satanic rituals.

Typhoon Guitars
http://www.typhoon-guitars.com

Hi Tai Fu,

You might consider making a set of curved clamping cauls and gluing the braces individually. I used this technique when I built the StewMac 000 and the results turned out fine. You could trace the curvature from your pre-shaped StewMac braces.

Curved clamping cauls...





Ray

Sorry, Tai Fu, I didn't see your name at the bottom of your first post. I ended up looking at your site, then your domain.

Pat

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formerly known around here as burbank
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http://www.patfosterguitars.com

Thanks for the advice. Here is what I did today: I traced the back bracing pattern onto the back, then tried to dry fit them on with only cam clamps. I don't want to make any mistakes here so I went ahead and made a clamping caul. I traced the bracing underside onto a piece of plywood then cut them out with a jig saw and finished with a drum sander, then taped sandpaper onto the brace and smoothed them out. Here is the caul in action:



I did both sides, I traced the top brace on one side and the back brace on the other side so I can get two uses out of one caul. I think for the X brace since I don't have a large cam clamp (they are heavy, shipping them to Taiwan would be unreasonable) I am either going to make a "clamp" with 2 long sticks and 2 threaded rod to reach the middle, or make a few expanders and use them in my "go bar deck"

I glued this brace in with hide glue... hope this thing holds!

Here is my "go bar deck"... (an acoustic guitar is placed inside for reference)

_________________
Cat-gut strings are made from kitten guts, stretched out to near breaking point and then hardened with grue saliva. As a result these give a feeling of Pain and anguish whenever played, and often end up playing themselves backwards as part of satanic rituals.

Typhoon Guitars
http://www.typhoon-guitars.com

By the way (I can't seem to edit my own post..) the back wood I am using is Bubina, but the weird thing is all the bubina I have seen on the internet are all orange-ish but this one I got looks purple! I wonder if LMI gave me the wrong wood by accident...

_________________
Cat-gut strings are made from kitten guts, stretched out to near breaking point and then hardened with grue saliva. As a result these give a feeling of Pain and anguish whenever played, and often end up playing themselves backwards as part of satanic rituals.

Typhoon Guitars
http://www.typhoon-guitars.com

Hey Tai,

Glad to see you made it over hear from RR.

JD

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Joe

Hi Tai Fu and welcome to the OLF!

You might be interested to know that I built my first 10 guitars in a bathroom in my condo so I can relate to apartment building. It looks like you are doing great!!!

Keep up the good work!

Perseverance and creativity will conquer many problems. Many of the techniques that you will read about are ways to increase productivity and consistency when making multiples guitars, there are many ways to work if you are prepared to go more slowly. Many of the old time classical guitar makers had many of the same problems that you have, and didn't have any internet to help find solutions to their problems.

You might find this website interesting. It's Neil Ostberg's site on building a Torres classical guitar using very simple tooling.

http://mysite.verizon.net/nostberg/

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Expectation is the source of all misery; comparison the thief of joy.
http://redrivercanoe.ca/