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Seeing Colin's beautiful guitar reminded me that I keep procrastinating putting up pictures of my first classical. This was built in Robbie O'Brien's class at Red Rocks Community College and I completed it in May. Thanks for your help Robbie. It's my 3rd completed if you count my uke, but my first classical. I don't have a frame of reference for what a decent classical should sound like, but I think it sounds great.

The back and sides are cypress. Top is adirondack spruce. Neck is mahogany. All the dark wood is camatillo. All in all, it turned out really well. Most of the things that bugged my about my first went well this time. I was hoping the headstock would age and finish to be darker and match the rest, but it didn't.

Thank you to all of you who participate here. I'm fortunate to be near enough to take Robbie's class, but the advice here has been invaluable.

Now where do I click to attach pictures... Figured that out. Is there any way to reorder them?

Mike

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Mike Lindstrom

Great job Mike! This is the one I was lucky enough to play when you came over. It sounded great to me, but I'm no classical guitar expert. Great choice of woods and appointments, and very clean work!

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Tracy
http://www.luthiersuppliers.com

Yep. That's the one. It's brother that I was building alongside it is still waiting for me to put in a week's work to finish it up. I don't think I'd be good at being self employed.

Mike

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Mike Lindstrom

I like it - I want to build a nylon stringed one sometime down the road. I have a cocobolo headstock on mine that also didn't turn as dark as I wanted yet - I think yours looks real good. I like the sapwood/heartwood contrast; to me that says hand made for sure.

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Steve Smith
"Music is what feelings sound like"

You did a really nice job on that. Beautiful guitar. Congratulations!

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Waddy

Photobucket Build Album Library

Sound Clips of most of my guitars

Looks great!
Love the headstock and the fretboard shape at the soundboard.

Awesome!!
I like the sapwood arrangement.

That looks good. Cypress classicals seem to be becoming more popular. And hey, we put the sapwood in the same place!

Colin

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I don't believe in anything, I simply make use of a set of reasonable working hypotheses.

Nice work !
Great looks also.

Making nylon strung guitars is like eating chips-you can't only have one !

Mike

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Mike Collins

Nice work Mike, great looking classical. I like the cypress.

Thanks for your kind words. I'll try and remember to bring my camera home from work tomorrow. There's 2 pieces of binding with sapwood. I decided to leave out any detail purfling because of it. It didn't want to scrape too cleanly, but some CA helped with that.

And the placement of the sapwood on the fretboard and as well as the profile at the sound hole were both to minimize the amount of sapwood that ended up getting cut off.

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Mike Lindstrom

Hi Mike,

Congrats! Looks GREAT! How does it sound? What tuners are those?

Dave

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God, Family, Carreer

Thanks Dave,
The tuners are Gotoh Premiums. Robbie's TA strongly encouraged me to splurge on a good top and good tuners. The better top ended up on a different guitar that's in process. This one got the good tuners until I see which one's sounds better.

As for the sound, I think it's pretty good. I just took it to a guy that's in guitar grad school and he didn't hate it. He said the set up was perfect, but found the treble to not be as strong as the bass strings and the noticed the high E was kind of twangy, but improved as you went up the neck. My bridge was a little tall on the treble side anyway, so today I planed it down a bit. It seems to have balanced the sound, but I could be making that up. The E was still odd, so I reshaped the saddle - didn't help, and worked on the nut a little bit. Doesn't seem different. The strings, 5th fret to open on the next string sound very similar except that E really stands out. Especially played open.

Any suggestions?
Mike

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Mike Lindstrom