Official Luthiers Forum!

I'm attempting to put together a sort of repository of knowledge about musical instrument building and repair. At this point it's in the proposal phase, where we determine which questions will be appropriate for the site and which ones won't, and also try to figure out if there's enough interest in it to form some sort of community. I hope at least a few of you will be interested in helping out with it.

http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/25263/lutherie?referrer=PUhfruzFuDkGkDnqMec0sQ2

Thanks,
--dg

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--dg

http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/25263/lutherie?referrer=PUhfruzFuDkGkDnqMec0sQ2

.... I thought that was what this site was about

Maybe they could stick with Banjos?

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The name catgut is confusing. There are two explanations for the mix up.

Catgut is an abbreviation of the word cattle gut. Gut strings are made from sheep or goat intestines, in the past even from horse, mule or donkey intestines.

Otherwise it could be from the word kitgut or kitstring. Kit meant fiddle, not kitten.

Well, I have no expectation of it replacing this or any other sites.

The sites on stack exchange work a little differently from web forums. They basically allow the participants to vote on the quality of both the questions and the answers. This way when someone passes through with the same question months or years down the road, he can figure out fairly easily which answers were generally considered "right". That is a bit harder to determine in the forum-style setup.

Here is an example site that uses stack exchange for answering questions about home brewing : http://homebrew.stackexchange.com

--dg

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--dg

http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/25263/lutherie?referrer=PUhfruzFuDkGkDnqMec0sQ2

Interesting idea anyway .

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I'm with Todd - I like the idea of a Wiki better. I think it's very hard to embark on such a thing unless you have commitment from a good-sized group of people. If it's on the shoulders of one or two dedicated contributors, they are better off writing a book.

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Jim Kirby
kirby@udel.edu

I certainly don't have the knowledge to contribute to a wiki, but if we can get a fair number of people willing to contribute I'll be glad to set one up without the annoying ads.

It's the least I could do to help repay the knowledge I've gotten from here so far.

To me, a wiki is much more useful for things with definitive answers. In situations where there's a single way to do something, or a single right answer, they make a lot of sense (the history of the J-35, or prewar Martin bracing patterns, for instance). Some things that you're looking for don't fit that very well, though.

"What's a good way way to pull the neck in a Gibson that has the top glued over the top of the dovetail?"

I would not expect a wiki to cover the answers to that sort of question very well. Generally, that's where a forum such as this would come in, but it might receive 5 or 10 different answers, and there may or may not be any indication which answers were useful. If someone came back to this question a year later, and could see that 17 people thought that one of those answers was better than all of the others, he'd at least be on the right track to not make a mess of the instrument.

It is a new kind of site and takes a little getting used to, but I've seen it work quite well for computer programming questions. I noticed that they didn't yet have a site dedicated to luthiers, so I thought I would propose one and see if there were enough interested people to get it to the beta stage and actually have people answering the questions. Unfortunately, that means I can't just show you the site and let you see how it works.

FAQ: http://area51.stackexchange.com/faq

--dg

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--dg

http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/25263/lutherie?referrer=PUhfruzFuDkGkDnqMec0sQ2