Official Luthiers Forum!

I have been running some ideas around in my head of what wood to use on my headplate. I have a piece of ebony, actually a new piece is on the way as the first cracked, but have been really considering using some tight curl maple instead to contrast with the dark fretboard and dark back and sides. I do plan to do an inlay of my initials in the headplate so I think using a grainy wood is not a good choice.

But why do you not see too many use light colored headplate woods? I rarely see figured maple headplates on acoustic guitars. Is it not a good design choice to contrast the fretboard with the headplate? This is all new to me so bear with me.

For me, I tend to use Ebony because it hides mistakes in my inlay routing. Besides that, I think it looks good. Nothing wrong with Maple either!

Don't know why exactly, guess it's just a personal preference, but I like a darker headplate, one that matches the fret board or the bridge. Ebony sounds like a good choice to me; I'm actually looking at a piece of ebony for one I'm working on right now. I've used only rosewood previously. I'm also going to evaluate my wardrobe and make sure I don't have any horizontally stripped clothes.

Anthony,

Google guitar head stock and guitar peg head for a thousand ideas but ultimately the color and choice of wood is up to you and your design sense. Mock up the different choices and stand back and take a good, detached, view of what you see, then adjust to taste.

Here's another thought. From a compositional standpoint you want your eye to travel around any piece of art and return to a focal point of some kind. Worst case is having your eye travel off the 'page' and not return. A dark headstock tends to stop your eye at the top of the 'composition' whereas a lighter one will tend to allow your eye to wander up and 'off the page'. I like the dark head stock for this reason.

_________________
Thank You and Best To All

I'd go with the ebony for the reasons Todd explained. Unless you've got a lot of inlay experience (maybe not if first guitar), very tough to inlay without a margin, which looks pretty lousy on lighter colored woods. Filling doesn't work. Ebony, on the other hand, is very forgiving. Dust mixed with black epoxy, ebony dust and CA, lots of options to fill in hte gaps and it fills in very nicely.

If you use maple and inlay with ebony gaps won't show.

_________________
Ken Franklin
clumsy yet persistent
https://www.kenfranklinukulele.com

I have used left overs from the back cut out scrap bookmatched together and it looks great and is free. I also use ebony a lot.

Fred

_________________
Fred Tellier
http://www.fetellierguitars.com
Facebook page http://www.facebook.com/pages/FE-Tellier-Guitars/163451547003866

Dark woods are so much easier to inlay. Its hard to fill the gaps in maple and match the color. If you want to use maple on the headstock I'd suggest doing the inlay first, before attaching it to the headstock. Keep the ebony for plan 'B' if you're not happy with the inlay results.

Reasons why most guitars have ebony or rosewood headstock plates:
1. Easier inlay
2. Shell inlay looks better on a dark background
3. Traditional look (probably because of 1&2)
4. Black goes with anything so the factories can just stock one type of head plate for all models.

now that's using your noggin!

I am fairly confident in my inlay skills, have been making furniture for 5+ years with lots of inlay. But inlay on something flat is easy compared to the weird shapes going on in a guitar. But the headstock is a nice flat piece to inlay. The bindings would run into the neck angle which shouldn't be an issue. If I do use a maple headstock I think a maple binding with an ebony line separating the two was what my plan is.

But I really still haven't decided. I glued up two different maple pieces (both bookmatched) to see how I like either one compared to the ebony. I think it just caused more indecision.

And I did do the google images of maple headplates and it really isn't a common thing compared to darker wood headplates. I will see if I can pics up here of my options.

My usual trick is to use book-matched sections of the back off-cuts for a headstock facing. Whatever else is going on, this is never a wrong answer.

Figured maple looks fine, but as Todd says, it works better bound. Pic here. (Scroll down to the 12 string headstock). "White" unbound headstocks seem to me to have a "Fender" look about them. Not that's there's anything wrong with that, but that's how it is. Pic below (book-matched Huon Pine), and also further down the page on the previous link.

Filippo, have you just "borrowed" my headstock shape?

_________________
Trevor Gore, Luthier. Australian hand made acoustic guitars, classical guitars; custom guitar design and build; guitar design instruction.

http://www.goreguitars.com.au

I think a maple head plate would look nice with some black tuning machines and dark binding as stated earlier.

For me personally I just like the elements to tie in together, so I usually match the headplate to the fretboard wood or the back and side wood, so I likely wouldn't use maple for the headplate unless I made the back and sides of maple, and I would probably use the same wood and bookmatch a headplate from the scraps or something.

That means I've used a much wider variety of woods for my electric headplates vs my acoustic headplates.

_________________
Old growth, shmold growth!