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Anybody ever try to keep track of how may hours in on a build? It's difficult. I have a hefty pile of high quality #2 tops and lots of nice, inexpensive back and sides so I want to do an affordable guitar or 2 to have in our little local music store. I've kept it pretty bare bones. I've been trying to keep track of hours to build the one I'm working on but there are so may tasks in building where you may just put in 15 or 30 minutes on that guitar and move on to some other project for a while. I'm just about done but I have lost track so I can only add up the long working periods and guess at the rest. Looking like 55 - 65 hours......... maybe.

Just curious if anyone has tried and how did you go about keeping track?

Enjoy The Day

Danny, I've wondered the same. Though I only do it as therapy and don't really care too much how long it takes, I'm curious as to what the average time would be. I suppose there are a lot of variables, for instance I buy pre-slotted FB's because I don't trust myself to be that accurate, so that saves some time.
And how much bling?
For me (after #7)I think 100 hrs give or take.

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My memory is so good, sometimes I remember things that never happened.

Start and build one guitar and one guitar only.kJeep a notepad beside the lightswitch. Write your in time and out time. Everything that happens in the shop from switching blades to sweeping up to ripping sandpaper counts as build time, it all adds up. Then sum when you're done.

Though truthfully you'd probably rather not know how appalling your wage is...

For my last 2 guitars I started at exactly the same time.
I put in exactly 2 hours per evening Mon-Thu (coincides with a CBC Radio Jazz Show), and 8 hours total on the weekend.
So 16 hours/week, x 12 weeks / 2 = ~96hrs per guitar.
Maybe a little slow, but thorough...

Do you listen to 91.1 Jazz FM, Rob? The only 24/7 jazz station in N.A.

Alex

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"Indecision is the key to flexibility" .... Bumper sticker

I have a white board in the shop I mark on.
I logged 40 hrs for a Tele build.
My labor is about 5 cents per hour.

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wah
Wah-wah-wah-wah
Wah

Hi Alex,

I have a PC with decent speakers so I stream CBC Radio 2 and catch Tim Tamishiro's jazz show between 7 and 9 - when the show is over I put my tools down.
On the weekend I listen to the 7 x 24 streaming jazz show on CBC called Phil Dwyer's Jazz Canada - excellent programming.
The best part is....no commercials.....ever....

FWIW, I had a switchable outlet in my shop with lighting & a clock plugged into it. Switching on the lights started the clock!

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Dave
Milton, ON

Some years ago I tracked my time building my classical guitars. For one guitar it took me 160 hours including french polishing. I usually build 3 at a time which would bring this down some although I haven't tracked that. I get about $25 per hour for my labor. Not great but better than minimum wage. Most times I keep the radio on in my shop which keeps me up to date on what's going on in our world. As most of the news is depressing and the talk shows are pretty inane I should probably stick to CD's.

I keep two notebooks going in my shop: One for setup and repair jobs and one for my current builds. When a build is complete I don't have an accurate record of hours, but I do have an accurate list of days/dates that I did some work on the build. I then know how many days I did some work on that build. Some days are full time building and others may only be a couple of hours, but its better than nothing.

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It will probably be alright.

Danny there is an OLF member, Pete Brown IIRC who some years bag wrote a Windows based software program for Luthiers that was a time tracker too. Pete's still around in so much as I believe I've seen him post in the last few months, is a very nice guy, and his software may work for you unless you are a Mac user.

I built a no frills "mule" L-OO as a top tester and even though no extra time was spent on the thing to add cosmetic elements it still took me 90% of the time to build as my other instruments. As such in my limited experience with bare bones offerings there really was not much in the way of time savings in my experience. Interestingly this no-frills L-OO is my personal favorite ax and weighs 2.9 pounds.

And this is the rub with building acoustic guitars - they are labor intensive or can be depending on how tooled-up and jigged-up one is as well as how fast we work.

In the repair side we don't track time. It's impossible to do with the phone ringing, folks dropping in frequently, clients bringing us work, etc. So we decided long ago to price jobs by our experience with the jobs in terms of time to complete when there are no distractions. This means that we have fixed pricing which is also kind of sort of expected in the repair side in so much as how else would one be capable of providing reliable estimates that of course in our view we must stick to unless, of course, something previously unknown rears it's ugly head. Most of the time though when something else if determined to need fixing we usually just go ahead and do it and don't bill for it. This makes our triage activity uber important to really assess the instrument well while the client is still present or we may have just done a disservice to ourselves.

Back to Pete - if interested perhaps search the membership here under Pete Brown and or ask the good guys on the ANZLF about Pete, I believe he is/was a member there too.

Luxury! I have to give myself a raise.

[quote="Hesh" unless you are a Mac user.

[/quote]

Mac user of course. 2.9 lbs. Is that with tuners? I've never weighed an entire guitar.

It's not about the hourly wage. We all know what it is is what it is. Sometimes your the tree and sometimes your the sap etc. Customers with $$$ that appreciate a nice guitar aren't on every corner in my neighbourhood. Maybe I need to move to a fancier part of town.

I was just curious if anyone had kept track. Some good replies. In this case I did try to keep track and keep the guitar basic. How do you keep track of shooting 12 coats of nitro? Watch it dry and keep the clock running? There are numerous tasks where you spend short periods of time on small tasks. I just glued the neck on yesterday. I'll shoot a pic or 2.

If you were trying to assess the build time on "quick" guitars, I think this would not be a good indication. Wouldn't you be better off building multiples so that there was never any wait time for glue drying, etc, and then average over the pack?

I calculated my salary per hour once when I was a grad student, back in the 70's before anyone thought they actually needed to pay us (even when on an assistantship) and it was common for everyone to be in the office til late at night. It was about 10% of minimum wage - yikes!

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Jim Kirby
kirby@udel.edu

" Wouldn't you be better off building multiples so that there was never any wait time for glue drying, etc, and then average over the pack?"

Along with this idea, some tasks which are only done once or twice a year (making kerfed linings, roughing out necks, etc.) can be accounted for by dividing the time by the number of guitars they will supply. This can also help you decide to " Make or Buy" a component.

Danny she weighs 2.9 pounds with tuners, Grover open backs.... I intentionally made it light and can't say how it will hold up but it was never intended to be sold to anyone and instead just a top-testing-mule. Funny, along the way it became my favorite guitar and I guess this makes me a Mahogany guy....

There is a bit of a belly, some telegraphing of braces through the French polished shellac but we see this often with vintage instruments and the bridge rotation remains minimal so I'm not concerned. I love the thing and it plays and sounds like a dream to me.

Anyway.... about 8 years ago someone tried to talk me out of building. Instead they told me that builders will never make a decent living unless, of course, one gets in the top ten or so. I rejected this advice and wanted to prove my friend wrong so the next instrument that I built I kept loose records of the time it took me. I also, unfortunately.... am no stranger to cost accounting where it's key to be both honest and realistic in considering ALL associated costs. These associated costs include expendables such as sandpaper and many other things such as the costs associated with heating, lighting, mortgage, etc. for shop space. And there are also costs such as materials (and as you know I tend to have a substance abuse issue with cool wood.... ) and for me I'm a fan of professionally done finishes which are expensive and then there is a case too. Although my cases are not all that expensive they still are several hundred dollars each.

With all of this factored in and my speed of building I found myself making just under $1 an hour..... Remember too that true cost accounting also includes associated costs of marketing, web sites, promotions, and even the time that one spends with prospects.... Of course the price that one can command will make a huge difference but where the small return in a monetary sense is most noticeable in my experience is with bare bones, lower end instruments.

After rechecking my data it didn't get any better.... I also can make the case that the time that it takes me to French polish an instrument well enough for it to be up to appropriate commercial standards if I account for my time outsourcing finishing was actually less expensive....

Not wishing to burst anyone's bubble here but I have been to this movie before and although it is possible to make a go of building and earning a decent living in my experience and to my knowledge and I know hundreds of Luthiers personally very few ever get there... Often too those who do have a second income source, spouse, etc. You guys don't have the health insurance issue but we still have to pay for this in the states although recently it's become more available and less expensive depending on circumstances and location.

What resulted was a greater interest and later a passion for repair work with building remaining a sideline, hobby sort of thing that once in a while when I build another one brings in some extra cash. But I would not want to have to make my living building alone...

When considering repair vs. building both completely depend on the disposable income of others.... not a great position to be in come the next recession.... Both also depend on musicians who traditionally struggle just like we do to turn that passion into reliable, forecastable income. When you think of it deliberately getting into anything that depends on musicians for your income is not exactly the kind of judgement that we would see from Warren Buffett now is it...

Most of all though is this - the most important thing to me personally. I love what I do now. I can make a decent living with our repair business, build when and if I feel like it, continue to refuse commission work not wanting to lose my ability to use my own artist's eye, and I am happy as a clam too.

So don't be surprised if the numbers don't work because that's my personal experience. But also don't let it discourage you either because there is a lot to be said for enjoying what we do day in and day out. I'm getting older now, traveled all of my life all over the world, in many ways was not permitted to have a home life.... but now I am and simple is better for me these days.

My guess is that you can make it work building less fancy, basic instruments that are serviceable and represent real value to the market. A $2,000 guitar that competes with say a D-18 for performance and price would be where I would take this. Built in batches from non-fancy materials just like Martin does and if you do your own finishing, supply basic cases, etc and have an outlet for these that you don't have to staff. I can see half of the selling price being income. Built in batches of say five with each batch taking 60 days to complete and that's a $30K annual income. Not great by any means but it may be all one needs depending on personal circumstances. It would be tough, one well known builder builds 65 a year and has two apprentices... So 30 instruments for a single Luthier would be likely a handful....

Do some repair work on the side for chump change and Bob's your uncle.

These days the thing that is on my mind the very most is that even though we have 50,000 students in a couple of miles from our downtown shop most of the clients that we see in person are older, adults and often my age....

Makes me wonder if guitars are still cool and what the prospects are for the future.

I'm also waiting for the Musical Instrument Resellers Association to come out with the 2014 sales figures for guitars. In recent years the growth has slowed to no growth at all... and this is why we see companies such as Gibson doing 29% price increases.... it's getting difficult even for them to make ends meet, maybe.....

Lastly and sorry to be so pedantic as Trevor might say my experience has been that doing great work can go viral and result in as much business as one would want. It's likely true that there are guitars for sale that never should have been for sale and it's also true that there is no shortage of music stores that take in repair work and don't know what they are doing resulting in the store owner letting his teen age daughter crank a truss rod until it cracks the back of the neck. True story by the way... Or the same store owner getting cheap with a vintage J-45 and attempting a bridge plate repair resulting in splitting the center seam on the top....

As such when you do great work, provide real solutions and real value be it building or repairing my experience has been that people will beat a path to your door. If the economy continues to improve and folks are doing well economically this can make it all work for us. If the economy takes a downturn all bets could be off....

A while back I made a list of every operation in the guitar building process. Then I went and bought a stop watch. I timed myself a few times on each operation until I had a pretty good idea of how long it takes. I found out that on paper it takes 49hrs and 20 minutes to make a basic guitar, that did not factor in the time savings by batching certain operations. I made a separate list of ever operation that could be batched and then figured out what batchable operation could be done at the same time for more time savings (i.e. certain table saw operations that require similar setups and could all be done at the same time). With batching I estimate the actual build time is closer to 40 hours. My goal for the coming year is to get it down around 35hrs for a basic guitar.

Figuring all this out takes time in itself, but I'm finding it is worth it. Timing myself on ever operation also shows me what parts of the building process are really slowing me down. It has shown me where to prioritize my time and money to become even more efficient.

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Josh House

Canadian Luthier Supply
http://www.canadianluthiersupply.com
https://www.facebook.com/canadianluthiersupply?ref=hl
House Guitars - Custom Built Acoustic Instruments.
http://www.houseguitars.com

I've tried to keep track several times. Turns out I always fail. I don't usually make a 'standard model' but I'm guessing around 80 hrs if I did. Guitars I usually make are one of a kind so i need to do inlay design etc. It probably takes 30 hrs more. But then I always under estimate

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Joe Beaver
Maker of Sawdust

I like Josh's 50 hours as a model.

To which I'd have to add set-up time.

And screw-up time.

And fark-up time.

Then all that extra stuff I didn't anticipate

So yeah, 150 hours seems about right

Steve

You have to include sweeping up, changing the light bulbs, jetting down to the store for a new bandsaw blade, yada yada. That stuff takes up a surprising amount of time.

Otherwise you come up with unattainable production expectations.

That's just goofing off. I'm good at that.

Man, I was so close to the $8/hr I was shooting for and them BAM, blew a nut. So much for that. If it was about money I would have given this gig up by now. FWIW I strung it up today and I think I'm at about 50 hours and still have the final set up. However I had batch made the linings, bridge, FB slotting, braces and I think binding. Shouldn't be more than a couple of hours for the set up. It plays well and is pretty close.



Strung up and played for a couple hours. Very sweet indeed. Very light, stiff inexpensive Sitka. The rest is lumberyard wood that were good scores. (PJ White Ed. $10 a set...... not counting the 2K saw to cut it up ) I don't know what it is with OM's but they seem to come out very balanced.

Is that Sapele or Khaya?

I don't normally keep track but I have logged 90 hours for a Classical, all hand tools and including French Polishing. If I do a brushed on finish it would come down to 85 hours. I once did this simple Torres model in 4 long days, so around 40 hours. A bit rough and ready, just like the original. It has zero soundboard bracing other than the two harmonic bars either side of the soundhole. Binding but no purfling. Good exercise though and an enjoyable build.

If you work from a home shop you are saving money on drive time and fuel vs driving to a job.

If you have building skills, you are never out of work. When setup and repair work is slow (not common in my shop but does happen) I build. Last summer I completed a $4800 build that began in July and was completed in early Nov. including a one-month cure for the nitro. How much did I make per hour? Don't know, but it was way more than 0.

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It will probably be alright.

Sapele. 7 or 8 sets and change from one bang on quarter $70 board. Bolivian Rosewood FB headplate and bridge came from there also.

`Ive told people who have asked about commission , its 80 hrs at 15.00 hr , that's $1,200.00 + Materials at $500.00 . Total $1,700.00 Minimum .... seems they want to buy something cheaper for some reason . But that's ok too !

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