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I first designed this guitar 7 years ago. I wanted a small guitar a youngster could play but still have a serious instrument. The body dimensions are Martin O and the shape is a bit of a mashup of a Gibson L-O and a '70's Stella. I took some advice from Grumpy and played with the sound hole size and placement to coax as much bass as possible out of the little guy. Funny thing is only two of these have gone to kids, the rest are played by adults who wanted something that "didn't hurt their shoulder" or "could be played sitting on the couch" or "don't want that boomy bass of a dread"...

Anyhow, they were always paddle head x braced until now. So I looked up John How's post where he showed his ladder bracing pattern and had a go at it. Quite happy with the results.
Zebra Wood, Lutz spruce, Ebony, ABS bindings and purfs. The finish is 4 coats of satin Enduro Var which came in at a whopping 2.5 thousandths of an inch.

Here are a couple of close ups of the slot head, including some dust and a hair. How can you clean a guitar and look at it for 10 minutes and miss stuff that is so obvious in pictures?

beautiful work

Very nice!

I like the details of the headstock slot shapes and the zebrawood looks great. Nice work.

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Once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right - Robert Hunter

I like the way that a the details seem to be of a piece. Very nice

Ed

Very nice.
Any chance you can share a pic of the bracing.
I have lately been intrigued by small body ladder braced guitars.

Thanks
John

Thank you for the kind words gentleman.
John,
I didn't take any in process pictures. I was going to point you to John How's post with the photos and drawing I used but all the pics from Johns posts are MIA. I'll look through my computer and see if I saved anything.

Steve

Very Nice!!!

Congrats. I like the features


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

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Ken

We had the sincere pleasure of seeing and playing this very cool little guitar in person in Ann Arbor when Steve came by for our classes and I have to tell you and Steve has heard this before from me this is a VERY cool guitar. It sounds fantastic but the entire concept, the smaller size and the artistry that Steve applied to the slot-head design and superb execution of same put this one over the top in my book.

This is a guitar that I would be very proud to own and I rarely.... ever say that....

Very well done Steve AND you've got some real talent my friend!

I love that slot shape you did. Also, is that just one long piece for the entire sides or did you manage to hide the joint at the end graft so well you cannot see it?

Beautiful workmanship! Having never tried a satin finish, I'm guessing that eliminating all that pesky getting to shine sanding allows for laying it on a lot thinner?

How did it come about, your choice of that finish? And, are you happy with it?

Thanks Leo and Ken.

Hesh, if I still have it when I come back up your way I'll bring it along for a visit.

JF, sides are done the standard way. I align the book match as best I can and when bending I leave enough extra at the tail to use the cutoffs for the tail graft. I chose the piece with the best grain match, shape it, add purflings and inlay it over the joint. For fun I've told people that I use one piece sides bent on a pipe and hand cut the purfling groove. The looks of astonishment are priceless. You have to be pretty annoying to get me to jerk your chain that hard.

Danny, I had the Enduro Var in the shop and I wasn't in the mood for a gloss lacquer finish. Four coats sanded between each with 400 grit. The difficulty of a satin finish is getting the last coat off the gun just right. The secret to that is...... Practice! I didn't get it perfect, you can see a bit of texture on the sides and the head plate got smoothed with 1500 grit. I like the Enduro Var better than any other water bourne finish I've used. I'll have to give the gloss a try at some point but i'm enjoying giving the buffer some down time.

That's looks great!!

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When designing the headstock, I wanted to keep it recognizable as one of mine so that's where I started.

You can see the outline of the slot head isn't too far off the paddle head. I just worked out the size of the slots and changed the bottom half to accommodate them. The problem was figuring out the carve to keep the strings from laying on the head plate. I had an idea of what would be required, I put tuners in the holes and a slotted nut in place. Using a razor saw, I cut slots where the strings would run. I still wasn't quite sure what to do so I busted out my Googler and started searching out pics of slot heads. Thousands upon thousands of pics of the same thing. And the I saw it. The sexyist thing to hold six strings since (insert you favorite here, currently I'm favoring Annie Clark (without the crazy hair)).

Cover your keyboards with something to catch the drool and check this out from Matt Artinger.

Awesome work Steve.

I'd like to hear more on your bracing & how you settled on the exact sound hole size & position - did it evolve over multiple builds or did you somehow prototype or test?

And how did you measure the thickness of the finish?

Thanks for sharing.

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I'm not a luthier.
I'm just a guy who builds guitars in his basement.
It's better than playing golf.

There's a whole lot of pretty going on there, Steven! You really let the wood speak for itself!

Alex

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

Thanks Alex, I thought I was going too plain until I stood back and looked at it.

Kevin,
The thickness of the finish was measured off the bridge masking and of what peeled off the plastic sound hole cover.
For the bracing I followed John How's recipe which you'll find here http://luthiersforum.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10101&t=15768&hilit=my+recipe. I build a bit differently than most and used my standard structure from the sound hole up. Since Johns pictures aren't available, I found one from Haans which shows the pattern.


Sound hole placement and size were a one time shot that turned out very well and I haven't changed since. You may remember forum member "Grumpy" aka Mario Prolux, a very accomplished builder from The Great White North. He did the experiments and found improvement in bass production in small guitars with an increase in the sound hole size and moving it higher on the body. I just took a stab at the idea and increased my sound hole to 3 3/4" over Martins 3 5/8" and moved it up two frets to the 19th. Is it better than what Martin and Gibson did? I don't know, but I'm happy with how these guitars sound and I'm not interested in experimentation of that sort.

Steve