Official Luthiers Forum!

I just checked, I don't have any messages at all.

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Hutch

Get the heck off the couch and go build a guitar!!!!

Weird. I exchanged messages with another member earlier this week. I need your email address so I can send you the schedule file. You can try to send your email address to me by the forum's private messages and I'll see if I get it.

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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

email sent

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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

Building the Steel String Acoustic Guitar. R. M. Mottola. 2021
I bought this book after building 3 dreadnaught kits. Im building my first scratch guitar.
This book is better than Cumpianio's in that it is focused on STEEL STRING guitars and the methods used are more contemporary. I have a large library of building (and finishing) books, and this is hands down the best book on building steel string guitars I own.

As others have pointed out, there are different ways to do almost everything, and some of those ways are not compatable with other ways. Personally, I would recommend a kit guitar where all the capital intensive ($$$$) work has been done. WIth a kit you can split the your efforts between actually building (kits are pre-bent, and later, fabricating parts (bending sides, cutting dovetails, cutting rosettes and channels) slotting a fingerboard slab ect.). You can do all those things yourself, from scratch, using hand tools, but I believe it will take a LONG time (and a lot of guitar-wood-campfires) before you get a truly guitar from scratch.

I've spent 5 years building (and finishing) three kits. Im 65 and burning daylight, but I have three very nice rosewood guitars, have acquired a lot of jigs, hand tools and templates, and have finally started on my first scratch build. THe kits were time and money very well spent.

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Measure Twice,

Karl Borum

So it was my first a StewMac Dread kit and it came out OK. It had sharp fret ends and loose frets, millions of pores that were not completely filled, the action was high enough to slice hard boiled eggs and the 12,742 cosmetic flaws didn't bother me when it was dark in the room....

But it held my interest and launched me into number two and three which of course got better with experience.

One Sunday evening after deciding that I did not want this first guitar to ever be seen by anyone I decided to pitch it out with my trash.

I lived in a condo and put my trash out by the road every Sunday evening. This Sunday evening on a summer night I propped the guitar up on the top of my dumpster so that someone could see it from the road and maybe take if they wanted it.

The next morning, Monday I went out to the street and someone had taken the guitar out of the trash, checked it out and then pitched it into my yard. They didn't want it either....

Sheesh everyone is a critic...

Kind of reminds me of the old joke of leaving a banjo in an unlocked car and coming back to find more banjos and possibly an accordion.

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Hutch

Get the heck off the couch and go build a guitar!!!!