Official Luthiers Forum!

I'm sure I'm not the only newbie who would greatly appreciate some candid remarks from some of the more experienced folks here about the mistakes you find yourself making on any given build. So if you are willing to fess up, would you tell us what mistakes you made on your most recent build (or a recent one)? Also, for those who sell their work, what kinds of mistakes (and what severity) will you sell a guitar with, and what would you require yourself to do over?

I'm not ashamed to go first.

My latest build (flattop number 5) is for one of my sons. I took on a lot of new tricks on this one --- purfling on the sides & endpieces; miters for all of the purflings, endpieces, & backstrip; a wood rosette with wood purflings; and a few other neat things that I probably should have learned how to do several builds ago. I'm surprised how few mistakes I have made on this one, but there are still plenty. Here they are so far (the body is done; the neck is not):

(1) I have very thin purfling lines on the inner and outer edge of the rosette. One of the lines on the outer edge wasn't pressed in deep enough when I glued it in, and it "fades out" for about 1/2" on the right side. Uggghh! The line is thin enough that you have to look to see it, but it's definitely there.

(2) When sanding the waist on the right side, I lost focus and now the binding is now too thin for about an inch on the waist.

(3) I had some weird thing happen with the binding channel on one area of one side, and I ended up with a small section where the binding is a hair under 3/16" thick rather than 1/4" like everywhere else. I had to put my wife's finger on it before she could see it, but to me it sticks out like an aircraft carrier.

(4) I used different thickenss purfling lines on the backstrip than what I put around the edges of the back. As a result, I struggled with the miters on the back; one of them is noticeably flawed if you look at it; the rest, I know they aren't perfect, even if most other people would never notice. (Fortunately, the endpiece miters all came out great, so I suppose it evens out for my first shot at mitered purfling.)

(5) The upper section of my back plate is between 1/16" and 1/8" off center. I can't see it now, but when I put the neck on, the lamination that goes down the middle of the neck SHOULD line up perfectly with the backstrip . . . . The heelcap will hide it a little bit, but anybody who looks at the back straight-on will notice something is off.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with how this build is going, but I'm still a bit frustrated because two of those mistakes (#2 and #3) I have made enough before that I should have known better. Mistake #5 was just me not paying enough attention, so, that's annoying. Mistakes #1 and #4 involved me trying something new for the first time, so I'll go easier on myself for those.

I haven't gotten to the point that I sell my guitars. I have thoughts about what I would do if I were at that point, but that's all in hypothetical la-la land . . . .

I feel yo pain buddy. I can't tell you the number of bonehead mistakes I have made. But my most recent mistake involves having to replace the top of a guitar whose binding was a world of trouble to do. My plan is to put the top inset into the purfling without removing it binding or the purfling. Pictures will be posted of this effort.

When you start to sell guitars you will still make mistakes but they ALL have to be corrected. At that point you arn't building guitars you are building character.

Nice Line John

My most recent ones, were doing a fingerboard inlay upside down, I'm a lefty so did it for me not Customer, and shapping a neck through to the truss rod, Doh !!

Kelby: I have shared many of your mistakes and also learned how to "hide" them. My Dad once said "A good carpenter is the one who hides his mistakes best". How true.

My latest blurb was while routing the 1/8" radius on my bindings that I routed ALL the way around the top (while I was talking with a customer). Well now when I attach the fingerboard I will have this nice GAP at the binding to fingerboard joint!!! Arrrrrghhh! The other blurb ... I did this same thing to THREE OTHER guitars in this batch!

Lesson learned - Don't talk to customers and work at the same time.

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tim...
http://www.mcknightguitars.com

I struggled last night let me tell you..... I was thinning a radiused fingerboard from the back. I thought I was so clever by using a 20" caul flipped upside down. I used double stick tape to hold everything in place.

only one problem. I forgot to check how deep the fret slots went and sanded away all of the connecting ebony.

DOOOOOHHHHH!

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Brock Poling
Columbus, Ohio
http://www.polingguitars.com

Current;
My biggest current errors comes from my accident last year on the table saw, when I cut off 1/3 if the tip of my index finger. The nerve was damaged. Feel sensitivity is not good on it or the next three fingers at times. This has cause me to inadvertently drop tools and ding necks backs and “Oh--My--God” that exquisitely bearclawed Caucasian spruce top. This has happened both prior to and after finish. Nothing too drastic but darn aggravating.

Past;
My biggest mistakes in the first couple years of building was patience, nothing causing structural but occasional cosmetic Also over working heel adjustment at neck set. More than once I have had to add creative laminations to build the cheeks back up a bit. I have to tell you though I kind like the look of having a matching binding and heel cheek purfling. I have done this intentionally several times since.

Recurring;
As far as recurring mistakes, I would have to say miters on three line side purfflings give me issues

For my latest uke neck I made a new improved jig for my bandsaw to do a better job of making the cut for the scarf joint. After carefully checking all my angles and measurements, I made the cut. Perfect, except my neck blank was flipped around so I made the cut the wrong way. Neither piece was now long enough to make the neck shaft and have the scarf joint in the peg head, the way I intended. I decided to go ahead and use the pieces and the joint will be under the fingerboard instead.

I continue to find ways to screw up but mostly in the areas of what we used to call 'hangar rash'. On my last two projects I have cracked the soundboard while trimming braces, had a back brace slip out of position in the go-bar deck and even worse misaligned a bridge.
I am getting used to hearing things like - "..it sounds great! ..nobody will even notice unless you point it out...".
My next primary goal is to make a guitar look as good as it sounds.

It's all part of learning, I've done a number of really stupid ones, the real trick is to stop and learn from the mistake. I was routing a ledge on the first fanned fret and had cut out the end graft slot, I forgot to check the sides before routing and ended up putting a piece of Koa there in the nice new moon I created in the bottom of the top, now I check EVERYTIME before I route to make sure it's all correct.

The other big tip is if you get mad, just walk away and do something else for a while. Give yourself some time to calm down and work out the problem, we all make them, no ones excluded from that club

-Paul-

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-Paul-

Patriot Guitars

Thanks, guys!

This brings a lot of perspective. I really like John's comment about "fixing them all." When you start with the assumption that there are no acceptable errors, it's much easier to convince yourself to fix everything. I'm planning to spend Saturday re-doing the backstrip (so it's centered and so that the miters work perfectly) and the two segments of binding that gave me grief.

One question about binding problems. If you have a binding problem on, say, 1" of binding, do you replace the binding on that entire entire half of the guitar, or do you splice in enough to repair the messed up portion?

Tim,
   I was spending more than 30 hours a week on the phone and still trying to put in 50 or so building without the phone stuck to my ear. I would get repeat calls several times a week from a few customers curious about what I was doing on their guitar that particular day. I understand their excitement and was thinking that maybe they were under the impression that if they had my attention, their guitars would get priority treatment...I'm guessing, though.

   I finally came up with a solution and started to tell them to hold on while I got their guitar onto a bench to work on while I was on the phone with them. I gently explained that it was only fair that if a guitar was going to get half of my attention because I was holding a conversation while working....that it's their guitar and no one else's.

   I tend to get more emails than phone calls now and it's worked out nicely since I can focus on work and answer questions later when I make it in from the shop or set aside time to call them if need be in the next day or so.

   Bullding guitars and holding a phone conversation at the same time is sort of like being on your cell phone while driving.....the conversation stinks and so does the driving. I like when people pay attention to what I say during a conversation and want to give them that same courtesy when they're speaking to me so I put down what I'm doing and listen more now.

Regards,
Kevin Gallagher/Omega Guitars

[QUOTE=John Kinnaird]
......At that point you arn't building guitars you are building character.[/QUOTE]


I like that!

Ronold man38603.5897685185

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OLD MAN formerly (and formally) known as:

Ron Wisdom

Somewhere in the middle of Arkansas......

I was putting the last bit of shine on a neck, at the buffing wheel. The wheel grabbed the heel cap, and jerked it out of my hands. Next--and this all happened quite fast--the fretboard extension slams into the spinning wheel, breaking the board at the 12th fret. (12 fret neck.) Ruined a real pretty set of curly maple bindings, not to mention a nice ebony board, and realized there was no fix for the job. Had to remove the fretboard, make a new one, and start the process all over.
Needless to say, I'm all concentration now at that buffer!
Hang in there Kelby. This time next year you'll laugh about it and have great stories to tell.

Steve

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From Nacogdoches...the oldest town in Texas.

http://www.stephenkinnaird.com

I am just of the opinion that you can learn to do this without a lot of mistakes. They are kind of like our tuition.

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Brock Poling
Columbus, Ohio
http://www.polingguitars.com

Cut twice, measure once.

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"I want to know what kind of pickups Vince Gill uses in his Tele, because if I had those, as good of a player as I am, I'm sure I could make it sound like that.
Only badly."

Hmmm...Let's see, where do I start??
Well there was the time I got the brilliant idea that in order to save time I could run my glued up rim set(with heel block,tail block and linings)in order to flush sand the linings with the sides through my drum sander. I had it in the outside mold with the spreaders in and it worked great-The next time I tried it I forgot to put it in the mold and it exploded!

Gluing the top to the rim on an archtop-using too much clamp pressure and crushing the sides!

I once hung up an almost finished guitar and somehow missed the hook and it hit the floor and exploded!

Carved a neck a litle too much on a spanish heel guitar-more expensive garbage.

etc.,etc.,etc.,etc.

Apprentices make mistakes and don't know it.
Journeymen make mistakes and hide them.
Masters make mistakes, but they are part of their style.

"Any fool can learn from his own mistakes; a wise man learns from those of others"        Bismark

I still make mistakes, after thirty+ years of building, but they are getting to be less problematic and more stylistic (Am I becoming a Master? Dare I dream?). My big problem now is the mistakes the students make when I'm not watching them closely enough. I really want to see people go out with a guitar _I_ could be proud of, but the reality is that they get ahead of me sometimes, and do dumb things before I can catch them. It sure doesn't take long to screw something up, particularly with a router....

A lot of the 'mistakes' I make these days are things that only matter cosmetically: brace pockets that are a little wide, for example. The guitar won't fall apart because of it, but it just looks lees than wonderful.

Bindings, purflings and rosettes are ever-productive sources of mistakes, as you've found. When you lose a rosette line like that you can often go back and re-inlay it if you didn't cut out the hole and lose the guide hole. We had to do that recently with a student's guitar: the replacement ring came out great except it has one extra line in it, which most people won't pick up. He could, of course, have replaced the other circle to make them the same.

BTW, I've seen expensive instruments from really well-known makers with mistakes. One was a guitar that the fellow had paid $12,000 for that had a chunk taken out of the top by the builder. It was glued back in, but not well. In another case I worked on a guitar from a maker known for his artistic skill that had a rosette inlaid on the _inside_ of the top. It had been sanded through, so he just flipped the wood and made that the inside, putting in a new rosette. A builder I know had the router blow out a piece of the top when he was cutting the binding rabbet, and did a beautiful 'finger' patch to fix it. He challenged me to find it, and I did, but only because I know where the router always blows out the top. I had taught him the patching method years before: it was a good repair and he had every reason to be pleased with it(especially since the guitar sounded so good).

My violin making teacher said she would never let us get away with some of the stuff Strad did. If your instrument sounds that good, nobody objects when one of the F-holes is 1/16" higher up than the other or the corners don't match. Again, part of the 'style'.

As for telling folks...

I don't normally tell people about things that I consider only 'cosmetic', like those brace pockets. We all have our notions of what is and is not a 'serious' problem, of course. I figure if it's not something that's going to cause structural or acoustic problems down the road they don't need to know.

OTOH, I do tell folks about those important things. I had shipped a Tenor violin to a fellow set up, and the end pin had gotten knocked, which broke the glue line around the end block on the top, and cracked the top on one side up from the saddle. He refused the instrument, and shipped it back for a refund. I was able to glue the crack together nearly invisibly and put patches on the inside to hold it, so it was a strong as could be expected. When I sold the instrument I was careful to tell the customer before hand about the problem and give her a chance to back out. It will probably never jump up and bite her, but if it does....

Remember, if somebody buys something and they like it, they tell their frinds. If they buy something and don't like it, they tell _everybody_.   

[QUOTE=Alan Carruth] Apprentices make mistakes and don't know it.
Journeymen make mistakes and hide them.
Masters make mistakes, but they are part of their style.

"Any fool can learn from his own mistakes; a wise man learns from those of others" [/QUOTE]

Allen I love this. There is more knowlage in your last quote than you can read in a life time.

"Learning is the gathering of knowlage, experiance is the the application of that knowage" C.M. Payne 1902-1972
MichaelP38603.7476967593

This type of thread is exactly what makes this forum so wonderful. Thanks for all the strories guys!

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Joe Breault
Merrimack, NH
Perpetual novice

You guys still haven't named a mistake that I haven't already made by myself. I can still think of many others that I have made that no one has listed. Come on guys, keep listing. I need to learn from some other peoples mistakes.

One mistake actually got me an extra sale. When I was routing the back binding, the router bit actually pulled itself out of the chuck and went about a 1/2 inch too deep. I used up all my Alabama cuss words and had to borrow a few from Georgia. After the smoke cleared in my head, I called the customer and told him what had happened. He decided that he had so much of his heart and soul into the guitar that he did not want to abandon it. He asked me if I could just make it shallower than the original depth. I told him that I would do it that way and if he liked it he could buy it, and if not I could sell it to someone else. It turned out that it sounded great and he wanted it. He still couldn't get the original guitar in his head and decided to have me build it as well. So now he has a deep body and a shallow body and loves both of them.

So when you get a lemon, fess up and make some lemonade.

My most recent BIGGIE was to drill and install ALL of the fretboard marker dots, ONE FRET OFF! all the way up!

I tried to drill them out and fill the holes because it was an ebony FB, that diddnt work! so I removed the FB and started over

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Lance@LuthiersForum.com

When I make mistakes it's not parts of guitars,it's whole guitars!

This is an interesting one-before I had a climate controlled shop the top split when the humidity dropped so I sawed the top off on my bandsaw and this is what I was left with!


I can't remember what was wrong with this one-it just displeased me,so I sawed it in half!




You gotta make at least one lute in order to call youself a luthier:



And talk about not being able to see the forest through the trees-I made this big mistake 30 years ago when I was 17 years old-my third guitar.

[QUOTE=Don Williams] Cut twice, measure once.[/QUOTE]

Geez...only cut twice? Man, you ARE good! I've cut up to a half dozen times and still can't get it to measure correctly!

[QUOTE=Brad Goodman]
And talk about not being able to see the forest through the trees-I made this big mistake 30 years ago when I was 17 years old-my third guitar.

[/QUOTE]

Hummm, Something just looks a little out of balance but I just can't quite put my finger on it. Maybe it's that bullet hole in the top