Official Luthiers Forum!

I will never admit to accidentally drilling through my mold with a guitar inside and of course drilling the guitar as well. At least it was rosewood and patched invisibly.

Al

Really nice uke's?

I have 30 or 40 handwritten pages of my goofiness in the shop -- its my build journal for number one!!

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Jim Howell
Charlotte, NC

Chris,

27" sides make for a nice 12 fret parlor guitar. Plus 4 of your 27" "sides" will make a 4 piece back. Or travel guitars or ukes or tenor guitars or ... Goof ups are life's way of helping you practice new skills and excercising the imagination

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Dave White
De Faoite Stringed Instruments
". . . the one thing a machine just can't do is give you character and personalities and sometimes that comes with flaws, but it always comes with humanity" Monty Don talking about hand weaving, "Mastercrafts", Weaving, BBC March 2010

I`d never glue the end block where the heel block goes, and the heel block where the end block goes.Oops
                                  James W B

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I cut it twice and it`s still too short.

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James W Bolan
Nashville Tennessee

I would never try the Franklin pre-made liquid hide glue on a neck reset. Total elapsed time for joint failure 2 hours.... kind of wish I had it on film. Now I only use chewing gum and gumption!!!
These are funny.
Evan

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http://www.NewYorkGuitarRepair.com

Hey Chris, I can relate.
I just did that to a bunch of old growth Brazilian. Broke my heart. Thou$andS down the drain.

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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."

Just kidding...

But I did run my fingers into the side of my table saw blade once. Does that qualify as a stupid mistake?

More recently, I turned on my bandsaw while the blade was totally de-tensioned. Nearly ruined a $200 blade...

Don't feel too bad about it, we've all been there. Just be thankful it was not a real expensive piece of wood. I wrecked a bunch of real nice cocobolo last year, which prompted my getting a new bandsaw. Stuff happens.

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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."

Well just this weekend -

One of my kids emulated Don and turned the bandsaw on while it was untensioned.

I was relatively together myself - I only spent about 15 minutes searching all over the shop for the tablesaw fence which was ... on the table saw, of course.

I recently planned the cuts on a pile of bubinga boards
wrong, and have a lot more billets for backs than I do for sides now. But at least I didn't cut any of the backs in half

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Jim Kirby
kirby@udel.edu

Well, being lazy, I was rough cut jig-sawing my top to shape, and instead of making a nice cutting platform, which would have taken 5 minutes, I shoddily supported it, and the blade hit the table underneath, jumped up, and broke the top a little. Luckily, it didn't break into the actual guitar cut out line. Good lesson for me, because I'm building 2 at the same time, and this is cheap spruce, the other is KOA! Yay! I figured out, I have to Live and learn, slow down, and think  ! Alan.

I carefully and clearly labelled my koa sides: neck, tail in and out, and marked where the waist would go, just so I'd be sure and get them into the bender correctly. Put the first one in its slat/blanket sandwich bent it, came out great. Put in the next one, looked at the label and put the end clearly labelled "neck" at the tail. Bent just fine too. Glued on the end blocks, linings, top and back. While marking the tail for routing the end graft channel, I thought to myself, "Hmmmm..... look at how that grain doesn't match." Amazing how long it takes for stupidity to dawn on me sometimes. Makes me feel dumb AND slow!

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now known around here as Pat Foster
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http://www.patfosterguitars.com

Chris...have you thought of 3 piece side/rib? Instead of an end graft at the centre of the end block, you'll have two grafts where the short piece at the end block end meets the 27-inch sides. I saw a guitar done this way and it looked really nice.

Chris, is there some reason you couldn't just joint those pieces and glue them back together? Padauk is generally not a very figured wood, and if you are good at getting clean joints, I don't think anyone will ever see the joint line.

Benedetto says that he often uses spruce wedges that aren't quite wide enough, so to make up for it, he cuts some off the sides in the upper bout area and adds the pieces to the sides in the lower bout area. For what it's worth, I don't think his customers were too worried about it.

It's funny the things we let bother us. But on the other hand, if it does bother you, then a piece of Padauk is not worth compromising over.

I’m not telling…

It seems that each instrument has a few stories of stupid mistakes to tell, but with each instrument you get better at fixing the mistakes so they don’t show as much. And some mistakes you don’t do many times or you get better at taking precautions; like padding the floor below you buffer, or using push sticks, not leaving the key in the drill chuck, remembering not to forget to tighten the resaw fence...

And so on.

Fear of mistakes used to worry me much more than it does now. After a while you get so used to the idea that mistakes will be made that you just deal with them and move on, it is such an integrated part of making guitars.

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Rian Gitar og Mandolin

I was making an OM from beautiful figured Claro Walnut. I profile my sides before I bend them to get them close. I bent two left hand (passenger) sides when I didn't check my markings well and put one in the bender upside down. I think I can straighten one out on my bending iron but haven't tried yet.

Blake

Yea....I mis-matched my sides too. I was so excited about the sides bending that I didn't occur to me that the grain was wrong. It wasn't until the tail block was glued in that I noticed.

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Brad
Avon, OH

Here's my latest "Dumb Man Walking" moment: I was trying to open a very thick mailing tube by cutting into it with a utility knife. It wasn't going well, and a quiet voice in my head said, "Stop, you're gonna cut yourself." So I moved by left hand way down the tube and continued to cut at the top. Well, sure enough, the knife slipped--right onto the tip of my left thumb. Made a pretty deep cut that probably could have benefited with a couple of stitches, but I didn't know at the time just how deep the wound was, because much essential fluid was filling the gap. Listen to that little voice!

Hey, Chris! How about a Weissenbornette?

BTW, after seeing how some of the Big Boys cover up "problems," I've come up with the motto: If you can't hide it, make it look pretty! A way to make a three-piece back of the same wood look like you planned it that way would be to graft the seams with purfling and a thin stripe of shell (or a contrasting wood, like curly maple or claro walnut). In fact, you could hone your mitering skills by continuing that theme around the whole back. It might even lead to someone asking you to make another one "just like that!"

I jointed and glued up two very nice curly maple wedges for an archtop. Later I cut out a nice "lefthanded"! back. Too bad I'm right handed

Now I don't feel so bad about bending two base sides for my first.  I actually re-bent one for the treble side without too much burning.

Kirby

When bending sides, be sure to turn off the ceiling fan and the AC unit. Two latifolia sides and one retusa side later..... heh heh, I figured it out....

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http://www.dickeyguitars.com

I had to learn through experience that guitar
plans present a "top-down" view, as if the
soundboard were transparent.

On my first, I initially glued the tone bar
(single because its the small-bodied guitar from
Scott Antes' AGP-01) emanating from the wrong
branch of the X-brace.

In all my reading about lutherie, I've never
seen this mentioned anywhere, so maybe I'm the only
one to make this error...

Eric (residing 500 yards away from Gryphon's
in Palo Alto)

Ha! Eric, you are one of many! Did you leave that way? It probably would sound fine.

All right, Eric and Carlton, I'll bite.

What plans are you using?

All my plans show the guitar top bracing from the perspective of the inside of the guitar, not from the outside looking down through the top. On the plans, the tone bar begins on the lower left X-brace (which will ultimately be the treble side when you flip it over) and slopes down toward the right (which will ultimately be the bass side when you flip it over).

In other words, the view on my plans is from exactly from the same perspective as the top in this Taylor photo (with the tone bars emanating from the same side and sloping in the same direction):

http://www.taylorguitars.com/video/factory-fridays/default.a spx?edition=7&title=7%3a+Bracing

I just double checked all my plans and they all show the same perspective. This includes (1) the Dread plans I received with my first Stew-Mac kit, (2) Scott Antes' Dread plans, (3) Scott Antes' OM plans, (4) Michael Payne's OM plans, and (5) Michael Payne's SJ plans (the OLF SJ).

So I'm confused by your comments.

Sorry to belabor the point, but I don't want someone to read this and confuse themselves into building their guitars backwards. (Unless I'm about to learn that I've been building all my guitars backwards. Which would worry me except that Taylor and everyone else seems to be building them backwards the same as me.)

My dumbest moment was not in the shop it was in the kitchen. A failed tendon repair followed by a tendon transplant. 9 months later I'm not 100% yet. We all need to think about safety even when were out of the shop.

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Say what you do, Do what you say.