Official Luthiers Forum!

LMI makes reference to the use of carbon fiber for double topped guitars.  I am not familiar with these. Can anybody explain what they are and there advantages?

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A higher purpose for wood.
Rich Smith
Issaquah, WA

I only know a small bit, and hopefully Peter or someone who regularly makes guitars with a double-top will chime in - but a double top is a laminated top made with a core of nomex (or other materials) to make a stiff but extremely light top. Maybe some day I will get to the point of trying something like this. Now for the chiming in....

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Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils - Louis Hector Berlioz

Chansen / C hansen / C. Hansen / Christian Hansen - not a handle.

Christian

The principle of double top construction is to make a stronger top by means of gluing 2 layers of soundboard material with a Nomex (honeycomb) inner core in order to have a lighter but stiffer soundboard. That allows for lighter and more aggressive bracing.
Personally I don't use Nomex but that is the most used version.

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Peter M.
Cornerstone Guitars
http://www.cornerstoneukes.com

I do double tops with spruce and a Nomex core as Peter describes.

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Jim Watts
http://jameswattsguitars.com

Here's a Post from late last month that I thought explained the double top pretty well.

Double top

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Thanks,
Blain

http://www.ullrichguitar.com

"89.67% of all statistics are made up on the spot."

I noticed Alan Dunwell has a nice tutorial on Double Top Building on his website.

Click on Double Tops on the left side of the front page Dunwell Guitars.

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http://www.dickeyguitars.com

www.dunwellguitar.com is the link, I put an s on there.

Dunwell Guitar

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http://www.dickeyguitars.com

[QUOTE=Bruce Dickey]www.dunwellguitar.com is the link, I put an s on there.



Dunwell Guitar[/QUOTE]
Cool!  What is the resulting thickness of the top? and the weight compared to a standard top?

_________________
A higher purpose for wood.
Rich Smith
Issaquah, WA

The resulting thickness of my double tops is about .120 at the middle and then thinner at the edges. I save about 15% on the weight of the top, Alan I use a little less core than Alan Dunwell as show above. But it's hard to get much more of savings than that due to the weight of the adhesive.
In my experience Hesh is right, the big deal is improved cross grain stiffness, and of course a lighter top doesn't hurt anything.

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Jim Watts
http://jameswattsguitars.com