Official Luthiers Forum!

When perusing all the Luthier's suppliers sites across the web, there is always the option of purchasing classical or acoustic tone wood.

I have never managed to figure out what is the difference in the wood between the classical and acoustic. Is it the size of the planks?

Please excuse this stupid question, and give me peace for my overtired and stressed mind...my boss walked out on us last week, and I have had to take up her share of the work...cramming four days' worth or work into two days!!!!

Size Classicals are narrower than most OMs, or at least the sets are.

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Lance@LuthiersForum.com

Sam,

Steel string sets are usually geared towards dreadnought/jumbo size. Classical sets are smaller usually. If you want to make smaller steel string guitars then sometimes a classical set will be big enough.

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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

Ok, thanks.

Spinal Tap...now there's a band with some serious genious...

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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."

Quoteth them; "How can I leave this behind?" profound stuff....

Most classical sets will usually do a 000, 00 for sure. The more likely thing on sets anyway, is that the sides will be narrower - approx 4 inch wide, 4.25 at most, and likely shorter, like 30 inches, which makes deep cutaways almost impossible.

As far as tops, its all about size ... mnarrower and sometimes shorter too - check the avg dimensions given by the suppliers for the differences.

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Tony Karol
www.karol-guitars.com
"let my passion .. fulfill yours"

Sam, most of the sets I buy are sold as classical sets, generally they are always large enough, as Tony says, for the OM, OOO size guitar. I've never had a problem with sides too short, but then I never build cutaways.

The one area you have to be careful of is with tops, the grade will guarantee to apply to the area covered by the normal classical plantilla, even though the board may be larger. I've never found this a problem from the guys I buy from.

Just check the dimensions of the B&S boards before ordering, or if using one of the UK guys just call them and make sure they know what you want.

Colin

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I don't believe in anything, I simply make use of a set of reasonable working hypotheses.