Official Luthiers Forum!

This may seem like a hopelessly open-ended question, but frankly it's something I'm struggling with, and, being a largely self - taught builder (by this I mean I've never attended guitar-building school - more accurately, I'm an OLF-taught builder ) I've probably developed some bad habits.

As I evolve my techniques from one build to the next, it's clear to me that many of you are able to attain super-clean fit and finish, and pristine glue lines, total lack of glue slop, etc. I'd really like to build guitars that have extremely good fit and finish, as well as really clean joints (re: glue or lack thereof) and other examples which make the guitar appear to be a professionally-built.

What techniques do you all use which you've found effective in building clean, and optimizing fit and finish.

Thanks.

I'll recommend Bogdanovich's DVD set. He is a very clean builder, and you can see how he does it, as he builds. It's expensive, but it's a great lesson in clean work and precision building, as you can watch his every step, including how he wipes glue before gluing, and while gluing. If you can find someone who has it, borrow it, or see if you can rent it somewhere. It's a good set.

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Waddy

Photobucket Build Album Library

Sound Clips of most of my guitars

#1 - Hot hide glue. It really cleans up easily with hot water or steam. Very clean glue.


#2 - Perfectly flat surfaces and less glue possible on both surfaces. Clean up the squeeze out immediatly after clamping. I personnaly check out my gluing surfaces with a Mitutoyo engineer's straitghtedge that are, how to say, really straight?



Francis

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Francis Richer, Montréal
Les Guitares F&M Guitars

Patience, take the time necessary to make every joint fit perfect, then take the time to clean the squeezeout. I use hot hide glue, and clean squeezeout with a cotton cloth, or toothbrush dipped into the water in my glue pot. I've seen really clean work with all kinds of glue though. Again, patience is the main thing.


Added, if there's gaps around the binding, or purfling, route them off and re do them, instead of filling. If anything else doesn't fit right, re do it. Take the time to drop fill any where that's needed when finishing, ect.

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I didn't mean to say it, but I meant what I said.
http://www.brackettinstruments.com/

Some obvious things about gluing that took me a long time to learn were things like having everything ready before you start. With bindings, there is often also purfling, so several things happen at once. Having tapes and clamps and glue and a rag and a sharp stick all ready before starting helps. When the top is glued on, if you can immediately turn the guitar over so that the excess glue settles in the joint instead of running down the side you don't have to clean up so much. If you are careful you can often take the clamps off after an hour or two and the excess glue is still soft enough to clean up a lot easier than when it dries hard. That would be on a less stressed joint. After many times it's easier to judge the right amount of glue so there's not so much clean up.

This is the biggy but i'll expand a little bit. The times my work suffers is when my head's not in the game for one reason or another. If you don't feel like being in the shop, there's a good chance that your work isn't going to be as good as you want it to be.

Sometimes if I notice a mistake or something after a long session, it's better to set the work down and take a break for a few minutes to the next day or week before picking up again and fixing/moving forward.

Everyone's different though. Learn your own attention span and work close to your limits. This sometimes means going past them but you need to push yourself to improve your patience and skills. Doing so in baby steps is a lot less risky than trying to make big leaps (though that works sometimes too!).

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http://www.birkonium.com CNC Products for Luthiers
http://banduramaker.blogspot.com

+1 on the idea of not going ahead with mistakes, fix everything, or do it over again. One of my many flaws with playing is I mess around, do pieces that are too hard for me, and never get anything completely up to a performance standard. Same thing can be a problem with craft. A "project", in this case a guitar, is not a place to practice. Practice at the driving range, play on the course. Of course you can't be perfect before you build your first instrument, so the logic is to at least bring all parts of your game up to a given standard. If you suck as something, practice it before you do it on an instrument, until you are at the standard you currently have reached for other parts of the project. This often does not take all that long. This also reduces stress. Don't be an adrenaline junkie, builds should flow. Also warm up. If you were going to saw a dovetail by hand, but you don't do that 8 hours a day. Be sure to whip out a piece of scrap, get in a non-binding stance, practice letting the saw fall through the cut, and after a few rips on the board, execute on the project. The rustier you are the more you need to start with the engine warmed up.

On the bindings, I use the dry install and CA method which is pretty foolproof. I noticed Bogdonavich had a clever method with yellow glue. I sorta forget what it was. But it involved not covering the difficult spots, and then getting to them later, or clamping them. I just noted it, and decided I would go back later if I wanted to use titebond. But it was sorta counter intuitive. Like if I was worried about a tight fit at the waist, I would probably start there and tape the heck out of it, but then you can't see whether you actually got it right, or not, till the tape comes off. I'd like to do bindings with hide glue, or maybe fish glue. Just starting to think about it. Both of those are reversible.

Another thing that pays off is to study glues and masks. An example is sealing end grain against glue infiltration, or finish bleeding with shellac, but then you have to know what sticks to what, and how to handle the sequence.

Sharp tools help too.

Oh Lannnnnccceeee? It's about time the "King of Clean" chime in here...

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http://www.presnallguitars.com

Good light and an Optivisor.

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Ken Franklin
clumsy yet persistent
https://www.kenfranklinukulele.com

A lot of good advice here, I like what Woody said, and Ken is right: good lighting is key, and an optivisor really helps to do fussy work like mitres and so on. If it looks good magnified X4 it will look great to the naked eye.
Every glue has different properties and generates different habits. With HHG I like to clean up right away with a small brush (left in the hot water of the glue pot), paper towel and quick drying with a heat gun (I specified quick…). With aliphatic glues (TB1, Gorilla wood glue) I like to wait 30mn or so and lift the glue squeeze out with a sharp curved chisel. Definitely before it hardens too much, the squeeze out should still be soft like leather, but not wet, and lift easily in long beads.
It's good practice to try and do a super clean job right away, rather than wait until completion to clean up everything. I always have a 3" brush on the bench to sweep shavings and particles and I vacuum often. It's amazing how a small piece of rosewood or ebony can ruin a top, for example.
For rosettes and bindings it's much easier to do a clean and accurate job if the channels are just a few thous shy of the purf/binding height. It's impossible to really see how lines and mitres meet if everything is 1/16" proud (I exaggerate). Depending on the gluing method (for rosette/binding) fit should be really tight (CA), or a bit loose (aliphatic, HHG) to allow for wood expansion with the water in the glue.
As for general joinery (fit), it's just a matter of having really sharp tools, and taking the time. If you catch yourself thinking "It's good enough", it probably isn't.
For finish it's good to stick to one type of finish, and refine one's method until things are easy and look right. Best quality sandpaper and a variety of blocks help.

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Laurent Brondel
West Paris, Maine - USA
http://www.laurentbrondel.com/

Double post. Maybe it's my mouse, or what?

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Laurent Brondel
West Paris, Maine - USA
http://www.laurentbrondel.com/

Laurent, do you have a Mac Book Pro?
That happenned to me a lot.
Great advice here!
Also, keep building more and more.
That has helped me get cleaner results.
Being familiar with each task.
Of course,
don't be in a hurry.

Keep a clean shop and know where all your tools are.

This sign hangs in my shop. The words are from an MIMF post by Mark Wybierala. (The line in my signature is pertinent too, I guess. It's from Goethe.)

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Tim Allen
"Never hurry, never rest."

This is a great topic.

Good lighting for sure. I use a headlamp quite often...the kind for camping. Lots of patience, move slow, and have a steady hand. I like to think I am a surgeon doing open heart surgery and someone's life is at stake if I don't get it right. Do a dry clamp. Have all your clamps and other tools ready to go. Apply the right amount of glue...just enough to get a good glue up but not so much you get a lot of squeeze out. clean up squeeze out immediately, although I have heard that waiting until the glue has "boogerized" works well. I repeated a lot of what was said before..but this is what I do and have learned works for me. I'm only on build #1 though;)!

This has been one of the biggest ongoing areas of improvement for me. Pretty revolutionary when I finally figured out how to consistently get a good edge on a scraper a few weeks ago. Haven't yet mastered planes and chisels, but still vastly improved from where they were a year ago.

Lighting can be too good. At least mine seems to be. There's a lot of it over the main bench, so much that shadows are almost non-existent. During pre-finish prep, I use an opti-visor too. Then, if I won't be in the shop for a few days, because it won't be heated, I take the work in the house and sometimes find faults I missed under the bench lighting. They show up under weak shadowy lighting in the house. So maybe the lesson here is to inspect under varied lighting conditions, such as point source and soft.

Pat

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formerly known around here as burbank
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http://www.patfosterguitars.com

Never settle for bad workmanship.
That has been my personal goal and motto.

Re-do it 10 times if thats what it takes to make it right.
Perfect is a stretch, but shoot for it and if you come close you will be in the ball park of very good.

I cant tell you how many times I have routed bindings OFF to just glue them back on. Or cut out an end graft because I fudged up the miter.

Thats really about it. Other than the obvious. Clean up your squeeeee'zout

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Lance@LuthiersForum.com

+1 on lighting and optivisor (Ken's workmanship is immaculate, so listen to him!).

I'll add:
Once your pieces are to size, never sand lower than 120 grit thereafter.
Make sure to sand up through the grits 120 - 150 - 180 - 220 - 320 - then raise the grain with a damp clean cloth - 400 before filling/finishing.
Never skip a grit.
Get someone else (a fellow luthier) to inspect and critique your work from time to time.

Cheers,
Dave F.

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Cambrian Guitars

"There goes Mister Tic-Tac out the back with some bric-brac from the knick-knack rack"

Really sharp tools that you can shave with - literally. When I was at Krenov's school in the early 80's we spent the first month lerarning how to get tools razor sharp, beause no tecnique works with dull tools. We used to say that the only reason we took Sundays off was to let the hair on our arms grow back from testing plane blades.

Paul

Simple answer - practice! I found that achieving tight, clean lines and joints just takes practice. So, keep building! It'll come. And relax. Nothing causes me more screwups than being tense or in a hurry.