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Hello! I am a new member of this forum. I start guitar building now. My first guitar will be a 000 12 fret like the Martin 000-30 1919. but with an laminatet spanish neck without truss rod. My question is how to create the neck angle, which should be about 1 degree. I will build the guitar in a form, not like spanish luthiers on a plantilla. First I will build the neck with the healblock, then attaching the sides to the neck. Is it right to create the neck angle by sawing the joints for the sides in a 1 degree angle to the vertical line?

The integral neck really works best on the Spanish solera. Back when I worked that way I use to establish the neck angle by clamping the neck and body to a beam, and shimming it to get the neck angle right before fitting and gluing the back. That's basically what the solera does.

Making a steel string guitar with a Spanish heel and no truss rod is asking for trouble in the future, and maybe the near future at that. The truss rod is there to fight 'cold creep' in the neck; the fact that wood bends progressively under a sustained load. The rod counteracts that in the neck, but can't do anything to stop the body from distorting over time. Even if the neck is perfectly under control it will still pull up, requiring lowering of the saddle and, eventually the bridge. When that bottoms out you have a real problem. Classical guitars have thicker necks, and carry much less tension that steel strings, so they don't worry as much about this. Traditionally they also used to make the fretboard very thick, so that when the neck pulled up you could remove the upper frets and plane it down to get the action back, for a while.

The Martin 12-fret 000 was the last, and largest, guitar they designed for gut strings. It was also designed before the invention of the truss rod. It's nice to follow tradition, and a classical built on that platform is very nice if it's built light enough. I've made a couple of those, and a number of steel string ones, but all of them had removable necks, and the steel strings had adjustable truss rods. The 'old boys' did the best they could at the time, but we know better about some things now.

What Alan said and I am a professional repair person. If this guitar came into my shop in 10 - 30 years needing a neck reset we would not take it in and the customer would be without necessary options.

Truss rods AND a neck that can be serviced and the neck angle refreshed is a must on a steel string.

Welcome to the forum and sorry to be negative but this is not a good idea.

Now Martin used a dovetail neck joint on the 1919 and they did not use a truss rod because it had not been invented yet. Although Martin was not fast to adopt truss rods likely because it was the IP of a competitor... they did eventually cave and do the right thing. That's their excuse as for the rest of us we have no excuse to not learn from those who came before us and broke the trail.

Consider a modern bolt-on neck joint too since this is your first. You can always struggle and pull your hair out with a dovetail neck joint with subsequent guitars. . I'll even go so far which is not very far to recommend a kit to get started so you have some support, documentation and the process may be more enjoyable. Building an acoustic guitar is not easy.

Again welcome to the madness

Hallo Juergen,
If you laminate a center spline of a hard and stiff wood (ebony, purpleheart, etc.) you may have some success initially, assuming you string it with extra light strings and use the 24.9 scale length the early models used. Still, I would add an oscillating tool to my toolbox so if (when) the neck eventually pulled up I could easily saw it off and replace it or convert it to a "bolt on" neck.
One thing to keep in mind is that the neck angle is in the opposite direction of that of a classical guitar, and that some allowance is usually made for the top "pulling up" when the strings are at tension.
Using a "bolt on" neck as Hesh mentioned offers a much better chance to correct mistakes and have a successful outcome.

Yep, purpleheart would be great for this. It has exceptionally high strength and stiffness for its weight. If laminating, I'd make the center purpleheart piece at least 1/2" wide. Better yet make the whole thing out of purpleheart.

If light weight is your objective, use Spanish cedar with carbon fiber D tube. You can buy from Dragonplate, or do like Burton LeGeyt and make your own with a Spanish cedar core that stays in the neck http://www.luthiersforum.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=578478#p578478
That one also has a vertical spline, but that shouldn't be necessary.

Personally I prefer a single compression truss rod, since it's still fairly lightweight and being able to level the frets flat and then adjust the relief is a heck of a lot easier than compression fretting. I've used 3/16" steel so far, but I would like to try titanium or 1/4" aluminum for even lighter weight.

Regarding neck angle, I build integral neck guitars without any forms at all (check any of my build threads in the doc-u-build or challenge forums if you want details), and do the final neck angle setting while gluing the back on with spool clamps and a couple of cam clamps on the headblock area. Get the clamps on, check the angle, and if necessary loosen the clamps and pull the neck forward or back while tightening them down again. Do a dry run to get an idea of which direction and how much force you'll need.

And in consideration of future neck resets, use hide glue, shellac finish, and no back binding. This way you can unglue the upper bout of the back, crank the neck back and glue it down, and fix up the finish relatively easily.

A mid-tier manufacturer in my country makes steel string guitars with a Spanish heel construction. Although popular with guitarists, their rep amongst repair-folks is …. not great.

Any sort of stiff wood lamination in the neck will put the problem off for a bit, but not solve it. It's still wood and subject to cold creep. CF will limit the pull up. A small rectangular CF rod inlaid under the fingerboard actually does not add appreciable stiffness to the neck initially. It's on what's called the 'bending center' or 'center of moment' of the neck in bending, where there is not much, if any, tension or compression, but only shear forces. CF is hard to stretch, but shear loads are only taken up by the epoxy that holds the fibers together in the usual small rods, and that's not much better in that way then wood. After a while, as the neck bends, the fibers in the rod start to take up some tension, so this will help to limit how much to neck bends, eventually. It does nothing to stop the body from flexing, though, and that usually contributes more to the need for a re-set than the neck bending. The carbon D-tubes are quite stiff, and should keep any neck bending to a minimum, but , again, that doesn't stop the body from deforming.

Years ago, the shop where I used to work received the exemplar instrument - the one and only steel string instrument as it happens - built by luthier and author Irving Sloane. The genesis of the instrument as well as the book that detailed construction was a request from his son for a steel string guitar. Ultimately, the boys elected to change strings and return the guitar to the owner with a suggestion to preserve it as it was -virtually unplayable due to body distortion and minimal string break at the nut. The requested work was simply too expensive and too disruptive to what remained of an ultimately unsuccessful but ultimately iconic instrument.

It seems to me that the fate of any more-or-less conventional steel string guitar with a neck joint which cannot be economically reset is to have that neck removed and conversion to a bolt-on. It seems wiser to just start with a bolted joint (or dovetail) and eliminate the entire problem.

Mr. Sloane built with a Spanish heel because that's what he understood... if nothing else, this thread should better inform your decision.

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Hello again. Sorry for that I did not reply on your advices immedeatly.
Thanks a lot for your several advices! I will build the spanish neck with a truss rod. It will be 48 mm wide, spanish cedar laminated eith an 8 mm ebony strip. The fingerboard will be ebony, 7,5 mm thick. I will make a drawing 1:1 and play with neck angle, hight of bridge and hught of saddle to search for an neck angle, which all together will create a comfortable string hight. I do not understand why to build a mortise-and-tenon joint. This is glued, so you can not remove the neck for adjustments of the neck angle. I think the main difference between the spanish neck and the bolt-on, dovetail an mortise-and-tenon neck is that the spanish way of guitarbuilding is not suitable for mass production, because the parts of the guitar are not produced seperat from each other and assembled at the end but very soon handled as a more and more completed unit.
I build a guitar not even for to build a guitar. For me it is a challenge for my handworking skills and the joy and happiness during building. I am a great fan of Antonio de Torres and the very traditionel way of guitar building! I will retire in Februar 2023, and then I will spend most of my time in guitarbuilding. My intention is not, to build guitars for selling. Just for my personal fun and joy, but very ambitious to my skills and sound of the guitars. The measurments I explained above are my personal preferences in guitar playing combined with thinking about playability and stability of the instrument.
I am a little bit sorry about that no one answered my entire question.

Now that you mention it, I did forget to say yes, you should saw the slots in the neck at a 1 degree angle. The relative arch heights of the soundboard X braces and upper transverse brace also affect the neck projection height at the bridge location. I use 1/8" arch height on the X braces and 1/32" arch height on the upper transverse and it comes out close enough to adjust while gluing the back on as I described before.

The need for a re-set on the neck of a guitar is not solely, or even mostly, due to distortion of the neck over time and under tension. The body and top also move. Even if the neck is perfectly rigid the changes in the body will eventually require dropping the saddle height to keep the action in line, and eventually you run out of wiggle room.

When I started out I made steel strings with Spanish heels. Now I wish I hadn't.

Spanish heels were the best they knew how, at the time. We’ve learned a lot since then, about why Spanish heels should remain in the past.

A drawing is a great idea. Make sure you include the initial state and then some other sketches of how things may change under the relentless pull of steel strings over the years and decades. Include the deformation of the body and the effect on neck angle. Don’t know how it will deform? All the more reason to use a neck joint you can adjust as the instrument settles.

Glued mortise and tenon or dovetail necks can absolutely be removed for adjustment and are removed for adjustment every day in luthier’s workshops all around the world, because steel string guitars are practically guaranteed to require adjustment of their neck angle at some point. That’s why the vast, vast majority of (good quality) steel string guitars have an adjustable neck joint, either bolted or glued. No amount of neck reinforcement will save your steel string guitar from needing neck adjustment, so it pays to prepare for it.

Think of all the priceless vintage Martin guitars from the first half of the twentieth century that people pay huge sums for. How many of these would be playable today if they’d been built with a Spanish heel? My opinion is very few. Most of them have had neck adjustment at some point to remain playable.



It’s a very rewarding and worthy process, I agree. However I advise keeping the notion that the resulting guitar must be a good, functional musical instrument at the front of your mind during construction. That’s all part of the challenge you mention! Anyone can put together a guitar-shaped box with a neck that sounds average and is difficult to play. The challenge is to build a viable musical instrument. You must aim to build a fine guitar.



Building a steel string guitar of American/Austrian design but with a Spanish heel but in a form not a plantilla is about as far from “the traditional way of guitar building” as I can imagine . Rather it is a fusion of two very different traditions.

If you want to be traditional, I would advise to pick a tradition and adhere to it, at least for your first few instruments. Guitars are complex objects to build. Mix-and-match from different design philosophies without any prior experience is more likely to lead towards failure than success.

You will spend hundreds of hours building your first guitar. It’s a wonderful process! But lutherie is way more fun and rewarding if the guitar functions well as an instrument once complete.

Ed,

Don't tell that to today's classical builders who get 5 figures for their guitars!

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Ha! Being forced by tradition, lol…

Juergen wrote:
"My intention is not, to build guitars for selling. Just for my personal fun and joy, but very ambitious to my skills and sound of the guitars. The measurments I explained above are my personal preferences in guitar playing combined with thinking about playability and stability of the instrument."

If you are building guitars for fun and enjoyment then by all means follow you own personal inclinations. I have been building this way for almost 50 years, and although on several occasions it has led me astray it is still a path I prefer to follow. I would suggest you not invest in expensive materials or spend a lot of time on your first few constructions, so you won't be discouraged by the shortcomings of your first few attempts.
I think most of us will tell you that playing the first few notes on the first instrument we built was a very rewarding experience, despite the faults it may have had. Happy building!

Many of the 'traditional' construction features and methods make a lot of sense if you keep in mind that good wood was scarce and expensive, and labor was relatively cheap. It was much easier, for example, to get wood that was good enough for the neck shaft if you could stack laminate the heel. Steaming off a dovetailed neck joint with a heel that was laminated with hide glue is a recipe for trouble.

The hardware used in bolt-on necks does add some mass at the heel, and in a very lightly built instrument that can be enough to affect the timbre. I recently had the privilege of looking over a very fine mid-19th century classical that is a feather. The maker used rosewood pegs for the tuners, and in that case I think even the lightest machines would have hurt the sound. The weight saving of the Spanish heel on a steel string OM, particularly one with sealed gear tuners, would probably be meaningless.

I have, in some cases, combined use of a solera to assist with neck alignment and a tapered tenon neck joint. The tenon is tapered in the 'vertical' direction; narrower at the bottom than the top, but the sides are parallel from above, so it doesn't 'draw in' as it's pushed down. The mortice and tenon are fitted and glued together with a 2mm thick plastic (or waxed wood) spacer to hold open the slot where the sides will go. The end grain of the neck wood can be sized with hide glue and allowed to dry before assembly. This produces a much smoother and more uniform width slot than you can get with a saw, and the pre-sizing helps get the sides in and stuck down properly. I'll note that one knowledgeable person I've spoken with has told me that often the old boys didn't bother to use glue when they inserted the sides, and this can cause issues down the road. At any rate, using the glued tenon and solera provides the best features of both systems provided you remember to notch out the top above the tenon so that the neck can actually be steamed off in the usual manner. Also, if you choose the laminate the heel you have to remember to use a water proof glue, such as Titebond 3, for that so it won't come apart.

Hello Josh, what I mean with "building in a traditional way" is: no drumsander, no router etc. The only powertools I use are a bandsaw and a powerdrill. I love woodworking with chisels, planes, scrapers and sandpaper. In this way I`ve build several furnitures. I will only use hide glue, one mixture with urea to increase the open time, and another mixture with Alaun to make it waterresistant. So most of the glued parts are reversible and possible mistakes can be corrected.

Hello Alan, thank you for your detailed advice! A lot of to think about and keep in mind! I am sure that my spanish cedar neck laminated with the mentioned ebony spline, together with the thick fingerboard building a T-beam, is much stronger than the normaly used one-piece mahagony neck, and it will only be half the weight of the mahagony neck.

I know very well that guitar building is a very complex task. I have studied nearly every available literature the last 20 years. But for I know that the task is very timeconsuming and a lot of patience and peace of mind is necassary, I delayed the practise until today, where I do not work 10 to 12 hours a day any longer.

During these 20 years I bought several different tonewoods, so these woods are very well seasoned. It longs to build 12 guitars.

Actually, it wasn't a traditional Spanish heel.
It was a pinned mortice and tenon joint.
To reset that type of neck the fretboard, or at least part of it would have to be removed.

I believe is is the same joint that Ervin Somagyi et al uses.

As an aside, I just examined a steel string guitar I made 26 years ago with a traditional Spanish joint and it still was "within specs' in regard to action height and neck angle. I guess I just got lucky on that one...

I stopped using that type of joint around that time and switched to bolt-ons and dovetails