Australian/New Zealand Luthiers Forum

Trevor, Thank you - I will get busy and make one now. Finished a SS falcate braced instrument with a bolt on/bolt off neck recently as per your plans, and I am very happy with the sound. Just about to start on a falcate classical, and again I will use the bolt on/off neck. All my previous classicals...

Trevor, Thank you for the reply. I see the first block has a (the one with the inlay) has a pair of nuts - presumably these are captive, and does each nut have a Belleville washer? Are there 2 nuts in the middle block which also seems to be captive and do these have Belleville washers also? Is the t...

On 15 Aug 2018 Trevor posted some extra pics of his precision router jig. Somewhere on the the site are the original details of the jig (I think) but try as I might I cannot find them - am I mistaken or are they buried in another post? Has anyone made a drawing of the precision jig?
Thanks. Mitch

Sorry to labour this issue, but others may find it interesting. I have done the thinning, and in doing so I have learned a few things. First, experience does not always help - I have made a couple of arch-top jazz guitars and carving the re-curve at the edge of the soundboard leaves the outside edge...

Further to my previous post. I was thinking about this (in the middle of the night!) and I have decided not to buy the magnetic device. I will just thin to a target frequency rather then an actual thickness, and use my judgement to ensure I do not thin too much. My 'out of the mould' frequencies are...

I have thinned the outer edges of the tops of my previous guitars, but this has been done by guess-work alone using scrapers. I do have a good metal thickness caliper which is fine for measuring the unattached plates, but it will not go through the sound hole of the completed box. I am building a Me...

New bridge is 17.5 gms - success!

I find it quite difficult to level my Jet drum sander to better than .2 to .3 mm. Usually one end or the other is just slightly high (more often the motor end). Reversing the feed of the boards each pass helps, but usually I find .1 or .2 variation. I note the high side and take just a little more o...

Thanks Trevor,

I have found another piece in the wood shed. It comes in at 556 which is nearer the mark. Not as tight grained as the previous one, and just off quarter, but I will make another bridge today and see if I can get under 20 grams.

Regards
Mitch

I am building a SS 12 Fret Falcate as per the book and plans - contemporary bridge design exactly as Vol 2 Fig 20-3. Trying to get the bridge weight below 20gms. So far have only achieved 23 gms. I have yet to shape the bottom to fit the guitar top, but this will only require about .5mm to be remove...

Martin,

Thanks for the reply. Presumably you set the blade angle to plus and then minus 5 degrees - I see this OK, but how do you get the 1 degree back angle - do you use the table saw?

Mitch

I am making a 12 Fret Falcate Steel String as per the plans. I would like to use my table saw rather than the band saw to cut the neck tenon as it mentions in Book 2 that this is the more accurate method, and hopefully it also means I will have less fitting to do on the shoulders to achieve the corr...

Thanks all for going to the trouble.

This will be a great help - particularly the pics

Mitch

Thank you for your responses. It seems the spruce I have been trying to use was of the 'will not bend without breaking' variety. Because of this very limited experience, I had assumed all spruce was like this. However, I have another batch of spruce brace wood which I will now try - hopefully it wil...

This a question for UK-based members. I am building my first falcate braced steel string as per the plans from the 'books'. Which wood have you used for the braces, and where have you sourced it please? My preliminary experiments with the Sitka and European Spruce I have to hand have not gone well! ...

Thank you Trevor. I will wait until the instrument is strung up to make a final decision. However, I suppose the good thing about having built-in weight attachment points is that the decision does not have to be 'final'.

Mitch

I have attached the bridge to my current traditional classical build (Hauser type), and recorded a spectrum which has left me with a bit of a dilemma. By chance (!) the 2 major resonances fall nicely between scale notes: the first air resonance at 102hz falls between G and G sharp and the coupled to...

I am making a contemporary classical walnut bridge. I intend to use 2 layers of carbon fibre cloth which is .5mm thick - is this OK or does the cloth need to be thicker to give the correct amount of stiffness? Assuming .5mm is OK - and the walnut slices are 2,3, and 4mm then the bridge blank will be...

Trevor,

Thank you, I will get on and design my blocks now.

Mitch

I make my guitars with modified side splints to house magnets which mate with similar magnets on a knee support. The support I use is a modified Ergo Play (magnets instead of suckers): it has 3 attachment points and hence 3 magnets - 2 on the upper bout and 1 on the lower bout. For the first time I ...

Did you by any chance take a note of the humidity level when the braces were glued and what it was when you noticed the radius reversal?

Mitch

Thanks for the help guys.

Mitch

Kym,

Are you talking about more then an XLR to mini jack adaptor?

Mitch

I have all my spread sheets (except the 4DOF model - struggling with that), my jigs, speaker, software and poppy seeds! So now I just need to buy a microphone. I was just about to get a Shure SM58, but I have been talking to a studio engineer, and he tells me that (in the price range) the Shure is a...

Trevor,

Thank you again for your time. Glad I have been through the 'spreadsheet process' it helped a lot with gaining a more detailed understanding of the relationship of the various equations, and being able to do more with Excel will be useful in the future.

Regards

Mitch