More bending...

Another three hours of bending. But I get the hang of it. The progress was lot better. The basic shapes are already there:

But being too confident has some drawbacks to. When bending when the wood is not hot enough results in cracks in the wood. I got some here and there:

Luckily these cracks can be mended. First you have to glue them down and then sand the ridges away. One difficult point is the cut-away. This is a very tight curve. I have a crack precisely at this point. I will let the wood dry first which should get the tension in the wood away. Next time I will try to get the cut-way in place. It is now up to:

Bending the sides

Bending the sides is very time consuming and needs to be done very carefully or otherwise you may break or damage the wood. You have to keep the wood wet and then heat it. When the wood is thoroughly hot you can put some pressure to both sides. Then move one centimeter further and repeat the process.
I used this heater:

After 3 hours of bending the first results are there:

Preparing the sides.

At the time I received the sides they where about 5 mm thick. Before I could start bending them I had to loose about 2 mm. I first tried to plane it by hand. Since maple (and especially flamed maple) has a lot of grooves, this did not work very well. So we had to use a router to carefully remove small strips at a time: When finished routing I sanded the edges, left by the router, away.

Bonding the Top wood.

To be able to bond the two half’s of the top, first the sides must be milled with a router. When they perfectly straight they can be glued together. To do this properly we used a self-made clamp:

At one side the metal pins are put in a straight line. At the other end the pins are put as close to the side of the wood as possible. The two half’s are glued and laid on the clamp. Baking paper prevents the wood sticking to the clamp. With the metal tube and two wedges the top is firmly pushed down. Little wedges at the side pins are clamping the two half’s of the top to each other. Keep it in place for two hours and the bond is strong enough.

Choosing Wood

To start the build I first had to choose what kinds of wood I would like to use. I want to keep it as close to my example guitar as possible. So for my back and sides I choose flamed maple:

As you can see I took these pictures after I started bending the sides which I talk about later on. The top will be made of Spruce. I picked a piece of wood which has a nice fine grain and a surprising vertical signature:

The other bits of wood I will decide later on.

The first steps.

So the first step I took was of course deciding what to build. I wanted it to be something special and also an addition to the guitars I already own. So I choose to build a 12 string acoustic archtop. But what should it look like? Some research on the web brought me to the stunning work of master luthier Ken Parker. His archtops are in a league of their own. Not in a million years I think I can build those guitars but I hope to build something that is based on his guitar called Mrs. Natural:

However this guitar is a 6 string and not a 12 string guitar. I discussed this with Outback Acoustics and they where able :-) to talk me out of this. Building an archtop as your first guitar is challenging enough. Building a 12 string Archtop nearly impossible. So a 6 string it will be then. Carving an archtop back and top as your first guitar is not really a good idea also. So we decided to go for some sort of Hybrid Flattop/Archtop by using a flattop which will be forced into an arch.
A very unique feature of the Ken Parker archtops is the way the soundport looks:

This is something I want to make use of in my guitar also. In what form I will implement this we will decide on later. The way how the neck is attached to the body is also very unusual. We have no idea how Ken Parker does this so my guitar will feature a "normal" neck joint.

And it all starts.

Hello and welcome on my blog. As from the 11th of october I have started with a course "How to build a guitar." I always wanted to pick up a project like this ever since a classmate back in my teenage years was attending a violin building course. Now well in my thirties I thought: "let's try it for once and see what I can come up with". I choose to start the course at Outback Acoustics in Bemmel. The way they have set up the course was appealing to me. Most courses I gathered information about where setup around the same principal: All attandees are building the same guitar in a set pace. This course however is very different. You can choose what ever you like to build and you can build it in you own pace. So get on with the building then. In the following months I hope to show you my progress, as I build along, through this blog. I hope you'll enjoy it and let me know what you think about it.


Greetings, Rik