Last Day

Today I spent the day helping Tom sell wood to a guy from australia who is visiting the states. He is a tonewood dealer and luthier and is interested in red spruce. We sold him a thousand dollars in goods, and he wants more in the future. This was a really successful day! Here, as promised are pictures of chladni (free-plate tuning) patterns.

Day 12

Today was mostly spent cleaning up the shop from its use all week, and getting it ready for tomorrow. Tomorrow an Australian tonewood dealer is coming to the shop to check out some spruce to potentially buy and re-sell in Australia. It is kinda a big deal, and the shop was in pretty rough shape. We got everything looking pretty good and then we moved on the Brazilian Rosewood. We have had a pile of Brazilian Rosewood to match, grade, and store all project, and we finally put it all on shelves in "books" which is our new inventory system.

Weekly Reflection #2

This week has been very packed. We worked for 56 hours over 6 days (from sunday to friday). Last week was mostly design and inventory, but this week was very different. We did do a lot of design, but it was finalizing, and setting up to build the tops. We spent a lot of time building things, too. We built a go- bar deck, a set of shelves, and two guitar tops. We visited Al Carruth and tuned our tops using his lab set up, visited a luthier's guild meeting, and looked at a violin maker's shop. I am amazed at the amount we got done. As I said before, a project like this really should be over a couple of months instead of weeks. This week has been packed with science and math as well. I have always liked science, but hated math. It is really helpful to see all the applications for the math we have to learn. This week has had so much science, my head hurts, but it is all really interesting. Over the last two days we will focus on tonewood. More inventory and processing.

Saturday

What a long, productive week! I am amazed at how much we got done! (in a mere 56 hours) So I didn't work today, but I did skateboard a lot, hang out at the local coffee shop, and talk guitars and tonewood to a lot of people. In the evening, we went to the school musical;Bye Bye Birdie. It was amazing. Matt, you are very talented, and did a wonderful job, as did Zada, Canon, Will, Caleigh, Jessy, and EVERYONE else. I was very, very impressed. What a solid, well done production. Great job, guys!

PS. I will finish posting the story of the trip as soon as i get the pictures.

Day 11

Wow! What a day! We went down to Al Caruth's in Newport, New Hampshire (not New Market). Is is a mad scientist of luthiery, and we learned how to tune plates. Tuning plates is a way to see waves in a top that was developed by violin makers, specifically Carleen Hutchins who lived in Wolfeboro, NH until she died last year. HERE is a link to her wikipedia page. Al worked for her tuning plates and building violins, and has applied this to guitars. He shared his knowledge with us. I have to get the pictures from the day, and then I will make a complete blog post. After we left his shop, around 7:30 or 8, we went to a luthier's shop in Etna. It was an old gentleman who was selling his shop. We took a complete tour of his shop, and looked at all of his tools and specified which would be useful to build guitars (he was a violin builder). After that we went back to the shop briefly to put everything back and sign my time sheet so i can fax it today. So there you have it- I got to the shop at 7:30 and left the shop at 11:30. Yeah, 16 hours! And I thought yesterday was long. Be expecting a more complete post soon.

Day 10

Today was a looong day! We spent 12 hours bracing up the soundboards. First we started off by cleaning up the glue joints, which although usually a simple task, one of the joints had failed, so we had to re-glue the top. Next, we cut the braces out of brace stock. Brace stock has to be cut very quartersawn for strength and sound. Next, each brace had to be sanded, planed, and shaped in general to fit the contours of the workboard. This was a very tedious process, and I sanded through the skin on both thumbs and had to repair them with superglue (which was the reason superglue was developed apparently). I shaped all the braces while Tom was working on the tops and other things. Then using the go-bar setup, we glued in all the braces. Then we shaped the braces with planes, chisels, and spokeshaves. By that time It was 8:00. Here are some pictures

Heres the glue pot. It is a jar of hide glue in water that is kept at around 140 degrees. It can be a pain because it comes in flakes and you have to mix it with water, then heat it up, and it will go bad after a day or so.

Here are the tops after they were glued. We braced the bottom two. The three in this picture (from top left to right) are white spruce, white pine, and red spruce. This pine is not your normal white pine. It is old growth from michigan. It has beautiful, tight growth rings, and sounds very similar to spruce to the ear. I'll be interested to see how it stacks up in the experiments tomorrow.

Here are the braces I sanded and planed to fit to the workboard. The result was holes in both my thumbs.

Here are the braces laid on the top in the pattern we designed

Here are the go-bars in action. I am cutting the angle in one of the braces to fit it on the top. As you can tell by the previous picture, you can't just throw the braces on the top. They have to be angles, and notched so they can cross and fit together.

After glueing, we shaped the braces. Using chisels, planes, etc. we tapered the ends of the braces, and shaved down the corners. This is just a rough shaping, there is quite a bit left as part of the experiment tomorrow at Al Caruth's.

We ended up with two of these. Pretty good for a day's work. The tops are really thin to make up for the amount of bracing. We decided to really go nuts with bracing, so we will shave them way down.

our top is really thin. The hole in the middle is where the soundhole will be.

voila!

Day 9

Today was a strange day. It started off assuming my baseball game would be cancelled and that we would have plenty of time. We were glueing up tops when I figured out my game wasn't going to be cancelled after all. Tom finished glueing up the tops and we will brace tomorrow. At a grand total of 3 hours today it is good i worked 11 hours yesterday so that averages out to two 7 hour days.

Day 8

Today I spent the first part of the day finishing the shelves. They are fully done now, and made in a way that the top of the shelves can be used as support for a floor or catwalk if the third floor is extended. Shelves seem like they may not be important, but space is money in the tonewood business, and there is always far too little of it. The new system will help Tom handle tonewood more easily so he can devote more time to making guitars, because he is getting back into making instruments. The second part of the day we continued the design of the guitar. We finalized the shape and bracing pattern. Tom has been working with the golden ratio, and we've been incorporating it in the guitar.

Here is how we designed the shape using golden ellipses:

For all of you to compare (Matt in particular) it has a more dropped "shoulder", a less muffintop-esque waist, and a rounder bottom than a Martin OM. It is still fairly similar in shape, and it is not as round as a Gibson. The last part of the day I spent making go-bar clamping. Go-bars are made by having the top and work board on a table and having a hard board above it. You cut long strips of wood that you bend between the glueing surface and the board. It is a little hard to describe, so i will update this post with pictures tomorrow.

Day 7

Today I came in, and we immediately got the tops into a dehumidified room to get them ready to brace and picked up the order of hide glue. We spent the rest of the day making shelves for storing back and sides. The space was irregular for self building, so it was a bit of a task. Tomorrow we will process some tonewood and file the pieces on the shelves with the new inventory system.

We had the space from looking like this:

To looking like this:

Day 6

Today Tom an I went to a meeting and demonstration in a luthier's shop in southern New Hampshire. The group was the Guild of New Hampshire Luthiers. It was very interesting, there was a demonstration of how to remove a top you want to scrap without taking off the binding. More interesting, however, are the people there. There are hobbyists and serious luthiers, experienced and inexperienced alike. The group was small, as it was limited at 20 people due to shop space, but talking to luthiers about their craft was great. The best part was getting into conversations and talking about subjects that I feel I have become reasonably knowledgeable about.

Weekly Reflection

This week has been a great exposure to all things tonewood. The amount of thought that goes into designing and building an instrument is amazing. There are myriad different ways to do everything, and the builder, has to determine the way they want to approach the construction of an acoustic guitar. A lot of it is intuition about the way certain changes to the guitar will affect the sound or feel of the instrument, but a lot of the same decisions can be based on scientific research and experimentation. For me, this week has really been an exercise in problem solving and reasoning.

The activities I have done in the past week have been exciting and diverse. Some tasks are less enjoyable, like labeling and coding wood for inventory, but even they are a huge part of the business and are interesting to me. Other things I have done include working on the construction of shelves for storing wood, designing and making a work board for shaping tops, designing the bracing pattern to use for the two guitar tops, and experimenting with pine as a tonewood.

There were plenty of surprises, but everything is going as planned and we are moving toward all the goals and activities. This coming week we are planning to complete the two tops and have them to present to the committee. My experience has been packed with learning. Tom is great about sharing bits of information about everything we do to help me understand the reasoning behind it. He comes from an engineering background, and has a masters degree in philosophy so he is very good at problem solving and thinking things out. That is a valuable skill and it is something that i will take away from this project.

Looking back on this past week, it is hard to believe that the project is almost half-way done. I feel like there is so much we could do with more time. We will get everything done that we planned, but really a project like this would be best planned over a period of a month or so.

Day 5

Today was an interesting day. A little over half the day was spent designing the bracing pattern. Tom is a great thinker, and has come up with his own bracing pattern. We looked at different luthier's bracing patterns, their functions, and looked at his bracing. We spent a long time discussing the physics of the braces, looking at each of the braces, and how that would allow the top to vibrate, We will see all of this in the braced tops when we test them in Al Caruth's lab. After that, we picked out our two tops that we are going to compare; one red spruce (a traditional guitar top wood) and white pine (an experimental wood). We planed them to thickness, and laid out the shape of the top on them. We are waiting on an order for hot hide glue to come in so we can start glueing on braces. Hide glue is a pretty awesome glue, and is used a lot in guitar making. It is made from animals, as the name suggests, and also it is a hot glue (as the name also suggests). You heat the glue, and when applied to braces it cools very quickly and crates a solid glue joint as soon as it cools. The best part of the glue is that to take a glue joint apart all you have to do is re-heat the glue and it will come apart. On sunday, I will be attending a Luthier's Guild meeting and demonstration. More on that on sunday. (along with my weekly reflection) Also you should check back for pictures because I will probably insert some then as well, because we took a bunch, but they are all with Tom at the moment.

Day 4

Today, We made our work board. Since guitar tops are not completely flat, you must make a mold to form your tops with. This is called a work board. Traditionally, it is a piece of plywood, scraped and carved down to the opposite shape of the top. Usually the top is a dome about 2mm high. Usually with every type of guitar you build, you have to have a different work board. Instead, Tom and I designed a type of board that would be useable between the sizes the sizes of a dreadnaught and OM. This is a very challenging thing to make because it is so subtly cupped and it must be very precise. To design and make, this took a full 10 hour day.

Here is the process from idea to reality

Here is the design of the top. We have thought out the way we are going to brace the top, and we designed the work board to reflect that, as to add support in those places.

Here is the design of the work board drawn onto the plywood

We then cut out the shape with a jigsaw

Then we cut and shaped the supports. They mount on the back and give the front its shape. Here Tom is bandsawing a slight curve into one of them

We then dry fit all the parts to make sure everything was all set.

Next, we screwed it all together, and planed the edges and back flat...

...and voila! a hard day's work.

Day 3

Today, I was working on solving inventory and storage problems. This is a typical problem in the tonewood industry, as every piece is unique and has to be locate-able. I spent most of the 4 hours I was at the shop working on new shelves before I had to go off to my baseball game. The results of our experiment are a little disappointing, the boiling got some of the turpentine out of the pine tops, but it was not a significant amount. We will continue our experiment, however, by going down to southern New Hampshire, to luthier extraordinaire, Al Caruth's shop where he has a lab set up to test the properties of the wood. We will be making two guitar tops (as in ready to go on a guitar, with bracing, and even a rosette around the soundhole) one of traditional red spruce, and one of pine.

Day 2

Today we mostly worked in the shop. I helped Tom dream up ways to organize his inventory, and started to put it into action. The organization of inventory is very important in tonewood because no two sets are the same, and they easily get lost among the others. There is a code that tells you when the log was cut, where the log came from, and where in the tree it came from. We also continued our experiment. After boiling the tops for over 4 hours, the water was amber colored, but we are still not sure how much of the resins we got out. More of the same work tomorrow. I am interested in seeing how the experiment turns out.

Here are some pictures from the shop:

Tom in his office:

Wood! It's everywhere in the shop

Dust collection and Shelves above the shop

Day 1

Today I started my Senior Project. I started the day off by discussing with Tom what I hope to accomplish over the next two weeks. We went over my goals and activities and talked about how to achieve them. Then, we started designing a guitar. We thought out our different options, and narrowed down my choices. Some were broad, for example, domestic woods or local woods. Some were more specific, such as the type of bridge or binding. While a few choices are open, most of the choices regarding size, shape, wood types, neck and fingerboard shapes, and scale length have been made. Tom is going to teach me how to draw up the plans later. Another component of the project is learning about alternative tonewoods and the individual tone of a certain woods. Tom believes that white pine would actually be a viable tonewood if it didn't have the resins and pitches in it. We decided to experiment getting pitch out of the pine by boiling it. Today we went and gathered materials for boiling the guitar tops. This was no small feat, as the tops are 20 inches long and 10 inches wide the solution we came up with was a 20 gallon metal trash can. As you can imagine, bringing 20 gallons of water to a boil is not the job for a torch or hot plate, so we also had to borrow a large propane burner. Upon filling the trash can, we found the can leaked, and had to spend the last few minutes of the day epoxying the seams of the trash can to stop any leaking. The epoxy will set over night, and we will be all set to continue the experiment tomorrow.