Australian/New Zealand Luthiers Forum

you remember the part of me being from Germany? The phone call is a bit expensive if I´m not using something like Whatsapp. But otherwise you´re right it would be very valuable knowledge to aquire

Thanks Martin. I wrote him via the contact form on his web site. Let´s see if he can help. In the meantime I found the following web shop offering a hardener for shellac to "formulate hard shellac polish" but it´s again just in Australia and does not export because it´s flammable. https://www.thewoo...

For my last few guitars I used hard shellac as finish and I really liked the result. As I don´t have access to a spray booth the hard shellac had been the perfekt solution to get a high gloss finish which is also more durable than the standard shellac. At the moment it seems to be difficult if not i...

Hi Richard,

Q1: i scrape back the finish
Q2: I suppose. It looks to me that way, but the guitar is now around 1100km far from me
Q3: Titebond classic

And at the moment I don´t have a clue on how to get the guitar back to glue the bridge again

I finally sold one of my guitars instead of just giving them away and after 3 month with the new owner I received bad news today. The bridge of the first classical I built with falcate bracing came off during the night. I received some pictures and it looks like there is no big tear out. As I never ...

As I couldn´t find anyone posting a comparison of recommended thickness calculations for the frequency approach and the deflection approach I thought it could be interesting to to put my results here. I tested 2 sets of backs and 2 sets of tops (will be 1 classical guitar and 1 steel string). For th...

Thanks for the fast reply John. Does that mean you did those measurement on pieces with less than 5cm width at some point? I assumed that 5cm is the lower limit for reliable numbers. Didn´t find a posting here on the forum with less than 5cm (but probably that´s because Trevor recommended it?). I th...

Hi, I wasn´t sure if I should start a new thread or not but the topic is exactly the same: I aquired a nice Padouk set from madinter and just realized later that the plates were cut as a trapezoid without leaving much flesh. Probably I can determine E for the longitudinal by taking an average width ...

Thanks Trevor. You´re right it is mentioned in the Design book but I overlooked the footnote and it´s implications on the calculations when not using a lower transverse brace. If I interpret this correctly this means I need to find a new typical value of the flexural rigidity for classical guitars i...

Thanks for the replies. I actually did both things lowering the saddle and changing the neck angle. Action is down to around 2.8mm. As I´m not in a hurry (there are no customers in sight) I will just wait and check from time to time if there are further changes. And if .... retopping is still a poss...

Hi I´m back again with a problem on one of my falcate braced OOO. After the two OOO I built to compare x-bracing to falcate bracing using the principles of Trevors book I built a quite nice rosewood OOO with the bolt on bolt off neck. Setup was done had it again testplayed by the usual guys and ever...

Sorry for the late reply. It seemed to me that not much was going on here anymore. @John: actually your description fits quite well. The vietnamese guitar sounds in comparison more percussive, a bit like a flamenco guitar. Which is surprising because if you compare this one to what is available at t...

I finally got the guitar strung up and played it a bit. I like it but it sounds totally different to my handbuilt vietnamese guitar which at the end was the reason for me to start building guitars. Showed it to my standard guitar tester (my guitar teacher) and he likes it as well. His comment: this ...

Hi Richard, actually I tried to use the spreadsheet which workt fine for the steelstring but as you already correctly guessed I changed the EI value to the values given for the classical guitar examples in the design book. The optimization resulted in braces lower than for the steelstring: around 4....

Ok, old top off, new top on. Actually easier than I thought. Thanks the advice Jim. New values after binding and sanding: T(1,1)1= 90Hz T(1,1)2=195Hz T(1,1)3= 244Hz I had been wondering why the T(1,1)1 is so low until I checked the diameter of the soundhole... Great! Instead of 85mm I have just 79mm...

After my actually quite nice results with a steel string falcate braced 000 style guitar I thought I can easily adapt a classical guitar to falcate bracing. Little did I know :) I should have believed John Parchem build description and stayed with the bracing height for steel strings. What I did was...

The answer is not easy. Depends strongly who you ask. In the mean time I had someone else try both of them and this guy preferred the x-brace a lot more than the falcate. How do you describe sound with words. I always had problems with that. Both sound quite open, you don´t have this boxed in sound....

Actually this is up to now the longest time it took me to finish a guitar. Problems at the company when they had been firing 500 people and then when the rest had to do the same work as before. Building some additional jigs. Girlfriend breaking up with me also didn´t increase the mood for guitar bui...

The jig is more or less the same as described in the book on page 4-107: plank of wood with a bolt and screw on one side to hold the string and a pulley on the other side. Distance between the locking nut and the bridge is 650mm and at middle there is a hinged fret. For the compensation calculation ...

Thanks Jeff. Yepp, you´re right. It had been a year ago when I put the spreadsheet together so I just mixed it up. I found one more mistake: at one point I used the wrong unit (m^2 instead of ^2). To get more stable measurements I played a bit around with g-tune: with a higher sensitivity setting an...

A year ago I started with my compensation spreadsheet. I stopped when the optimization seemed to work with some data I found in the forum thanks to woodsy23 (Richard). The last few days I tried to get the complete calculation including string stiffness measurements and neck curve model running. It l...

With the Padouk Ißm down to 18.6gr. Should be fine

Thank you for the fast reply Trevor.
Means I can save my time and leave this wood for some other project (whatever that will be). Let´s see how far down I will get the weight of the padouk bridge.

is there any way of correcting the text or title of a posted thread?
That´s already the second time I made a mistake in the title and couldn´t find a way to correct it

I wasn´t sure if I should start a new thread for this or if I should post in the old thread with the two OOO I´m building. I had some problems to get the weight of my bridge under 23gr with my walnut blank so I ordered Padouk at my wood supplier. I asked for a blank with low density and explained to...