Guitar Making Tip No. 46 is about the quality and patience of the guitar maker. Nothing else will determine the success of the build better than the person doing the work. The materials, plans, books, and tools you use are nothing compared to you. Here is why.

You Set the Standard for Your Guitar

Patience and the willingness to stop and learn when you encounter an information gap are going to be the keys to success for your guitar. It’s all in you to decide if you are going to have a good build or not.

A great builder can take wood from a pallet and produce a great sounding guitar. This has in fact been done before by several companies. They took the boards from their shipping pallets and made guitars that sounded excellent.

This was done by those companies to prove a point, that the materials you use have little effect on the guitar when compared to the maker of that guitar. This holds true for new builders as well. The nice thing is that you have the ability to overcome the lack of information as a beginner. You can do this one thing and be far more successful than most beginner guitar makers… Read more “Guitar Making Tip No. 46”

Guitar Making Tip No. 7 is about the time that it takes to make a guitar. While there are a lot of ways to schedule, plan and estimate the time it will take, the following method is easily the best and most productive way of working it out.

Don’t Worry About How Much Time it Takes

That’s right. Don’t worry about how much time it will take to make your first guitar. Don’t worry about the second and third either for that matter. The more you plan, the more you will feel like you are getting behind.

To be quite honest, you have absolutely no idea who long it’s going to take you to make a guitar, and that’s completely fine. It’s your first build, so how could you possibly know?

Mistakes happen on a first of anything, and there are a lot of steps to get right in making a guitar, so opportunities for failure are abundant.

Don’t add a schedule to the mix and make the process even more frustrating. Any time you put a deadline on something, you inherently increase the stress associated with that task. That part is bad enough, but the real danger in watching the timeline is this… Read more “Guitar Making Tip No. 7”

Guitar Making Tip No. 51 is about design and execution. It is much better to execute a simple design extremely well than to butcher a complex design. Especially in the beginning, don’t overload the build with unnecessary weight. Here is why.

Making a Guitar Takes Time

Making a guitar takes a long time. For some it can be a matter of weeks. Others months, and others even years. There is already enough to do in order to create an instrument without adding more complexity to the build.

Every custom element, every design addition, and every detail you add to the build, you are extending the time that it takes to make the guitar. Adding a few small things is ok at first, but it can be really easy to get carried away.

I wrote an article about the 25 Simple Ways to Customize Your Guitar Without Altering the Tone, I stress in that article NOT to try more than a few of the techniques on the same guitar. I do that because you could literally add years to the build if you pack as much custom stuff as you can into the plan. Other than taking more time, the number one danger in adding too many custom layers to the first build is… Read more “Guitar Making Tip No. 51”

Guitar Making Tip No. 805 is about drilling for round inlays. Round inlays are some of the easiest in all of guitar making. If you can drill a hole, you can produce round inlays. There is one thing that you need to watch out for however, and here it is.

My First Mistake With Round Inlays

When I started doing inlay work, I was amazed at the detail and precision that some of the best builders used in their masterpieces. Not knowing how to do anything like that myself, I decided to start with round inlays because they were too easy to mess up.

I was wrong.

Having underestimated my ability to screw up something simple, I ruined a fretboard in spectacular fashion.

I was drilling on the press, and not only did I not set the depth stop correctly, I neglected to realize that the table top was not locked in place either. As I was running the fretboard through the small chute I made, I was drilling the holes all too deep. On top of that, the table was moving slightly with each hole, so my row of holes was veering off center. Here is what I learned about drilling inlays from this now-laughable experience… Read more “Guitar Making Tip No. 805”

Guitar Making Tip No. 405 is about making a side bender. There are essentially two ways to bend the sides for your guitar. One uses a form, and the other is freehand. While there are benefits to both, you will discover for yourself which you prefer. Here is how.

Devices for Bending Acoustic Guitar Sides

The old standard for bending wood is with a hot pipe. This is the least fancy of all the methods, and the least expensive.

To get started, all you need is a small length of metal water pipe, a flange to attach it to a board, and a torch to heat the pipe. You press your sides against the pipe, and the heat helps you bend the wood. (See My Bending Jig)

While this is the least expensive, it is also the most difficult to learn. Not saying that it’s very hard, or will take forever to figure out, it’s just harder than the other methods.

You do get more control over your pieces with the hot pipe method, but again it can be a bit of a challenge to learn at first. If you are a little worried about bending wood in the beginning, there is a method that can help you get good results with a lot less worry… Read more “Guitar Making Tip No. 405”