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 TH Intern Caitlin Sullivan interviews Houston luthier Stephen Marchione, who breaks down the guitar-making process.
Design
You have to start with a good design. You have to know what you want to make before you make it. I design my own.
Choose Wood
Choose appropriate woods for what you’re trying to make. For example, if you’re making a Spanish guitar, it’s most likely going to have a rosewood back. But if you’re looking for a specific sound, it will affect the type of rosewood you use.
Mill Pieces
You’ve just selected the wood for the neck, body, and top of your guitar. Now you’re going to mill or work all these basic woods, cut them down to size, make them flat and square, and thin them to a certain dimension.
Glue Up Process
The tops or backs of guitars are almost always “center joint.” They’re made from two pieces of wood that are cut from the same log and then glued back together.
Transfer Design
Next, with a template or computer, you transfer your design to the wood. The body shape is transferred to the top and back pieces, which are then cut out to the finished size.
Side Wood
At this stage, for most acoustic guitars, you would bend the side wood on a bending iron to match the outline and shape of the top and back.
Blocking
There are two blocks of wood called the neck block and the tail block. Where the side pieces meet is at the end of the guitar, or the tail. The top and back of the guitar are glued to the tail block. The neck block is where you join the neck to the body. Both are big structural parts, kind of like the main supports of a bridge; everything gets anchored to them.
Lining
Thin strips of wood that are little more than an eighth-of-an-inch thick are glued to the edge of the sides to provide a gluing surface for the top and back. There’s not enough surface on the sides to glue onto, so the lining provides some extra support.
Bracing
The top and back are structurally braced with wood, which gives them the proper curvature. Once those braces are glued on, you tune the braces and remove any excess wood because, like airplane construction, you want it as strong as possible, but you want to minimize your weight.
The Neck
Cut the dovetail joint into the body at the neck block and fit the neck to the guitar. At that point, you’ll do any kind of finishing to the neck, like shaping the back of it or veneering the headstock, which is where the tuning machines are placed. Once that’s all done, the neck will be glued to the body, and the fingerboard (usually ebony or rosewood) gets glued on top of the neck and the body.
Details
The rest is very fine detail work, such as putting frets on the fingerboard and doing any decorative binding on the body. The last bits would be to glue on a bridge (where the strings attach to the body), fit the headstock with machine heads to tune with, and attach a bone or ivory nut and saddle. The nut holds the strings in place at the headstock and neck, and the saddle holds them in place on the bridge.
Finishing Up
String it up, say a prayer, and hope it doesn’t explode, which could happen since guitars are usually under about 225 pounds of string pressure.
The guitar maker’s conundrum is always how to make something lightweight and responsive, but still strong enough and durable to last as much as a century. My goal is to make something that will last a lifetime.
See the full article in the January 2009 issue. Subscribe Order back issues |
