The Hub

Good morning everyone, I was taking some measurement on production necks with scarf-joint (13° headstock angle) to add some machining process with the cnc. I so recreated the standard neck blank feature (100mm wide and 20mm thick), then drawed the 13° angle. Everything correspond the to the real piace but two measurement: the startingcut behind the break angle is ''off'' by 20mm +/- as well as the cut on the bottom, still off by 20mm…

Let me start with this; I'm trying to find the root cause of difficult fret wire installation of two different SM fret wires. I've spent a lot of time gathering dimensions and experimenting with techniques wich could cause the problem. I enlisted the help of a colleague who arrived at a similar poor performance. His solution was to glue the fret ends/ beat the frets in. My "rather" is to find the root cause so I don't have to go thr…

Hi all. Brand new member. I’ve been building a classical guitar via kit from LMI for a couple of years now. I keep putting it off but recently became motivated to get back to it. Unfortunately LMI is out of business so I now have no one to go to to ask questions. I’m at the stage where I’m putting the sides together in the form. I followed the dimensions for the form based on the plans as I measured them, but the sides overlap pretty ba…

I did a pretty big update to my web tools last week. These are updated from the older versions I had up on celestialinstruments.com. There’s an updated FFT tool now, plus mode detection for guitars and plates, wolf note detection, played-note energy transfer, monopole mobility, plate thickness calculation, and 1/2/3/4 DOF modeling that can be prefilled from FFT data. The part I’m most excited about is being able to fit a measured guitar re…

Technically this is a repair, but I thought there would be some crossover with building, so I posted here as well. A 1950s Gretsch Town & Country Rancher 6021 is missing the two braces on either side of the sound hole (see photo). Because this is such a wide instrument (17” lower bout), I’m thinking that installing those missing braces will help with the stability of the top in addition to repairing the cracked/loose ladder braces. The…

For my current mandolin build, I set out to answer 2 questions: 1. Whether to use physical deflection or frequency analysis to measure stiffness, and 2. How well can I measure wood quality in rough sawn form? (T. Gore says it needs to be planed smooth and rectangular for frequency analysis.) I have 4 different topwood species available for my current build: California Sitka, Englemann, Lutz, and Coastal Redwood. The billets range from 37…

I attach my necks using the LMII/O'Brien jig. No matter the method, there is no guarantee that the neck block and edge of the rim at the top is truly perpendicular to the centerline of the guitar. I’ve just flossed when things weren’t quite right. But now I take a long square, place it on the rim at the neck block and measure where the long square aligns on the top seam. I note Bass/Treble deviation at a known point (I use 290 mm).…

I will tag @member for this question. I hope you are ok with that. Is it of any use, to use the deflection measurement from for tonewood before building? To determine the basic deflection/stiffness for the selection of the tonewood.

Friends - My "go-to" truss rod for my basses has been the rod sold by LMII; however, since they are now out of business, I am evaluating what other rods are suitable for bass guitar necks. The attached photos are all showing truss rod lengths from the front edge of the nut slot location on the blank. One photo shows my last LMII rod (23 1/2" in length) vs. 2 other rods, one longer (23 11/16") and one shorter (22 1/4") -- all measured f…

Hey folks, I put together a video showing how I measure the long, cross, and transverse frequencies on guitar top plates before thicknessing, following the Gore method. I also walk through using the calculator I built (based on Trevor Gore’s equations) to get target thickness and track density / young's modulus. Fair warning: the video’s a bit YouTube-y in tone thumbnail faces, a little energy for the algorithm, but the content is genuine…

I'm having trouble getting my mic to work with REW. I'm at the beginning of a new build and would like to measure the tonewood properties. I am trying to follow Giuliano's instructions in his book. everything seems to be working but they don't talk to each other. I think its a calibration or pc setting but I'm not very computer savvy and what seems to go without saying needs to be said to me in step by step, very simple language. I…

I've been testing all my top and bracewood to find the best combination of stiffness and density, optimize plate thickness, etc. I started with Nicoletti's spreadsheet which calculates both stiffness and density, but since I was also testing deflection, I decided to compare the flexural modulus using that method (with the formula from T. Gore's book) on the same plates and bracewood. Unfortunately, I'm having trouble getting a satisfa…

Hi, I am thinking about building a copy of a Gibson LG. I measured an old LG0, that a friend of mine owns. For my own build I want to go for X Bracing. I do not have acces to an LG1, 2 or 3. Does anyone have a plan with measurements for the top bracings you want to sell? Thanks, Jacob

Hi everyone. I just wanted to share a new (free!) tool I made, a website for designing fretboards. https://fretboard.buzz. It's similar to FretFind2D, but modernized, with many more features, including fretboard markers, a 'flip' for converting any design to lefty, support for mixed units of measure (use both metric and imperial at the same time), etc. I spent months building it, I would love to get your feedback. Thanks!

Two pieces of maple, each of which were measured beforehand and then cut up and epoxied back together to keep things as consistent as possible. Even the orientation of the grain was the same to avoid any impact of vertical vs horizontal grain lines. The plain maple had one layer of 300gsm 12k unidirectional carbon fibre between each piece, the flame maple had two per lamination, which may be why it sees a smaller gain afterwards? Lots m…

Hi dear luthiers, I want to build a copy of a vintage Gibson acoustic. Therefore I need to draw a good plan. Do you have good tips of how to measure the guitar, especially the interieur like braces or the back+side thickness? Do you have a certain schedule, that you follow? For the position of the braces I will use magnets. But the height, thickness and profile, how do you adress this? Thanks a lot in advance!

@member @member I have a question for you. I'm starting to measure spruce for a couple of classical guitars I'm going to make. I used structured sides (I'm calling them cored) on one of my last guitars and it came out notably great. I accidentally thinned the top more than I might have and it seemed to work very well. My thought is that the sides are so stiff that it's allowing the top to survive structurally even…

I was thinking it would be kind of cool to have a community spread sheet for guitars. Repair guys see a huge variety of instruments. We could include a REW spectrum as Well as maybe the T(1,1)1 and T(1,1)2 labeled. A monopole mobility measurement and bridge rotation measurement would be great too. All who have Giulianos book can make these measurements easily. It would just be a willingness to share and input data for the community.