The Next Big Thing ......

I really enjoyed this little mini-restoration and started thinking about what I might do next. I've been looking on and off at the acoustic guitar kits that companies like Steward-MacDonald do and thought I might try making something like this mahogany dreadnought.

Then I though I might look at their little Ukelele kit first, the logic being that I could try out the techniques on something cheaper first before committing to the full thing. But when I looked at the process for this, the "hard stuff" like the bindings and purfling doesn't occur on the uke, so there didn't seem to be a lot of value to doing it.

Lots of internet research later and I kept coming back to a few blogs about people that had built their own acoustics from scratch. These weren't guys with huge workshops - one was built pretty much on the kitchen table! 

Looking at the process in detail, I decided that I'm pretty handy and have done a fair bit of woodworking in the past (nothing as fine as this though) and individually there is nothing in each part of the process that really terrifies me, so I'm thinking of building one from scratch!

Two books are constantly referred to:

Guitarmaking: Tradition and Technology - A Complete Reference for the Design and Construction of the Steel-string Folk Guitar and the Classical Guitar (Guitar Reference) - William R. Cumpiano & Jonathan D. Natelson

and

Build Your Own Acoustic Guitar: Complete Instructions and Full-Size Plans - Jonathan Kinkead

I have bought both of these as research to help the decision before I commit and I'm currently deeply absorbed in them! The first book is very much the set text - there appears to be nothing it doesn't tell you about making a guitar, but it is quite dry. The second is more like a Haynes manual by comparison, with lots of colour photos showing each step. Between the two, it is fairly easy to get a good grasp of the processes involved.

There are some fairly consistent messages coming out of all of this research:

1. you will probably spend as much if not more on tools as you do on materials the first time round.
2. It's not worth doing this just to get a nice guitar - I think this is going to need about a £600 investment in tools and materials for the first one; that money will buy you a very nice guitar.
3. as long as you take your time and are careful, your first guitar will probably sound very good compared to mass-produced, but the detail finish may be a bit lacking.
4. you are unlikely to just build one, as it can become addictive.
5. by the time you get to the 3rd or 4th one, they should be pretty good!

I have quite a lot going on at the moment with a new job etc so, unusually for me, I'm not going to rush into this. I am thinking that I might try and do a trial of the bit that I'm most nervous about, which is constructing and carving a mahogany neck and building the dovetail joint between the neck and body. If I can make a decent job of that, I reckon I'll be OK to go for the full thing.

Watch this space!

Meanwhile, I'm keeping up the guitar practice - still trying to do at least half an hour for 4 days a week, and I am definitely still not as crap today as I was yesterday :-).