Help! Flat top too flat!

[Colin Lyall]

Hi. I have made a mistake. I have realized awfully late (hangs head in shame) that the top of my 6 string steel has next to no bow in it. The neck fitment and purfling is already complete. On the up side, I believe I erred on the side of heavy bracing (std X bracing layout) and and internal bridge plate. Is there a chance I'll be ok or am I staring down a barrel? I only use light gauge strings which might also help. Is there ANYTHING that I can do at this late stage to prevent the top buckling? Any thought? Thanks!

[Charlie Schultz]

Hi Colin and welcome. Please, the forum rules require that you use your real first and last names. You may PM me with the details and I will correct your account. Also, this is still a test bed for the new MIMF forum, so we're not quite ready to go live yet- you may have better luck getting your question answered over on the live mimf.com for now. And lastly, you are referring to doming the top? There are a some well-known makers that do not dome their tops- if your top is not too thin and you have good bracing (as you say), you may be fine. You might want to look up William Cumpiano's blog of August, 2011 for his opinions.

[Colin Lyall]

Hi Charlie. Did you get my PM? Not sure if I did it correctly. I'm a bit techno challenged.

[Charlie Schultz]

Hi Colin, no I did not see a PM from you yet.

[Colin Lyall]

I don't know whether to put the message in the top window or the bottom window in the PM section? The bottom window already has a lot of stuff in it as per below.

For the record tho - my surname is Lyall.

THIS WAS IN THE BOTTOM WINDOW:
Subject: Help! Flat top too flat!

Hi Colin, no I did not see a PM from you yet.

[Colin Lyall]

Interesting - all the gibberish that I copied and pasted into my reply above turned into the Subject. Must be script of some sort that assembles itself in the message. The wonders of science!

[Charlie Schultz]

Hi Colin, you should be all set now!

[John Hall]

this may not be that big a deal. With RH changes your top will go up and down. Martin tops are pretty flat on initial set up. If you place a straight edge across the top at the bridge , how much clearance is there on the sides of the guitar ?
Also when you place the straight edge on the fretboard , at what point does the line hit at the bridge/saddle location?

[Simon Magennis]

Hi. I have made a mistake. I have realized awfully late (hangs head in shame) that the top of my 6 string steel has next to no bow in it. The neck fitment and purfling is already complete. On the up side, I believe I erred on the side of heavy bracing (std X bracing layout) and and internal bridge plate. Is there a chance I'll be ok or am I staring down a barrel? I only use light gauge strings which might also help. Is there ANYTHING that I can do at this late stage to prevent the top buckling? Any thought? Thanks!

Don't worry. Be Happy.

Some gross generalisations:

Steel string guitars are sometimes called "flattops". If you look at guitars going back a while the steel string as seen today mostly comes from the central European tradition, Martin being one of the best known names. They build bodies and necks separate and joined them up at the end. They tended to have flat tops intentionally as the neck angle could be adjusted when it was put onto the instrument and thereby achieve the necessary string height. This style possibly lends itself to more workshop/production oriented building.

The dome top is more from the Spanish style of building which used a solera to get the neck angle of the integrated neck correct. The solera usually had some doming to assist with this.

We can speculate that the climates in the two areas also promoted one method over the other. The Spanish probably didn't need to worry quite as much about humidity and so could take their time closing up the box. Where as the Germans/Austrians/Czechs would have been very anxious to get the box shut as quickly as possible. This is probably easier with a flat top and no neck in the way.

All that is simply a pre-amble to say that a flat top is not necessarily any issue whatsoever. So long as the neck to bridge relationship works out, all maybe good. The only disadvantage I can think of, and this is probably why steel string builders put some dome in, that the different reaction of the various wood in the top to humidity might cause it to go concave if the change was drastic.

Over on the old version of this forum there are been a number of discussions over the years about replacing the bridge plate when it is worn out so even if something goes wrong later, it is almost certainly fixable.