MIMF

On my 'Winter' archtop I tried a number of different things. One was a tailpiece based loosely on the way they do them on viols da gamba. In those they use a post, about 1/2" square, that's dovetailed into the tail block and sticks up above the top. It has notches in it along the back edge. The tail...

Trying for a rigid mount is just going to put a lot of stress on the attachment point. Why not simply let it float?

Note that side tapes are also good for keeping sides crack free. If the sides cupped at all in the 'straight' part below the waist you might want to use a wood fillet there. I put any such things on after profiling the sides and before putting on the liners, so the reinforcements end up under the li...

Archtop guitar bridges move 'up and down' to drive the top relative to the plane of the top of the rim. All stringed instrument bridges do most of their work that way. Flat top bridges that are glued to the top can also rock forward and back in response to string tension changes, but that does not c...

I suspect that the two things that matter most are the mass of the bridge and the break angle, but that's not engraved on stone tablets from the mount. These things can get complicated. Experiments I've done on flat top guitars show that when it comes to break angle, more is not better. Once you've ...

That technique goes 'way back; they used it on viols da gamba. Often the tops were of five peices; a central bent strip, two more outside of that, and split wedges toward the edges. The bent strips would staet out at about 5 mm thick, a scant 1/4", which allowed for some carving. Smallman uses a som...

All of the drying oils I know of increase the color saturation of the wood so that it looks darker. They also all yellow with age.

Marshall: I'm sure that the dome height on a braced 'flat' back has some effect on the sound; it's just hard to say what's doing what. The braces add a lot of cross grain stiffness, probably more than the lengthwise arch, and some mass of course. The shape of the arch matters as well. On most guitar...

This thread has been about carved arches; I'm not sure how that relates to a bent-with-bracing dome.

The OM/000 is god's size for the steel string guitar. Unless you really need a lot of low-end 'thump' that's the way to go. I've been using a double-X brace pattern on the top for some time now; it's easier to 'tune' using the tap tone/Chladni methods due the symmetry. In an 'almost matched' pair ex...

AS for the difference in arch height from top to back, which I failed to address, your guess is as good as mine, I think. It seems to differ from one maker to another. Violins tend to start out with the top arch about 1 mm higher than the back, but that may be related to the use of a sound post. The...

It turns out that arch height scales best with the thickness of the plate, rather than the length or width. It's a balancing act, of course. You use both arch height and thickness to get the stiffness you want, so a small increase in arch height along with a little more thickness gives a much stiffe...

The bridge on those guitars is more or less like the tieblock on a classical guitar. Often the upper surface slopes down a bit toward the front, and the front side may be under cut. This gives a somewhat more defined string height off the top. It's amazing that they don't come unglued more often tha...

Again, the easiest way to get piezo material is to salvage a tweeter from an old boom box. They usually consist of a disk of metal about 1"+ in diameter that has a piezo element, about half that diameter, in the middle. The ceramic is tinned on one face for the contact, and the metal side is ground....

The only solid body instrument I ever made was a 5-string viola, with frets. The customer insisted on the frets... Big mistake. For a pickup I used a small piece of PZT-5 piezo ceramic. I got some years ago in pieces about 1/4" wide by 2-1/2" long and 1/16" thick, metalized on two surfaces, and figu...

The 'bass side/treble side' model is not really very useful. Lower tones are produced by the entire soundboard, moving as a unit like a loudspeaker. This is actually so effective that it's likely that it's the main sound producer all the way up to about 1 kHz, according to Richardson (Wright's thesi...

More for stability than tone,I expect. As it ages and undergoes moisture cycling the hemicellulose in wood breaks down. This is a sort of 'filler' in the lignin 'glue' that holds everything together, and it's the part of the wood that actually absorbs moisture from the air. As it goes away the wood ...

Plus one for Gore; also Wright and Jansson (from KTH). I wrote a series of articles on 'free' plate tuning (the 'tech' version of tap tones) for 'American Lutherie' back in '91-92, which should still be available in the 'Big Red Books'. It's maybe a tad dated, but still useful for the basics. David ...

Bridge rotation is just an indicator of whether you're in a safe stiffness range with the top. Reducing the stiffness will usually increase the bass response, but may not do as much as you'd expect depending on what the condition of the top is and where you take material off. It could also be far mo...

Alembic made solid body guitars with aluminum necks; they were said to be really cold to play on. Ovation made aluminum necks and painted them, which helped. It's not too hard to make a neck that plugs into the body, held in place by string tension with a bolt to keep it from folding up. Stauffer, w...