Official Luthiers Forum!

Michael Gurian and I were talking over the whole CNC thing, and he asserted that either one of us could build a guitar as fast or faster "by hand" as with a CNC, though both of us have built businesses around CNC technology...or at least I'm getting there. And it's true. I can carve a neck faster than my CNC machine will be able to do it...but I'll be able to put 12 necks on the thing and walk away for six or seven hours and come back to find just what I want to see.   But I can get from a raw blank to a pretty decent neck with hand tools in about an hour if I need to... But my employees can't...

One of the things that really taught me to work accurately and fast was being in the cabinet business for much of about six years.   I could cut a kitchen's worth of parts...panels and face frame stiles and rails...faster than it took me to do the shop drawings and cut lists. I could knock the parts out for a typical nice kitchen in less than a day, and I got used to handling 4 x 8 sheets of 3/4" material by myself. I wouldn't want to go back to that, but it taught me a work discipline that has carried over to guitar making. Spend the time designing "it" properly, and then cut your parts accurately, and then it's like putting model airplane kits together only you do get to do a bit of voicing and tweaking.   That's my current approach.

It's funny, buy I am learning a lot about how much time is saved by doing things as a group as Rick is saying now.  I am a new builder with 5 under my belt now so I am by no means anything more than a newbie at this.  I decided to build two guitars for my daughters as Christmas gifts so I started a double build early last month.  Both guitars are virtually identical with the exception of some cosmetic differences and the brace shapes.  (I wanted to try one scalloped and one parabolic to see what differences I would hear in otherwise identical instruments).  Anyways, I have been tracking my time with these as I have tracked my time on the others I have built.  The odd thing is, the last build I did, an OLF SJ is sitting at just over 100 hours and it still needs final buffing, bridge and neck set as well as the final setup.  I am estimating I have another 10 hours or so to have it done.  The two I am doing now are 14 fret 000's and so far I have roughly 90 hours into the pair and they are ready for the spray booth.  It is amazing how much time is cut when you do things in groups as Rick said.  Join tops and backs all at the same time, make necks at the same time, cut braces, make blocks, etc.  It does feel a lot more like an assembly line project but it still is a lot of fun.  I know I have a very long way to go, but I can definitely see that building a very nice guitar can be done in the 40 hour range as long as the builder has the skill, experience, and works smart.

Of those three, I so far have none.

    Al,
   I think that you'd find documentation can actually save you time in the
long run...well not so much now that you're an experience and skilled
builder, but the young or beginning builder can really benefit from taking
the time to simply jot down som dimensions as they build and to
document the new things they're trying on ech guitar as they get started.

I just made up a couple of simple spreadsheets with slots for each
dimension and some space for small skatches and diagrams on them.
They accompanied each guitar and its invoice and design paperwork
through the build process and I'd jot things down on them.

   When the guitars were finished and playable...or hearable...I was able to
cross reference those sheets and that documentation to determine what
new features or changes were made and could be given credit for the
tone of the guitar....whether good or bad. I don't have to do it now, of
course, unless I'm prototyping a new model or idea. My designs have
become so familiar to me that ther's little need to reference those
sheets....at least for the last 250 to 300 guitars that I've built.

    I've built guitars in less than 40 hours with little ornamentation and
adornment....complete with close observation and documentation so it
doesn;t take much time at all and the benefits far outweigh the few
minutes it does take over the course of a build.

   I've told a story of the extreme in guitars being built in record time...at
least for me. A freind had his main guitar destroyed in an auto accident
and came to me to see if I could perform a miracle of sorts for him and
have a guitar in his hands to play on the upcoming Thursday
evening....and it was Monday. We talked about what he wanted and
needed and then made up a quick list of design details and I started to
prepare the woods for the guitar.

    I did every glue joint on the guitar, with the exception of the bridge
and neck joint using CA glue. Plastic bindings, a simple rosette and
purflings around the top only saved loads of time and the guitar was
ready for finish in about 10 hours. Being local, he even stopped in twice
to have me custom shape the neck for him in the middle of it all.

   I sprayed a few coats of a catalyzed finish I had on a shelf that would
dry and be ready to and and buff in another 8 hours. In a total of less
than 20 hours, he had a guitar in his hands that he's been using as his
main guitar since.....and that was 7 or 8 years ago.

   It went out at material cost and with no warranty for him since it was
such a time experiment. It's held up really well and plays great. It was an
East indian Rosewood/Cedar topped MJ that has opened up and gotten
very loud with the many hours that he's played it both live and in the
studio.

   Was it one that will make the pages of any custom guitar publications?
Not at all, but it looked good and the joints were all tght and nicely fitted.
No notes were taken during those crazy hours of building.

Regards,
Kevin Gallagher/Omega Guitars

Kevin, that's like when I made the first graphite necked bass in 1976. We didn't have CA, but we had 5 Minute Epoxy. That bass went together in three days and was shown at NAMM and then bought by John McVie of Fleetwood Mac who used it on much of "Rumours".   Stanley Clarke was pissed that he hadn't snatched it up first one, so he got the second one...not made with 5 Minute Epoxy.   

Years later John's bass went into a non-climate controlled storage locker in the San Fernando Valley where the temperature hit about 140 inside.   Every glue joint on that bass came apart, and then I got to put the kit back together again...this time with better glue!

It was built as a prototype, and John knew it.   No problems...

I don't think I will be able to listen to that album without just a slight bit of a smile...

For some reason an image of him(in a Spinal Tap sort of moment) saying

"I turned it up to 11 and..."


It might be that after tipping over my oldest sons Manx
and breaking the little piggy that went to market on my dresser this morning...

I think my mind needed to project my moment.

So now I will probably think of my toe and the bass that fell apart every time..

_________________
"It's a Tone Faerie thing"
"Da goal is to sharpen ur wit as well as ye Sgian Dubh"
"Sippin Loch Dhu @Black lake" ,Kirby O...

Well, it's wonderful, and she's wonderful, and perhaps we'll not always be this far apart this often. She's decided that her home is mine, and I'm just away a lot on business. I'll be setting up a small shop at our place (Penna, Tasmania) in the garage she had built a couple of years ago. I found the Jet tool distributor for Tasmania, and I've got my shopping list going.

I do a lot of documentation, and end up with a good file folder on each instrument. Some of the contents of that folder get transferred to a page in a book in condensed form, and I use both the folders and the book all the time in building. It's really handy to be able to pull out the records on all of the guitars you made of a given model, and see what happened when you made changes. And, as you say, Kevin, it's really a heck of a time saver in the long run, as you don't have to keep trying stuff over and over.

Even though I've been at it a long time, I have not built as many guitars as some of you. Part of that has to do with fact that I make a lot of different things: if I had one of every model of everything I've built, it would be at least 35 different instruments, and there are several other things I would like to try. These days about half of my time is spent on 'fiddles' of various sorts. My total for harps and hammered dulcimers together is nearly up to the number of guitars I've made, and the mountain dulcimers are 'way ahead. It's a lot easier to jig up and set up an efficient space if you specialize. I could also build a lot faster if I wasn't teaching in the same shop twice a week, but at least that forces me to sweep up!

My big problem is the dratted 'science' stuff. The more I learn about how these things work the more things there are that I feel I should measure. After a while as a builder you come up with a limited suite of measurements that give you enough information to achieve a decent level of consistency, but there are several possible sets of such measurements, and it's interesting to see how they correspond. In other words; it's too easy to get side tracked! ;)

I built the 'corker' guitar, with no binding, rosette or finish, but with a removable neck and 20 holes in the side, in about three days. A commercial rosette and simple bindings would have added maybe a day to that. It's hard to account for finish time: I either varnish or French polish, and with both the way I do them a lot more time is spent waiting for the stuff to dry than actually working on it. 8-12 hours of actual work over a week or so? Of course, I don't just spend the waiting time sorting my sock drawer. So, yeah, 40-45 hours, I'd guess. As I say, my big bottleneck right now is the rosette: I spend more than a day on that, and another day in voicing (and writing all the stuff down, doing tests, printing charts, etc.).

In the end, you pays yer money and takes yer choice. We each do what we feel is important, and try to make it all work out well enough. I decided some time ago that I just can't get all that excited about simply making money. If I'm not learning something or pushing my skills I feel like it's just a waste of time. The trick is to keep _enough_ money coming in, and enough orders going out, so that nobody gives you too much grief. Sometimes it's hard to strike that balance just right, but I've managed to keep the same wife for 36 years and we've put three kids through college, so it's possible.