Official Luthiers Forum!

I hate to drive traffic to another forum, but it's not really direct competition with OLF, so I hope it's okay.

Over at the Unofficial Martin Guitar Forum, there's a thread in the Technical Info section titled "ATTENTION ALL MEMBERS! HELP NEEDED FOR BRACING LIBRARY." where members have taken pictures of their guitars with a light inside so the bracing pattern becomes visible. Also, there are a lot of other photos and tracings of tops taken during repairs.

There are some very knowledgeable guys there, too, so it's an interesting read.

http://www.umgf.com (You may need to sign up to view the pics)

Of particular interest to me was a tracing of a 1932 14-fret 0-17 braced top. Some of you may remember I posted a printable cad/pdf file of an outline tracing made by George Armstrong, it was a 1937 0-18 14-fretter.   It's hard finding info on these as they weren't very common, most of the 0's were 12-frets. Here's a link to that thread. The download links there are still active.

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Jonathan Kendall, Siloam Springs AR

Jon-
Thanks for this.
I downloaded your pdf outlines and appreciate all the work involved by the folks who contributed to that thread.

Cheers

John

I have a 1919 Martin 00-18, and I can tell you that the bracing is incredibly minimal in there. I need to make a new bridge for it and do a neck reset, but I expect it to sound quite wonderful someday. I'll probably use Thomastik extra light Spectrum Bronze or the Classic S rope core strings on it. I'll try to get some measurements on the bracing.

I'd love any measurements or tracings or whatever you feel like throwing our way. They were still using gut string in 1919, weren't they?

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Jonathan Kendall, Siloam Springs AR

One must remember that the older "vintage" martins were built for gut strings and not steel. The delicate X braced guitars from the turn of the century were not built for the Steel strings.
   The brace for steel is 5/16 and 1/4 as for the D35. The 1/4 scalloped braces of the older guitars will be under more stress than designed.
     Brace sizes for steel are
5/16 by 9/16
1/4 by 3/4
   that is for the mainX . I have seen the truss rod brace from 1/2 by 1/2 to 3/8 by 1/2. The tone bars are often 1/2 tall on the older ones. Some were as high as the main X.
The company did use a variety of brace designs for the different models.
   

Man this is cooler than when the martin guys came to our local music shop with some tops and where restringing for free. Thanks good find.

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"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...

Yep, gut.   I might just try some Aquila Nylgut on the guitar when I get it back in shape. Real gut is also an option, though not terribly vegan... But they'd go well with hot hide glue!