Official Luthiers Forum!

Allright, so with regard to the butt block, then, what we're looking at is tension from the strings pulling on the soundboard, which, in turn, pulls on the top of the butt block. The "Chasson Struts", I'll call 'em - the CF rods that run from the bottom of the waist blocks to the top of the butt block - create a "virtual pivot point", or fulcrum, just below the point where the string/soundboard tension is pulling on the top of the butt block. So, we want to anchor the tension rod near the bottom of the butt block to counteract the string pull on the top. If I understand leverage correctly, the lower on the butt block the tension rod is anchored (as well as the lower on the heel at the other end), the less actual tension the tension rod will have to bear in order to counteract the string tension. So, lower is good.

Am I making sense? Bear with me, guys... I went to school for stuff like art, music, and theater... I ain't never opened an engineering book...

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Todd Rose
Ithaca, NY

https://www.dreamingrosesecobnb.com/todds-art-music

https://www.facebook.com/ToddRoseGuitars/

Correct, though I'm not particularly concerned with the stress on the top of the end block. I'm more concerned with it on the neck block.

Thanks, Rick.

_________________
Todd Rose
Ithaca, NY

https://www.dreamingrosesecobnb.com/todds-art-music

https://www.facebook.com/ToddRoseGuitars/

As for "Chasson Struts", as I said, I doubt that's original.  If it is, then I'm stuck with the fact that my only two innovations in the lutherie world to date have to do with the butt end.  Go figure.

As for credit though, does anyone know who came up with the idea to buttress (or strut) to the waist?  I first recall seeing them several years ago on guitars by Barry Daniels and Howard Klepper posted on MIMF.  Was it you, Rick?

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http://www.chassonguitars.com

    The first builder I ever saw use this kind of buttress application was Mike
Doolin. Mike is one of my favorite builders and has introduced a few
innovations that have been copied by others.

    I believe that one of his innovations was even copied and then patented
by a big house....but I doubt that Mike would make that claim.

Regards,
Kevin Gallagher/Omega Guitars

I don't know who was first, but I did some guitar rebuilds in 1989 and 1990 where I turned guitars into baritones by retopping and making new fingerboards for them. I installed waist to neck block wooden flying buttresses in several of them...maybe all of them; I forget.   I did a Guild, a couple of Gibsons and a couple of Martins, and I think a Yamaha for folks like Jackson Browne, Bernie Leadon, Stephen Bishop, a great songwriter named Tim Ray, and some other folks.     I went with a 27" scale, and just didn't care which fret met (or didn't meet) the neck to body joint...it was usually at about the 13th...a good luck number for frets...

So it's about 17 years of doing flying buttresses for me. I was influenced by my repair experience and by Steve Klein's guitars, though I thought his curved flying buttress was way too complicated and not as stiff as could be done with simple struts. I was also influenced by visiting the Cathedral of St. Denis in Paris...it was the first Gothic cathedral built with flying buttresses, and it's now over 800 years old.   Amazing place where many of the French royalty of the Middle Ages are buried.

As soon as I started building acoustics from scratch in the mid 1990's I integrated the flying buttresses into them and also freed the fingerboard from touching the top. I built three or four butt-jointed, cantilevered-fingerboard guitars, and then went to the fully adjustable tilt neck in 2001 with Henry Kaiser's Ms. Antarctica being the first of those.

I haven't looked back...this stuff works.