Official Luthiers Forum!

I don't want this to come across as harsh, but I think you need to hear it:

Take a look at the word from your post that I placed in bold and underlined. See, the thing is, you probably don't know enough yet to discern whether the hope you have expressed is a realistic hope. I think you should learn more about this possibility before you move forward based on the idea that it is a realistic hope. I could go on and on about the difficulties associated with trying to make real money (as in: living off of it money, not a little on the side money) from selling guitars that you build yourself. But my saying it is not going to have the same impact as you reading up on it and coming to conclusions on your own.

A person can have a great deal of fun and satisfaction from building guitars. She/he might be able to sell some and make a little bit of side money. A few people try to make a living at it, and find it to be quite hard. Very few try and succeed at it financially. Personally, I find the odds to be much more in favor of a person having fun, learning a lot, and eventually being able to sell a few as a side gig. Hoping for more than that is not a good plan for making the money you need to live on, in my opinion. But you need to figure that out for yourself.

And BTW I don't want to sound discouraging. For all I know you could turn out to be the next Symogi and you would never know unless you tried. There are some professional luthiers on this forum some of which are at the highest level and maybe they will have some words of the wise too. In fact this has been discussed here before and you may be able to find some discussions by searching the archives.

Very helpful information here thanks alot everyone!

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Even the most successful luthiers worked in the trade for years at a deficit or low wages before they found a way into the black. This is not a trade for those seeking good money. Every builder I have ever met does it for rewards other than monetary.

Except for this one......

Seriously-all you need is a bad case of the "wannas"....

You have to really wanna do it.

When I started building guitars (and other stuff) 45 years ago there was nothing that could stop me . I would go to bed at night and lay in bed thinking of what and how I was going to do the next day... I still do!

When I started out ( I was 14 years old) I had no idea what I was doing,but it didn't matter, I just kept building and every time I built another one I would try to improve it.

Read EVERY book, watch EVERY video, Talk to EVERY person who has some knowledge.

I can't tell you how many aspiring Luthiers I invited to my shop over the years -very few took me up on it. If I had an offer like that when I was coming up I would have jumped at that chance!


It reminds me of the saying"don't just stand there-do something!"

Like any discipline , you need to practice to get proficient at it.

I have heard it said that it takes 10,000 hours to "master " something. .I easily have double that in guitar building alone and I feel I am just starting to get "comfortable" with it...

I am a firm believer in the concept that you learn more from your failures than your successes, especially when you are starting out. Half the time you succeed in the beginning you just got lucky .

The only advice I can give you on making money in this business is to do repair work. IMHO there is a shortage of good repairmen and as far as Guitar builders go you can't swing a dead cat without hitting an amazing one who can't make a decent living at it.

[quote="doncaparker"]Johnathan—

First off, welcome to a fellow Mountaineer!

I think the best way for you to get the kind of guidance you are looking for is to give us an assessment of your situation, other than the facts that you are new at this and you don’t have a lot of money to spend on it. What I mean is, we don’t know what tools you have



Do you own the Cumpiano/Natelson book on guitar making?

Let us know what tools and skills you have


Sorry, somehow I didnt see this message till now. I'm 22 and just moved into a house me and my father built so I have some general knowledge of tools and carpentry but not much knowledge of fine woodworking.
My current tools are
Benchtop bosch router
Benchtop grizzly spindle sander
A laguna bandsaw
An super old drum sander
Powermatic jointer
No 5 jack plane
Low angle block plane
Bending iron from stewmac
All of this is in a 20 by 40 garage I have reserved for woodworking
I think that's about it

I'm also completely ready to make mistakes on my first build. I know we learn from our mistakes but being as it's an expensive hobby I really dont want to make any disastrous mistakes on my first guitar. I have the cumpiano/natelson book and alot of it confuses me. I also live near a local luthier who has been very helpful with getting me to understand some parts of building process. Some things confuse me and I dont want to bother him to much so I get alot of information from YouTube videos from blues creek, obrien, and eric shaefer. Also that is again to everyone on this forum. You guys are extremely helpful to newcomers

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It sounds like you have most of the large power tools you will ever need. I would suggest you skip the "kit" and use domestic woods for back and sides to start with. You may want to buy a dozen "A" grade soundboards and learn to test for "runout" and stiffness. Soundboards are for the most part graded on cosmetics and the lower grades can make a fine sounding guitar and be a good value. The mechanical and acoustic properties are often as good or better than some of the higher grade soundboards.

+1 on the domestic woods. You can build a good guitar for about $250 bucks.

I would suggest getting Trevor Gores books as well. If you use his approach to top thickness then you will be way ahead of the game. Cumpiano's book is great but when it comes to thicknessing the top it's guess work. Gore has a method for doing it for each individual piece of wood and it works well. You could find that info elsewhere but the book has good detail on the construction process too. They are expensive but worth it imho.

I would seriously consider Stewmac membership - free postage and half price books, plans costs about $35 for a year.

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The name catgut is confusing. There are two explanations for the mix up.

Catgut is an abbreviation of the word cattle gut. Gut strings are made from sheep or goat intestines, in the past even from horse, mule or donkey intestines.

Otherwise it could be from the word kitgut or kitstring. Kit meant fiddle, not kitten.

So, here is my perspective on the value of the Gore/Gilet books for a new guitar builder:

If you are absolutely certain you are in this for more than one guitar, and you want to have the most up to date book on how to build guitars by hand (showing go bar decks, dished workboards, bolted necks, etc.), the Gore/Gilet book is worth the money. You can save money, as Colin says, by getting a StewMac membership, then buying the Gore/Gilet books. And you are not going to “outgrow” those books. They are full of way more information than a new builder needs, and are a source of information for very experienced builders. You grow into them.

But . . .

They are very expensive, and they have way more information than a newcomer should try to digest. That’s particularly true of the design book. This is why I don’t recommend Gore/Gilet to new builders. I can see a person getting overwhelmed by those books.

Regarding confusion while reading the Cumpiano/Natelson book, it could be that you need to be in the thick of building along with the book to understand what is written. I think the strength of that book is what it gives to someone like you. It doesn’t take any experience or skill for granted. It tells you precisely what to do and when to do it. Other books will say things in more of a shorthand fashion, and expect you to know what that means and how to do it. Cumpiano/Natelson really does go step by step. I figure that’s pretty tedious if you are just reading and not building while reading, but it is gold for someone like you who has not done a lot of “fine skill” woodworking.

If there are specific things you want to ask about the Cumpiano/Natelson book, feel free. Somebody on here will know how to respond. Plenty of us built our first guitars using that book.

A lot of good information here already from people a lot more experienced than myself. Given that, I’ll just talk about my experience getting started.

The first “thing” I built was a StewMac soprano uke kit around 5 years ago. I started with that for three reasons:

1) It takes very minimal tooling (you already have way more than is needed).

2) Get get at least some idea of the steps of instrument making. Gluing blocks, gluing lining, closing the box, fretting a board, etc... without the most difficult aspects of instrument building like neck angle and radius rims, etc...

3) It’s only 60 bucks and if I got frustrated half way through and put it in trash it would be no harm no foul.

The second “thing” that I built was a guitar from an LMI kit using the Robbie O Brien video series. The good thing about Robbie’s course is it’s very thorough and he tries to show ways to do things with minimal tools where appropriate. In the end what you build is likely a decent guitar that will be playable. To me it sounded like magic. Frankly, it sounded like crap.

Using those two as a foundation I came here to the OLF and started asking questions, reading the archives, etc... the folks here will be very willing to help. Using a lot of the techniques I’ve learned here each build gets a little better. Nothing close to perfect it in getting closer to the level of confidence needed to sell something.

I took a fretting class at Ann Arbor Guitars. Read the archives here of Hesh and Dave, they will help immensely.

I took a voicing class from Greg Maxwell, also an OLF member. That’s been immensely useful in my more recent builds.

I’ve read the Build book from Gore / Gilet twice and used it as a working guide on my last few.

What I’m trying to say is all the learning, classes, books, and forum posts were easier to consume for me because of the foundational learnings from a uke kit and building a fairly modest kit along with Robbie O’Brien.

Hopefully some of that is useful. You’re going to have fun, frustration, sheer anger and elation all at the same time. Like Robbie says, take the time to take victory lap around the shop when you do something well. There will be ample other times when you’ll be walking it off for other reasons.

Good luck!

Brad


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Just saw this thread. Here’s my two cents.

I got started building Martin kits in the 90’s and got hooked. You can build a kit with pretty basic tools. This will tell you if you have a passion for it. I did get hooked. I later took the Charles Fox course in 2003 and have been able to do a little better than break even selling instruments since.

One cool thing is that if you get good at it and your instruments are respected you gain credibility and it opens a lot of doors into the world of professional musicians, lutherie, and the music business and you meet some really interesting people and make new friendships that you never would have made otherwise. You can’t put a price on that.

If you do a few kits and the fire burns and you want to get serious take a well established building course. It will shave years off your learning curve believe me. You will come out of it with the raw material to make a good guitar from scratch and that can be your baseline for little tweaks as you gain experience.

If you build some kits, love it, and are really serious about trying to make some kind of living at it you have to be able to do repairs. You will never support yourself building guitars as a solo luthier.

If that is your goal then take one of the professional courses like the Red Wing MN course or the Brian Galloup school. You won’t regret it

https://www.southeastmn.edu/academics/program.aspx?p=10

https://www.galloupguitars.com/schools- ... uthier.htm

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It's not what you don't know that hurts you, it's what you do know that's wrong.

Let's accept that OP has built and equipped his workshop, and he's taken a bunch of small-business courses. Now comes time management: OP will need to understand how much time he needs to invest in each piece of his work product. If he's not ruthless about time budgeting, he's going to have a hobby, not an income-producing business. And the skills are hard to learn and new folks are at the back of the line in attracting business.

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Peter Havriluk

But if you never have a dream, you will never have a dream come true.....
It's not easy to get there, but for all those that fail, there are still a few Bob Taylors and Paul Reed Smiths, and a greater number of custom builders who at least make a living at it. Even if it doesn't pan out , there is still experience and skills to be gained by the attempt.

Absolutely!

There as very few things that are as satisfying as building a beautiful looking,sounding and playing instrument....

If you want to save money on specialized tools (like fret files), what machine tools do you currently have access to?

You can crown frets with triangular files by grinding the edge so it won't scratch fingerboards. I like them because I can never know what frets I am expected to crown so I don't have to buy 20 different fret files for different fretwire profiles.

For nut files you can buy them, or you can take a small normal (flat) file, and keep the edge cuts, and if you have a surface grinder you can grind it to whatever thickness you need for whatever string gauge. For the very small ones, use a razor saw. For something around .028 range, a hacksaw blade will do. In fact you can surface grind hacksaw blades into whatever thickness needed as well. Don't have a surface grinder? Do the best you can with a bench grinder. Feeler gauges with teeth cut into it can work as well, and also you can use torch tip cleaners. Do not use a triangular file or japanese saw file for this. A V shaped nut slot is very bad.

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Cat-gut strings are made from kitten guts, stretched out to near breaking point and then hardened with grue saliva. As a result these give a feeling of Pain and anguish whenever played, and often end up playing themselves backwards as part of satanic rituals.

Typhoon Guitars
http://www.typhoon-guitars.com