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This will be a first for me. If anyone has experience I'd love to hear some tips on building, materials, techniques and so on.

Is there a Cumpiano style definitive book out there on Rezo guitar construction?

Curios for those who build both Rezo and flat tops if you find one easier to build then the other?

Regards.

I own three resonators, one of which I built. It is a wood bodied tricone, I already had a metal biscuit and a woodie spider





I have worked inside both the spider and biscuit and have a pretty good idea how they work and have pictures.

I also build flat topped acoustics, Weissenborns and recently an arch topped acoustic. Resonator construction is quite a bit different from most flat tops, there are a few sets of plans available and there is a wonderful photo essy by Chris Paulick at MIMF on building a metal bodies tricone.

As far as difficulty, they are similar but different. One thing that was tricky is that the bridge location and height is defined when you cut the cone well so you work backward from that point as you build and set the neck. Most have neck sticks and action is set by adjusting the angle like a banjo.

Before I go any farther it would be helpful to know exactly what you want to build - cone type, body materials, neck configuration.

Thanks Freeman. I'll check out the MIMF article. This is the guitar I want to build.

OK, what I see is a spider bridge (the coverplate and you can see the legs of the spider thru the holes). You can buy cones and bridges and cover plates and tail pieces lots of places - Beard or Quarterman cones are good. Most common spider cones are 10-1/2 diameter.

The guitar in your picture is wood (duh). Resonator guitars are built out of all sorts of woods, some out of birch plywood including my 1932 Dobro (on the right). Mahogany is also fairly common but my feeling is that "tone wood" has little meaning with a resonator.

Your guitar has a 14 fret neck, I'm sure its round. Traditionally resonators were 12 fretters but more modern ones have gone to 14 and even a few cutaways. That of course will dictate where the bridge is in relation to the neck joint - it will shift the cone towards the upper bout. Resonators are traditionally 25 inch scale but I you can use whatever you want. An important decision is how flat or radiused you want your neck and how wide. If your playing style will have more fretted play a slight radius is nice, if you will be playing more slide flatter is nice. I have my own preferences but that is a personal choice.

Your guitar has a lipstick magnetic pickup. Resonators are hard to amplify and get a natural cone sound, in my opinion mag pickups don't really cut it. It is possible that the guitar also includes some sort of piezo in the bridge - I can't tell from the picture. Again that will be a call for you to make.

As I said in my last post, it is traditional for resonators to have a neck stick rather than a dovetail or bolted neck joint. I did put a bolt on neck on my tricone. The important thing is that you have very little room to work with the bridge to set the action - you need some way to adjust the neck angle. The actual action also depends on your playing style - I like medium because I play a mix of fretted and slide, Here is a picture of the insides of my spider bridge guitar showing the cone well and the end of the neck stick. There are usually two or four screws under pearl dots in the fretboard extension that go into the upper bout plus the neck stick. I don't know about your guitar, it has fancy fancy inlay but maybe the two round dots





You can see in those pictures the small lip that the cone sits on. Biscuit bridge cones are a different configuration for the well (and a smaller diameter cone). I would suggest getting your cone, spider and cover plate before you start and take careful measurements as far as the depth of the rim. You will set the neck to the cone and spider.

At one time there was a pretty good set of spider bridge plans available thru Beard (Resonator Outfitters). I have a set somewhere. There was also a pretty good biscuit bridge plans at StewMac and you might go thru the plan archives at GAL and MIMF. I have an Autocad drawing of the top of a tricone. Other wise I don't know of any building resources.

Looks like you want to build a spider bridge? Not a lot different from a biscuit bridge other than the depth of the soundhole. As Freeman said, the bridge location and height is critical. The location is going to set your intonation so you need to establish that before you cut the top for the soundwell. And the neck angle and bridge height is limited by the opening in the coverplate. So a scale drawing of that geometry is helpful, and/or a mock up with the parts to understand that layout. The top needs to be solid to support the cone and I used different methods with baltic birch. It's been so long since I have done one and I'm not sure if I can find any pictures. But check out Kent Schoonover's shop tour for a cool way to do it. https://www.schoonoverresophonicguitars ... uitars.htm

Actually Kent mentions one more thing to be aware of with resonators. Most have their saddles exactly at the scale length with no compensation and not angled. That means they intonate rather poorly. If you are playing with a slide and particularly lap style that doesn't matter - you've got your intonator in your hand. It is possible to compensate the saddle of a spider bridge but you don't have much material to work with and you might be limited by where you put the cone and your selection of strings and tuning.

Thanks to you both.

I thought I had an account a long long time ago on mimf but I cannot seem to log in. Put a request in to join days ago and heard nothing back. I guess I'll wait a bit

The article that I referenced above is about building a metal bodied tri cone and its 74 pages long. Totally different guitar than you are talking about. As I recall there were a bunch of other short articles at MIMF in the archives, I have not looked at them in quite a few years.

I got a set of resonator hardware from bezdez on ebay many years ago, reassenbled a Johnson body w/martin neck and made this:
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M&T neck connection after cutting off the broken stub.It's set up for fingerpicking. I was lucky that the action and intonation came out OK.
Here's a couple of eBay links to some cheap parts to try it out. https://www.ebay.com/str/bezdez?_trksid ... 70.l113337, https://www.ebay.com/itm/125625315792?h ... BM3Iut5Jph.