Acoustic Guitar Building

Chapter 1: The Steel-String Build at a Glance: What You're Building and How This Book Works

You are looking at a stack of wood, a set of drawings, and a few hundred hours of your life. What you will have at the end is not a piece of furniture or a wall decoration. You will have a musical instrument that responds to your touch, that changes its voice as the room temperature shifts, and that will outlast you if you treat it with basic respect. That is the deal. This book is the roadmap for that transaction.

This is a steel-string acoustic guitar, built from the ground up. Not a kit where the hard decisions are made for you. Not a bolt-together assembly of pre-routed parts. A real, from-raw-lumber instrument. You will thickness your own top to 0.105 inches (2.67 mm) and your back to 0.090 inches (2.29 mm). You will bend sides at 320°F (160°C) over a hot iron, carve a neck from a blank that starts at 1.75 inches (44.45 mm) thick, and set the action to 0.078 inches (1.98 mm) at the 6th string, 12th fret. When you string it up and it holds tune, when you play a G chord and the whole box shivers with sympathetic vibration, you will understand why luthiers keep doing this.

The book you are holding is designed to be open on your bench, not read in an armchair. The full-size plans and bracing templates are folded in the back pocket.