Getting Totally Bent!

On the Edge!
Binding My Guitar

Bruce Roper bends binding

If you can't take the heat, then just bend with it! 

Bruce Roper and I have become dedicated advocates of an important part of the guitar building process: The Meal! Wishbone is just around the corner and ALWAYS lands right where you want it to when it is time to eat. On this particular day, a young woman named Maya waits table for us. It is a terrible day full of clouds and drizzle and the kind of pressure that makes your ears close up (at least mine.) It feels like the atmosphere has come to sit on my head. But this young woman changes my mood completely because she is so bright and cheery. Go see for yourself.  It's what guitar building is all about! Pancakes, bacon, orange juice and coffee and we headed off to Bruce's shop just around the corner.

Once again, Bruce has taken to the heating iron to begin bending the hardwood pieces that will become the binding around the top and bottom of my guitar. We're looking at thin strips of wood that might well snap if we aren't careful, and it doesn't take much heat to just safely bend them, which is what Bruce is up to at this point. Then he will diligently push them into place on a base of wood glue and tape them up so they can dry.

Binding versus purfling! Which is which? And why? Undoubtedly you have been asking yourself this question for a long, long time, as I have. Binding seals an edge. Purfling is actually an embedded strip of something, usually wood, around the top of a violin that keeps its maple from splitting. Guitars can have purfling, too. But not this one. Today is all about binding.

The binding ready for glue

This is what he binding looks like once it has been bent. As you can see, it matches the form of the guitar and will fit into the grooves cut around the top and bottom. In my case, the binding is dark hardwood on top on a base of light green wood. That coordinates it with everything else that is going on with the guitar. These are the kinds of things most people don't notice, but that I notice all the time. Sucky binding wrecks the guitar's look and seems out of place. So it's an aesthetic choice. We have chosen well here, I would suggest.

We made another discovery last week that I can now show you. This guitar will have an eye on the front. We didn't plan it that way. Nature did. Because the instrument is flitch matched, both the back and front are book matched pieces so the patterns repeat on either side of the center line. In this case, on the front, it forms what I think is a pretty perfect eye image that you don't typically see in a guitar. So basically, it's looking at you.

Matched set presents an eye!

I love the look of it, and I suspect i will love it all the more once Bruce puts a coat of shellac and some finish on the guitar. It has all kinds of little nooks and coils in the wood and each of them will add another distinctive layer to this instrument. I'm actually thinking of naming it, but I have to wait to the end to make that decision. Just now its Bruce Roper's Guitar for Madigan, which is good enough for me.

Binding is an annoying practice because Bruce has to have a couple of things going at once and there's not much I can do to help. He has to spread glue in the groove around the top, start the binding at a center point, then move around the top of the instrument pushing it in and down and taping each half inch with masking tape.

It comes out looking like this:

The tape can come off at the end of the day and Bruce can move to the next step, which is sanding with a small orbital sander and some very fine grit sandpaper. You want to get all the bumps and grain points level before you put on the first coat of finish. Then you do it again, and maybe again, until you are happy with it.

Bruce is not a believer in the "shine like a mirror" school of guitar building. A midwesterner to the souls of his feet, he wants practical protection on the instrument and maybe some beeswax on top of that. But no 30 coat efforts come out of Bruce's shop. The question will be "Is the surface protected," and the answer will be "yep." But it won't be shining like an expensive piece of furniture. It will have some depth and some shine, but not so you would be looking at that instead of the genuine beauty of the wood.

Some dental cement stuff will be used to fill in a couple of places where perfection fled the effort. I am looking at this the way Arabs look at rugs. Only Allah is perfect. What man touches, he messes up in some way. But by the time Bruce is done, you won't notice it unless you are looking for it.

Next?

The first layer of finish.

Please come back.

A Big Problem...Solved!

How It Becomes Binding:

A Delicate Process Full of Peril

Before we got rolling on this next delicate part of buildmyguitar, Bruce Roper and I fortified ourselves with pancakes (Mine was buckwheat. Fantastic!) at Wishbone, just around the corner from his shop. That was fortunate because we would be needing the energy. Take a look at this:

That piece that goes around the outside edge of the guitar (in this case, a 1958 Martin D-28) is called the "binding," because it closes the seam between the bottom and top and hides some important brace ends that are exposed in the building process. You might think this would be easy to install, and at Martin these days, or other factories, it probably is because they have done it a million times and have worked out machines to complete the difficult parts.

 Not so at Bruce's. His guitars are hand-made. All of them. Each part.

Here is the body of my guitar on the table and ready to be routed for binding. A router is an interesting piece of equipment, basically a high speed electric motor with a razor sharp cutter on the end that spins thousands and thousands of times a minute. One might cut a guitar clean in half with a router, which, of course, is just not the objective at all. Bruce wants to cut a uniform groove around the top and bottom of the guitar so he can glue a very handsome dark wood and green binding around the top. It will kind of match the ring around the airhole on the top, but not exactly.

If everything about a guitar was square (and I'm talking about geometry here, not absence of coolness) this would be a simple process. You could put the router in a jig that put the cutter at a specific depth and height and just zip around the top.

But guitars are not square. If you have been following the blog, you might have seen an earlier entry in which the top of the guitar (and bottom) were set in special curved forms so they would each have an arch. That works very well, but not for the router. It means you can't get a guaranteed square cut along the top of the guitar, and that is irritating, not good and potentially damaging if anything goes wrong. A cutter spinning that fast will cut through sapele, which is hard wood, like it is cutting through butter, making a long trench in the wrong place. Bruce has constructed a bunch of solutions to help prevent this. Here is the one he set up first. Basically, it's like one of Thomas Jefferson's signing machines, lots of parallel things that float along and keep the router level and at the right depth. But once he had set it up, he didn't like the look of it. It would be a pity to wreck a guitar like this one, made from select woods and designed to be only mine and like no other one in the universe. A big hole in the top or side, of course, would make it distinctive, but, as you might have guessed, that's not the intent.

So he shifted to another option, a rig he designed and built himself that is free form, hand driven and good enough so that if everything goes exactly as planned, that groove will be just right. But nothing ever goes as planned.

This gives you a solid idea of what Bruce's rig looks like. But it doesn't tell the whole story. The bottom part of the rig is designed to ride along the side of the guitar to keep the router bit at the proper angle to the top, and the plate on the router is designed to keep the bit at the proper angle to the side. You really want that groove to be uniform, because the piece of binding that fits in it can take a little sanding from the top, which no one would notice except Bruce, but none from the side. It has to fit perfectly so that it is uniform as it marches around the top. (Bottom, too).

But...oh, shit! It's not working right. Some of the cut is perfect, but in some cases, the router jig pushes the cutter completely out of the groove because the top is just not level (and it's not supposed to be!) So these parts Bruce has to go over again, adjusting the angle of the router to make the cut just right. It's hard to imagine how invested I have become in this guitar, because I worried (needlessly as it turned out) at every point. The fact that the router burns the wood a bit and fills the shop with the smell of simmering sapele doesn't help (although it's a delightful smell.)

Also, that "just whip around the top and cut the groove" part isn't exactly right. Here is Bruce's schematic on how to cut a binding groove. He starts and stops for adjustments. Starts and stops because the heel on the vise holding the guitar gets in the way. Starts and stops so he doesn't go chipping any wood. Then goes all the way around the top in a different direction. This is a time tested formula. I suspect he wrecked a few guitars early in his life when he was working this out. I do not ask because he has won my respect. We all make mistakes in our careers. Bruce knows how to fix most of his.

After a nerve wracking 90 minutes, he finishes the job and starts filing the groove flat and fixing any little bumps he caused along the way. Here is how the guitar will look with its binding in place. But that can't happen for about another work because the groove needs to be prepared before anything gets glued in place.

The binding has to be soaked in water before it is installed so it bends without breaking.

We also discovered something I am not going to show you until the work is done. This guitar has an "eye" on the front, down below the air hole. Because it is a matched set that made the top, a couple of little growth rings come together just perfectly. It is as though a cyclops is watching you from down there. I love that, so natural and unexpected.

What was most interesting about this part of buildmyguitar was watching Bruce use the various rigs he has constructed to get specific jobs done. Dremel tools are a guitar maker's good friend, something Christian Martin did not have back in the 1830s when he started building fine guitars in New York. That gives you a good sense of what a craftsman he was as he built his way into American guitar history.

We finish this binding challenge next week, I suspect, then move on to the neck.

Please keep reading!

"The beauty that flows from this instrument..."

Inscription in the new guitar

Signing and sealing: 

A Milestone 

What would you write inside the top of a guitar being made just for you, something no one but the owner and the builder will ever see? Bruce Roper, the luthier at Old Town School and now a good friend, told me I could say whatever I wanted. Never at a loss for words, I was at a loss for words until I thought about it. What was I getting out of this experience? I didn't need another good guitar, having many. I didn't need much of anything in the way of musical instruments, but if you have been following this blog, I think you will understand that the wood and the glue and the cutting and pasting and clamping were just the mechanical part of the process. What I value the most is the friendship I have built with Bruce Roper over the past few months. He produced a CD for me so I knew him, but I didn't really know him. Now I have listened to his gentle explanations of what is going on, his feelings about wood and how to pick it, his thoughts about writing and performing music. I have watched him use his hands in a hundred ways on this project. I was watching someone who knew, from long practice, what to do about anything that came up. So I thought I had to say something that stretched beyond the guitar.

I have also heard him talk with great affection about his bandmates in Sons of the Never Wrong, Sue Demel and Deb Maris Lader. I have been in bands and I know the kinds of pressures that build until the whole thing fractures and you run away screaming about one another. After nearly 25 years, he still laughs when he talks about the times they have had (and continue to have). When you see them on stage, what is there is genuine. They aren't acting. I so admire that. 

Friendship.

"The beauty that flows from this instrument is friendship," I wrote, in my own ridiculously sloppy handwriting. Then I signed it, and so did Bruce, and then the whole process moved on to the finishing of the box. This is a very important step because it is the first time anyone can get a full view of how the guitar will look when it is finished. The chatoyance I talked about much earlier is stunning, front and back and sides. It is going to be such a lovely work that I hesitate to put a pick guard on it. I plan to use the guitar for finger picking (without picks!) so I don't think I'm going to be banging it up.

The back, braces trimmed and ready for glue

Bruce trimmed the braces and got them ready for glueing to the sides of the guitar. He put the top on last week in a similar process. This side involves a little guess work and some measurement by eye. He has done it so many times it goes smoothly.

Marking the brace spots

Because the bottom has to fit tight against the sides, Bruce must trim little slots into the sides where the braces will fit, just so it all looks tight and sealed when he moves to the next step (placing the bindings, which comes next week.) He does his trims with a Dremel tool then uses his band saw to cut little notches in parts of the top that don't fit handily in the jig when the bolts are installed.

Cutting the brace notches

It might seem like a tedious process, but it isn't. It's just a series of steps that Bruce follows closely whenever he makes this kind of guitar. He's helping a client build a classical guitar on another bench nearby, and that one involves a whole different world of steps. Those will be meticulously followed, too.

Watching him work, I got to thinking about which part of this process actually leads to a good instrument and I concluded, "All of it." I know, that sounds like a cop out. But it's not. Guitars are a process of the whole, but the individual parts have to be right or it's not going to play well or sound good. So I think what I am seeing is a craftsman at work who knows all the steps and performs them at a very high level of skill. It takes the romance out of the instrument, I suspect, but there you have it. It's a bunch of pieces of wood glued together so they vibrate well and create a noise.

Here is how it looks when the back is glued up and screwed down to dry, a process Bruce completes just after he glues a series of rosewood straps along the inside of the sides of the guitar. This is protection. Sometimes guitars are bashed around a lot and the sides can be broken fairly easily unless they are reenforced. Nothing much better for that than rosewood strips.

Top glued down. Looking at the neck

Rosewood reenforcement strips on sides



Closing this all up was a little sad, like being four days through a seven day vacation and knowing that it's all going to end. But guitar building is just like life, I suppose, which is a really stupid thing to say because, after all, everything is just like life. It begins. It develops. It ends.
Except with this, you get a friendship and music! Next: Binding and then on to building the neck.

Weight Loss: Take a Chisel to The Fat Parts

Bruce Roper sculpts the braces on my guitar

 I don't want to say "This is what I have been waiting for" because that's not the case. I'm waiting for my guitar.  But this part of buildmyguitar is very important because it involves weight loss. Those are Bruce Roper's hands behind the chisel and that's an important thing to note. They are "behind the chisel." Any body part that might be cut or lopped off in this process has to be kept behind the chisel because it is that sharp. One slip could easily slice off half of a finger or carry the blade right to almost any bone in your body. Chisels are so dangerous that my old shop teacher in Altoona, Pa., Mr. Wray, insisted we walk with our thumbs over the end of the blade so we didn't accidentally slash anyone. If he saw you walking with an open chisel blade in the air, he had a paddle he had constructed of walnut and he would pound the back of your legs until you wept. It was a different time. But that was very effective, I must say.

Or maybe he just liked beating eighth grade boys with paddles! That's a possibility, too.

Bruce, the luthier for Old Town School of Folk Music's Different Strummer music shop, is building a guitar for me. These blogs started with the selection of a great piece of Sapele at Owl Lumber in Des Plaines and continued through cutting it up, selecting the flitch-matched top and bottom and moving step by step through the challenges of guitar building. Today, the top is going to be glued on after the bracing is sculpted.

 Bruce has tapped hard with his fingers on the top of the guitar with its braces glued on and concluded its pitch is too high, that its sound is too hard. We needed to work this out because once the top is glued on,  it's too late to begin the sculpting process. Before you know it, the whole body will be completed and glued together, and you are NOT going in there unless something awful has happened.

Blade sculpting with a chisel

During this two-hour visit, Bruce pruned those braces with his chisel and then sanded them until they were sculpted into the shape of blades. Every few cuts, he tapped and listened. That brightness gradually became a little muted, which is what he wanted. And as he cut, the braces began to look like helicopter blades. That's one of Bruce's signature contributions, the helicopter blade sculpting of braces. No one will ever see it, but chances are it will make the top of the guitar much more lively over on the treble side where the high strings, the G, B and E, live, and much deeper over on the bass side where the wound strings, the E-A-D strings live.

Here is how the sculpted brace looks before Bruce has taken sandpaper to it to smooth it out. You can see one just north of his hand that has been about completed. The braces are spruce, so Bruce has to be careful. He knows his craft. Just when you think the brace is going to split, he flips the top and goes at it from the other end. 

There are lots of debates in the world of guitars about the value of sculpting braces. The C.F. Martin Co. in Nazareth, Pa. used to sculpt all guitar braces, then it stopped and let them leave the shop un-sculpted and now it sculpts the special ones and custom guitars. Some makers insist on sculpting all of their guitars. Cheaper guitars avoid sculpting. They just glue the up and ship them out. They are generally somewhat sloppy inside, with glue coming out of the braces and kerfing.

You will never see that on Bruce's guitars. He is not a perfectionist about it, but he is the complete professional and experienced over many years of building. His guitars look confident, comfortable with themselves and well finished.

We had a big philosophical discussion over lunch about guitars in general and song-writing, too. He has seen all the flaws after two decades fixing broken instruments at Old Town and he has designed his guitars to avoid some of the more common problems. On song writing, we were just about in unison, although he has been comfortable at it for many years. We are not much for collaboration. I worked in a band with two other guitarists and a woman singer. He is a member of Sons of the Never Wrong, probably the strongest group to emerge from the folk era in Chicago. They remain delightful and Bruce thinks it can't be better than to be the guy in a trio with two women.

This is unlikely to ever happen for me. Too cranky, I suspect, and too insular about the process.

Back to guitars.

The sculpted braces

 I think you can get a sense from this picture of how it all comes out when the sculpting is completed. Perhaps half of the weight of the braces has been trimmed away, The underside of the top has an elegant look to it, which is too bad because no one will get to see it, other than right here. There is one more piece Bruce will put in after the top is glued down.

The headblock addition

If you look to the right side of the picture above, you see the head block, where the neck fits into the guitar. This is generally viewed (by Bruce at least) as a dead area of guitar top where nothing much happens musically when you hit the strings. Still, it is one of the places he finds himself fixing a lot as a repair man. Splits and cracks show up on the guitar top near where the neck hooks on because of the varied stresses on the top.

To fix that, he cuts a thin piece of pine and glues it to the guitar top just where it fits over that end block. That means the top of the guitar is reenforced by wood that has grain running perpendicular to the grain of the top. In other words, it's not going to crack or split.

Just about time to make some final adjustments and glue the top on. You can see how it sits on the sides by looking closely at the picture above. The reason the fit is tight is that Bruce has prepared the sides to receive the top and trimmed the braces so it all fits snugly. Which is exactly what happens when he puts these things on.

What things?

Glue on the kerf to hold down the top.

Well, the things that look more or less like marshmallows with bolts stuck through them. Of course they aren't. They are actually wooden rounds with cork glued to the bottom. It takes about 24 of them to hold the newly glued top down. When you put it all together, it looks like this:

So that's how that happens. You tighten up the bolts with wingnuts (not too tight) and give it a day sitting and you have a well glued top. There are special deep throated clamps that hold down the very center of the front and back. The bases are all covered, as the sports writers might put it.

The same thing is going to happen to the back of the guitar, but it will be a little easier because the braces there are parallel. Then on to bindings, which are going to be stunning.

I hope you read all of this. If you do, you will have a chance to say Happy Birthday to Sue Demel, one of Bruce's partners (along with Deb Maris Lader) in Sons of the Never Wrong. I took two songwriting classes with her at Old Town School and she's brilliant. Tough but brilliant. And not to be missed if you have a chance to see her perform.

Onward with this tiny snap of Bruce's note on the form, Gibson N.L. 1937
That stands for Gibson Nick Lucas, 1937. Among about a million other things, Nick Lucas wrote "Tiptoe Through the Tulips" in 1929.

We'll be back next week with more as buildmyguitar pushes on. 

A Stage Too Good To Overlook...

We are moving rapidly toward...

An Actual Guitar

Bruce removes clamps from kerfing

Bruce and I had lunch downtown with some folks considering another project we will be working on and I dropped by his house on the way home to Evanston to listen to some fine music and check on the progress on the buildmyguitar.blogspot.com effort. As you can see, it's really starting to look like the insides of a fine guitar. And the kerfing effort is the last stage before the top and bottom are glued into place.

Here's what the guitar looks like out of the frame:

The finely cut kerfing around the inside edge creates a little flat platform Bruce will use to put the top and bottom in place. It was nice of Bruce to take the guitar out of the frame for me (usually, once it goes into the frame in this part of the process, it stays.

We checked it all out and then shifted it back into its temporary home to get ready for the next step.

But before we did that, we played with it a little bit, balancing it on his workbench to give you an idea of how the back fits and how the top will look.

Bruce still has some planing to do before we can get this elegant little sapele box in shape. We're getting closer and closer to the end product (except we have to do the neck, which is a challenge.)

Stay tuned.

The HEAT is on!

My guitar sides in water

Hot! Hot! Hot!

Bruce Produces Lots of Heat for the sides of my new guitar. 

There are a lot of ways to bend wood, many of them so risky that a project might indeed break up right in front of you if you are not careful. Bruce Roper from the Old Town School of Folk Music's Different Stummer (he does their repairs) is building a guitar for me out of a highly figured set of sapele wood. Today is side bending day, which is more fun than it sounds and a little risky, too when you have such a beautiful set of sides to prepare.

First, wood bends, of course, but not this much. What you see up there are the sides of my guitar resting in about an inch of water. This has two consequences. 1. You can really see how lovely the grain is going to be on the sides of this guitar, and 2. They become  a lot more malleable after they have absorbed some water. I don't know why but it is a magical transformation. These sides are going to have to take on a shape they never imagined when they were part of a tree growing in west Africa. Bruce is going to help them do that.

Guitar building form

That guitar shaped thing resting on the work bench is actually a two-part, fiberboard form Bruce made in the shape of a 1938 Nick Lucas Gibson Guitar. What he has to do is take the sides he has resting in the water and make them conform to the inside of this shape. It's all done by meticulous measurement and gentle bending, with not much guess work involved at all. The two pieces of wood sticking up on the top and bottom of the form are the end plate, a simple piece of pine, and the neck block, which has a trench cut into it that perfectly fits an extrusion on the bottom of the guitar neck. Bruce's guitar necks are bolted on in a couple of different directions. That means you can get the neck off in a few minutes, but it remains stable and solid. He devised his system (others use similar systems) after decades of repairing guitars, particularly old valuable ones with necks that were glued into a dovetail. It can be hard to fix the neck on a guitar like that.

 The end piece and the neck block must be glued to the sides once they are bent and put into the form. They are important for a lot of reasons. One is strength. The glues Bruce uses are steam and water soluble, but very strong once they dry. So those blocks will play a central role (literally) in holding the guitar body in its shape and creating the opening for the neck. This is the point at which the project really starts to look like a guitar. So here is Bruce starting the bend. He is using an iron form heated by a propane torch. The wet wood will bend, with a little pressure from Bruce, around the contours of that hot form.

Bending a side

It's all a little more particular than it seems when you just see it in a picture. The sides are flat on the bottom and sloped on the top and ultimately will be planed to the proper dimensions. But first you have to get them in the forms. Bruce bends them in a couple of stages, starting at the top and bending down to what is called the bout (the waist) on the guitar. This is a process that involves feeling when the wood is ready to bend, Bruce says. You can't go faster or you might break it. He is practiced at this and for both sides, it goes smoothly. Bruce says sometimes, although not very often, a side will break during this process. Because my guitar is flitch matched (everything is book matched all around) breaking a side now would mean having to find a whole new matched set. As the tops and the sides of this one come from the same piece of wood and are quite distinctive, that would not be easy. Ultimately, these sides are going to carry a line of kerfing. Kerfing is a piece of triangular wood cut into a long strip with slits in it so that it can bend. One side gets glued to the inside top and inside bottom of the guitar, providing a little platform for gluing on the top and bottom.

But that's getting a bit ahead of the game. Bruce patiently bends sides and tries them into the form. Then he gets to a point at which he decides he has done enough bending, that clamps will do the rest of the work. He turns off the propane torch and puts it outside to cool. He dismantles the bending iron and takes it outside to cool, too. It's not a tiny shop, but it is a small enough shop that you don't want any blistering hot objects sitting around where you might put your hand on them.

He puts the sides in the form and marks and trims them so the forms will fit together.

Bruce uses a Japanese pull saw for trim

This is not as crucial a stage as it might seem. The end block and the neck block do a lot of the work where the guitar sides come together at top and bottom. Each will get a good layer of glue and will be clamped to hold the sides in the right places. The plate of the guitar neck will cover the one opening so no one will ever see it (unless it is a person removing the neck.) The heel plate will help create a gap that will be cleverly filled by Bruce with another piece of something. Could be wood. The important thing is that this little guitar bottom insert will finish off the bottom of the instrument and provide a handsome spot for drilling the hole that will hold the base peg (where the strap hooks in, if you are a strap wearer. I am not.)


It takes perhaps a dozen clamps to hold this all together while the glue dries. Bruce uses three clamps each on top and bottom blocks to hold them in place while the glue dries. While he is careful about this, he works confidently.

This wood has bent without crack or strain and dried nicely as soon as it was in the form. It will stay there for perhaps another 24 hours, when Bruce will remove the clamps and put in a set of spaces that will stay in place while he moves on to the next phase in the process, installing the kerfing and planing the sides to exact height to receive the top. The bottom is already flat and ready for kerfing and gluing.

Just a little more work is required on the braces on the top of the guitar before it will be ready for glue. You can see how the completed bracing looks. Where there is pressure on top of the guitar, there is bracing beneath to hold it all together.

But Bruce doesn't want to leave the bracing this thick as he is putting the top on the guitar. He will use his chisels to sculp the bracing make it as thin as he can. It must retain its strength without adding weight to the guitar. It might not sound like much of a trim, but bracing is one of the key components in how the guitar vibrates and makes its sound. That plate in the middle is a piece of maple. The bridge will be glued right above it on the face of the top, then the holes for the strings will be drilled through the bridge and through this plate. String it up and you have something that functions as one piece, strings and all, with the bridge plate transferring vibrations of the strings to the top of the guitar.

I'm pretty pumped about all of this. It's actually starting to look the way it will look when it is completed. The figuring in the wood is pronounced, and that will make it lovely. Of course, the big test comes when it's time to play, and we have a way go to before we reach that point. Stay in touch with us and watch us get there.

                                                                                                

The Guitar Mystery...or is there a mystery?

         The Big Guitar Secret (Don't Tell Anyone About This!)

                                     

On this particular morning in the history of the Buildmyguitar blog, I went to see Bruce Roper for what I thought was going to be a glue session but instead, turned into a conversation about the philosophy of guitar building. This is an area full of conflict that Bruce seems to avoid by just focusing on craft. He is a woodworker who happens to build guitars. He could just as easily turn those skills toward building nice mahogany boxes, or furniture, or quality mirror frames or who knows what? Fortunately, he stayed in the world of guitars.

Things are moving along quite well on my own guitar. Here are the back and the front, both upside down so you can see where we are on the bracing front. Bruce is very traditional about this. There is nothing you see here that you would not see at the C. F. Martin factory in Nazareth, Pa. or at Gibson or at Collings or Taylor. Bracing patterns have been worked out over many years. Still, in the world of luthiers, there is always debate about this fine point or that.

We started out by thumping on some wood.

That is my guitar top Bruce is thumping on with his fingernails. "Hear it?" he says. There is a little echo to it, maybe a little music if you apply some imagination. Basically, it sounds like a hard piece of wood that is being thumped. That makes it a little different since most guitar tops are made from spruce or cedar. This one is Sapele, which is like mahogany, but not mahogany. Some luthiers put a lot of weight on how these pieces of wood sound. Bruce doesn't. He believes you can get different sounds from different woods, but the real deciding factor is how the guitar is put together, not whether the wood rings when you thump it.

So why the emphasis on thumping? Bruce thinks it comes from history.

There has always been a fascination about what makes a great guitar sound so...great! It could be that the answer resides more in the ear of the owner than in the selection made by the luthier. We picked the wood for my guitar because it is going to be drop dead beautiful when it gets a finish on it. It has chatoyance and figuring that will make it dance in the light. But we aren't sure at all about how it will sound.

I have two Martin guitars (see the earlier blogs) that have spectacular voices but I don't know that they had them on the day they left the factory. I once talked to Chris Martin IV about that, and he said the worst a Martin guitar will ever sound will be on the first day you play it. After that, it gets better and better and better. My guitars, from 1958 and 1963, are proof of that. There's a process involved called "opening up" and a guitar won't have its best voice until that happens. It can take a while.

I have played lots of Bruce's guitars. They have their own voice. Their own feel. Their own unique finishes and decorations. I'm looking forward to that, and also to the point I can settle in with the instrument and give it a chance to open up. But I'm not kidding myself about what is involved here. It is serious craft, not art, and there is not much luck to it.

So, in the end, there is no mystery at all. But there is something else: mastery. And that only comes after building and building and building. We'll get back to that process in the coming Buildmyguitar blogs. Bending wood is on the horizon, and that's something Bruce loves.

And me too.

Back in the Guitar Game: A Cross at the Heart of It

Take a look at this:

We're back in the shop after a little vacation from buildmyguitar.blogspot.com and Bruce Roper, luthier at Old Town School and guy at the heart of Sons of the Never Wrong (there is actually only one guy and two women, so it's okay and you don't need to send emails about sexism) is getting ready to brace the top of my guitar. This is one of the most important things in the construction of a guitar so Bruce is paying close attention to every aspect of it. He is getting ready to cut one of two braces that will form an "x" just beneath the hole on the guitar front. You don't get to see it, but if it's not done properly, the tone will be bad, the top will be weak and the whole thing might just blow up in your face once the strings are tightened to key.

We had a guest on this morning. Stuart Flack, a jazz guitar player and long time friend, came along to watch Bruce in action. The minute Bruce heard what Flack was about, he went into his house and brought out an arched top jazz guitar he had built so Stuart could sit and play while Bruce was working and I was watching. Here's a contented Stuart and Bruce's fine guitar, which isn't made out of anything very special but sounds and looks very, very good.

Looking at this again, I'm thinking you would all be very happy to hear Stuart play, too, but I'm not facile enough to get all that stuff working at once. Stills I can do, but stills and a sound track and even one other little thing and my head will explode. So enjoy the picture. Enjoy it as much as we enjoyed having Stuart in the studios. Lots of big, full jazzy chords and little leads and progressions, all of them very smooth, very much on target. Someone into jazz should buy this guitar, which has a great heart and voice. But whoops! I digress.

This round disc Bruce is working on is actually a round slice from a 25' radius imaginary ball. It provides exactly the right curve for the top of this guitar, but not without some work, and that is what Bruce is setting up just now. Note the sheets of fine sand paper on the disc. That stuff follows the curve of the disc, too, so anything you rub on it long enough is going to come out with that 25' radius curve to it. That is important because Bruce is going to take that part of the brace, glue it up and set it on the inside of the top of the guitar, so it has this very smooth, natural curve to it. But to do that, he has to cut the "x" braces just right, so they cross in the proper place and make a perfect little platform on each side of the guitar bridge, which will be glued on later.

He is doing some careful placement here with each of the braces to make certain they start and stop just where he needs them to start and stop. There's some guitar building philosophy that comes in at this point. Some luthiers say that "x" needs to be close to the sound hole if the guitar is to be bright, and a little bit back if it is to be bassy and deep. Bruce says he doesn't know if any of that is true. What he cares about is that the cross of the "x" is di-sected by the seam going down the center of the top of the guitar. Symmetry is what this is about. That you achieve by placing it very carefully. Then you use a pencil to draw lines of the sides of the braces where they cross, so you will know where to cut the indentations that will allow them to be pushed together. Once you have that measure completed, it's time to cut.

Bruce is using a small Japanese pull saw to cut into the braces, which he has lined up beside one another in a little clamp on his workbench. You do it that way because it guarantees that the cuts are going to be the same size, which is just short of the drawn lines on the spruce braces. If Bruce cuts on the outside of the line, the joint will be loose and not worth much when all that pressure hits the guitar top. Just inside gives him a chance to use a fine file to cut away what remains so he can prepare a very tight joint. Cut, size, try it and cut again. Then he moves down to a set of files used to take off any remaining wood. This is how you cut a joint that is going to be tight.

Bruce still needs to take off some wood from the bottom center of both sides of the joint. The objective is to have them fit together and create a flat surface, which is going to be glued to the inside top of the guitar. After not many tries at all, Bruce gets it completely right. The pieces fit and are ready to be glued.

Bruce wants to insure a solid bond with the curved surface of the guitar, so he spread his glue with his finger. Much later, he will sculpt the glued on braces to give the top great resonance, which is important in guitar building. For now, he just wants to make certain that every little part of that brace has enough glue to build a strong bond with the top of the guitar. He's satisfied. Now its time to glue up the braces and give the top a little curve.

He is using fiberglass garden stakes to hold the parts down. One part goes against the plate at the top of Bruce's workbench. The other part sits on the brace. He will have about a dozen of these sticks in place when he is done with this part of the job. Each will apply exactly enough pressure to guarantee the wood is glued, but not enough pressure to wreck the top of the guitar. It's an old fashioned way of placing the braces, to be sure, but as certain as can be. The factories that make guitars use vacuum devices to apply uniform pressure to the glued brace.

Now that he is just about done with the stakes, you can see how the "x" sits on the inside of the top of the guitar just south of the hole. there will be perhaps three other braces on the inside of the top before Bruce is ready to sculpt the braces. One will cut across the bottom on an angle, another across the top will hold the surface flat so the guitar neck fits properly. A couple of other ones sit in random places that need reenforcement. When its done, it will include a place just below the "x" that will sit beneath the guitar bridge and be tied into the whole structure. That's why the placing of the "x" is important. The bridge is glued to the top side, but it sits directly above the legs of the "x", which makes it very strong once its all glued together.

Everyone was under some time constraints on this particular morning so we just stopped with the "x" brace once it was placed and glued down. We had a little conversation after that about what we want to do with the headstock on the guitar. That's a pretty distinctive place for decoration, and neither of us is interested in getting too fancy with it. But Bruce has come up with a very nice touch that will make this headstock unique.

Here is how it looks on paper. Bruce says the various parts of the top cut form the initials "CM" for Charles Madigan, which is cool enough to take my breath away. You will be able to see right through it and it will be topped with a copper cap. Down at the bottom of the neck Bruce will affix something in white with all thee of my initials, "CMM" to make sure everyone knows its mine. But that is coming down the road.

Next, Bruce is going to bend the sides the old fashioned way. That will be something to see. Then it will be time for some glueing up that will make it all look at lot like a guitar. I can't wait! Come back and watch!

Sucky Weather Does Not Stop Guitar Building!

Here's this first. Guess what it is:

That's where the hole in the middle of the front of a guitar comes from, which a lot of people call "the sound hole," but actually, it's the air hole that lets the top, back and sides vibrate in the lovely way that creates the guitar sound. More on that much later.

Bruce Roper, the luthier at Old Town School who is making a guitar for me, cut this sound hole from my sapele guitar top Wednesday morning in a series of meticulous steps that also included building a rosette that encircles the hole. I'll show you that in a bit.

What a ghastly day! The car went to the Botanic gardens with my wife and her good friend, and I packed my camera and stuff into a backpack and headed for the CTA so I could get to Bruce's workshop and move things along on the Buildmyguitar project. It was not an auspicious morning. My fancy tripod fell out of my backpack and the top snapped off as it hit the ground. Amazon is sending me a better new one. I am sending them money.

Bruce lives and works in a neat little space down near Lincoln and School, where he has his apartment, his recording studio and his guitar repair and building shop. To get there, I have to go to from South Boulevard in Evanston to Belmont and then cross over and get the Brown line and go backward a little bit until I get to Paulina, which is the stop for Bruce's place.

I don't mind the trip at all. It's snowy and everything that was dingy, frozen and gray just a day ago now has a mantle of fresh snow to perk it up for a while. It's great to look at Chicago from the El. I used to take it to work every day when I first joined the Tribune in 1979. I thought of it as a very romantic ride past the lives that countless thousands of Chicagoans had built over time.

 I would write poems in my head on my way to work. It is an easy city to fall in love with, despite its challenges.

Bruce was shoveling snow when I got to his shop (after a stop at Wishbone for a coffee and a biscuit and some bacon). Cheery about it all, he unlocked his shop and led me in. What a vision.

What you can see here are the fiberglass splints Bruce uses to hold the glued bracing down against the back of my guitar. What you don't see is that the guitar back is sitting on a piece of wood that has just the slightest curve in it so that when the whole thing dries, the back will have just the hint of an arch in it. All my guitars have that and I have seen how it is done at Martin's Nazareth factory and at L'arrivee Guitars in Vancouver. But this is how it's done in a small shop that has no fancy vacuum presses or lines of guitar builders. It's just Bruce and the wood. But he has his ways.

The braces need to be held down with even pressure all around so the top shapes right and they do their job once the instrument is assembled, adding lots of strength to what is basically a fancy, thin hardwood box in this case. Bruce used a belt sander to shape the braces before he glued them down. There is a reenforcing strip that runs down the middle, holding both sides of the back and the strips of walnut and sapele that run down the center of the back in solid place. Those orange sticks are fiberglass Bruce bought at a home repair center. They are wedged up against a piece of plywood that hangs above the workbench. It's a smart way to do the job.

But I would learn Wednesday morning that there are a lot of smart ways to do the job when you work alone. Bruce will teach you how to make a guitar in his guitar building class, but mostly he is working alone. He has just two hands and lots of tools to help when he needs them. You learn the value of practice when you watch him at work.

The challenge today will be to cut the trench for the rosette around the sound ("air"?) hole in the center of my guitar, then to cut the actual hole. This is delicate work with a high potential for creating disaster unless you know what you are doing. Bruce knows what he is doing. First, he marks the top so it has the same measurements as the 1939 Gibson Nick Lucas that was the model for this guitar.

Bruce is using a compass to draw the circle he will follow to dig the channel for the rosette he is building for the guitar. The pattern is tortoise shell, green wood and then another strip of tortoise, very simple and quite lovely. First that gets cut.

He is using a Dremel Tool with a hole cutting jig and a special bit that does the trick (but can cause some problems in wood that is so hard.) Looking closely, you can see the inside line he will use to make the actual hole. The rosette trench has to be cut first, then using the same axis (a pin that sticks up through the top of the guitar right in the center of what will be the sound hole) he will cut the hole. Everything about this part of the guitar depends on that center pin. If that is setup correctly, the geometry of the hole and its rosette will be perfect. It takes a couple of passes to make sure the trench is cut to the proper depth. It's careful work. You can't make it too wide or there will be an unsightly gap around the rosette on the outside. Too narrow and the strips used to make the rosette won't fit.

He doesn't actually pronounce the work done. He just takes the three strips and sets them in the little trench, starting at the northern most end. They fall perfectly into place. When he has pushed them all into place, he trims the ends and there you have it. The first part of the process is done!

See how they fit down in there? The next step will blow the brain right out of your head, as it did mine. Bruce gets those strips down in the channel, pushes them down to make certain they are in place and the grabs....guess what? A. glue made from horse hides. B. glue imported from distant Asia made from the carapaces of beetles C. Elmers. D. Can't say?

Superglue. That's right, Superglue.

Here is what it is doing. If you have ever seen a plumber sweat a copper pipe and then let the solder draw itself into the gap, you will get this right away. The Superglue, being super, does exactly the same thing. It seeks out every gap, every spot it can find, and sinks in. Because Bruce wants this part to go quickly, he is not happy with the ten seconds you have to wait for Superglue to dry. He has a drying agent he sprays on it. It sets and there you have it, a near perfect rosette ready for sanding.

He has to sand it because its not exactly level with the guitar top in some places. It will be soon.

He's taking a belt sander with fine grit paper to the rosette. It cuts it all right down to the surface. "You always have to keep it moving so it never has a chance to scratch into the surface of the guitar," he says. It takes just a few minutes and what comes out of it is wonderful.

Next, back to the center pin for five passes with the Dremel cutter again. Each time, Bruce takes just a tiny layer of wood away until the center finally rotates on its own. This day's work is just about done.

Here is how it looks:

Next step: top bracing, then bending the sides and moving toward some serious gluing!

Stay tuned.