Drum roll please.....

Well...its been quite a while and quite an experience but its finally done!! WOOHOO!!!

First let me explain why it took so long to get it to this point when you all (both of you) clearly saw that it was fully assembled and playable. Heck, I even posted a video of me playing it on YouTube! Well...it took so long because I had to wait until the weather got warmer so I could lacquer it. Thats pretty much the reason. Once it was lacquered, I had to wait a few days to sand it and then polish it, which also took quite a while, but mostly it was the weather. I noticed in my haste to take these pictures that I left a little wax on it in a couple of little imperfections, but I really don't care. It looks amazing, sounds amazing and simply amazes me that I could build a fricken acoustic guitar in my living room on the floor mostly with hand tools! You should be amazed as well. Both of you. So without further ado, here are some pictures of my creation:

Here is a picture of the side port. I made it bigger

than when you last saw it. It didn't put out much

sound when it was smaller, but now it really lets

the player hear the guitar. Plus, its a real conversation starter.

Or I assume it will be. My wife never asks about it, but

other guitarists might.

This is the peg head. Normally this part of the guitar

has a dark wood like ebony or rosewood. I chose

this kick ass cool spalted, curly maple. The black

squiggly lines are the "spalting" and are the result

of a fungus that grows in the wood when the tree falls.

It makes the wood unstable and crumbly which

in turn makes it a challenge to work with, but I feel it

was worth the effort cuz it looks fricken cool!!

Here is the back stripe and heel cap. The back stripe is

purely aesthetic and was more work for me to add it

but again, I think it looks cool so I added it. The heel cap

actually serves a purpose and that is to protect the exposed

end grain of the heel of the neck. The wood is more likely to split

at the end grain so the heel cap covers and prevents (hopefully) that.

I used the spalted, curly maple here again because it looks cool.

What is end grain you ask? Well, think of the end of a 2 x 4. Thats all end grain

and easily split along the grain lines. The top and sides of the

2 x 4 are not end grain. The wood...she no split there.

Here is a rear view. The wood is ribbon sapele.

Sapele (pronounced suh-pee-lee) is native to Africa and

is sometimes called African mahogany, but it is not a true mahogany.

It was used in furniture making in Europe for many years and

is highly prized for its figure. Cadillac uses it for the wood trim

in its cars. Some people foolishly think sapele is a cheap

wood because the Martin Guitar Co. uses it in its "cheaper" guitars.

Those "cheap" Martins have a sticker price of over $1000

bucks and are not nearly as nice as my guitar. However, I would

consider selling you mine for $1500.

Oh yeah...full frontal baby!! I accidently left one of my golf

clubs on the couch in this picture. I also realized that I

need to take more and better pictures of this guitar. My wife takes

really good photos. Me...not so much.

This is the tail wedge. It serves three functions. It

reinforces the tail block because its grain is perpendicular

to the grain of the tail block. It helps in making a clean joint

where the two sides join. It looks nice. Mine is made out

of curly maple. The same wood as the binding around

the body. Thats it. Nothing funny here.

Please let me know what you think. You can be honest. If your opinion is that its not that nice, it will just let me know that you are legally insane and that I should not bring my children around you. If your opinion is that its beautiful and awesome and totally amazing that I actually built it, I will know that you are one of the following:

a) Not my wife (Ouch)

b) Possibly my mother (Hey mom!!)

c) A good friend who has no problem lying to my face when you know it will

make me feel good (I have no problem with this)

d) Some weirdo blog stalker with a sapele fetish (I have no problem with this either)

e) A generally nice person who is probably really good looking and has tons of friends

and someone who is held in high regard by their peers. People probably want to be like you

and may secretly, or not so secretly be jealous of your good looks and charm. Members of the opposite sex either want to have sex with you or buy you things. You totally rock. (Notice how I have no problem lying to your face when I know it will make you feel good. Take notes

before sharing your opinion of my guitar, K?)

Thanks for looking. I hope this blog was a fraction of as much fun for you to read as building this guitar was for me.

Many thanks to everyone who made it possible:

My wife for her patience (usually) when she needed me to help around the house but I was too busy with glue, a chisel and sawdust. And for putting up with the mess each night while I worked.

Thanks to Ken Cierpilowski of KennethMichaelGuitars.com for his incredible customer support, top notch materials and directions and for creating his "KMG Success Kit" without which this guitar would look much more like a Picasso painting than the beautiful instrument it is.

Ken is a great guy to work with and sells top quality wood with his kits. Not to sound like a commercial for him, but I am already planning my next guitar and I wouldn't think of buying it from anyone else. If there were more people than my wife and brother reading this, I would say anyone who is thinking of building a kit guitar should talk to Ken before going anywhere else. I would say that, but nobody is reading this blog and I don't want to sound like a commercial.

Thanks to Bill Cory and all of the members of the kitguitarforum.com

Bill, thanks for making a place where budding luthiers can go and find out anything they need to know about building kit guitars, and get support from you and the members to successfully build a flat top acoustic guitar to be proud of. Thanks to the awesome members of the Kitguitarforum.com for all of the help and support and the laughs. Go to the site and check out the great guitars being built be its members. Really...go now. Unless.....

....Unless you are interested in a full break down of the materials used for this guitar. If you are, well then read on.

Kit: KMG Success Kit (which includes a body mold, clamps and some essential jigs, fixtures and some other really important and useful things you really need to build a guitar...like the wood.)

Back and side wood: Sapele (still pronounced suh-pee-lee, why would it have changed?)

Sound board: Engelmann Spruce

Brace wood: Engelmann Spruce

Neck: Mahogany

Fingerboard and bridge: African Ebony

Binding and purfling: Curly maple binding with herringbone purfling. The neck is bound with curly maple too.

Rosette: Herringbone with black and white rings(Martin HD-28 style I think)

Back stripe: Martin "zipper" style marquetry stripe

Nut and Saddle: Bone (probably cow bone, but one can not rule out water buffalo, ox, Triceratops or human. OK...maybe Triceratops can be ruled out. And probably human.)

Tail Wedge: Curly Maple

Peg Head Veneer and Heel Cap: Spalted Curly Maple. Yes, it is real wood and is found exactly like this in nature. Well...not exactly like this. Usually in the forest, it does not have a polished lacquer finish on it. Nor is it cut into 1/16th inch thick sheets and glued to a piece of mahogany. Or a guitar. Also, in nature, there are never tuning pegs in it. Ever. Other than that, it is just like Mother Nature made it.

Well thats all folks. Until the next guitar anyway.

~Tony

A video of the guitar...and me

Here is a link to a video of me playing my new guitar. It does not have lacquer on it yet, but it sounds great and looks pretty good too!

Enjoy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPsQIaoyhOQ

Thats it for now.

Sound port

I was asked for a close up picture of the sound port on KitGuitarsforum.com, so I thought I would put one here too. Thats it. Nothing witty to say. Enjoy the soundport. I bound it with a maple veneer so it would look purty. I think I need to enlarge it. But I am not sure yet.

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Hello again. Check this out...

Well...here it is. I did a lot of work, but with the holidays keeping me busy, I had to let my blog updates slide. As a result, the guitar is almost finished except for the lacquer. Stewart Macdonald sells these Bridge Bolts that allow you to string up a guitar that does not have the bridge glued on yet and play it. They basically bolt the bridge on and have a hole through which one can pass a guitar string. I am the one who did the aforementioned string passing through. I bought them since I simply could not wait until the spring to lacquer this baby and play it. Here are a few pics of the mostly finished product. Above, you can see the whole guitar in all of its unlacquered glory.


Here is a closer shot of the neck.
And above, you can see the neck and rosette. I bound the neck but I am still not sure I am going to leave the end of it as is. I may cut the neck slightly shorter to square it off...or not. I kind of like my unorthodox binding at the end of the finger board. Look closer and you will see what I mean. Well...that's all until spring. I can't do anything but play it for a little bit, then put it aside and do a little finish sanding. At least it has a really nice case my wife got me for Christmas to keep it safe, warm and humidified. One more pic for good measure.

The Neck and a little goof.

I did a lot of work since I last posted, but I neglected to take pictures of what I was doing or to make posts about what I was doing. So let me bring you up to speed.
I posted about binding the Finger Board (FB from now on) so you know about that.
Then I had to install the frets. Fretting a bound FB is not easy. The frets if viewed from the end, look like the letter T. The part that sticks into the FB is called the tang. To fret a bound FB you have to clip off part of the tang so it does not go into the binding. That sounds easy and you can buy a special tool for like $60 that does this easily. I am building on a budget, so I opted to use wire cutters and a dremel to get the job done. It took about 3 nights of working to get it done and it was far from easy but I think the results are worth it.
The next thing on the agenda was to install the side dots on the edge of the FB. These dots allow the player to see the positions without having to crane his or her neck over to look at the front of the FB. Since I dislike craning just to see dots, I went about installing the side markers. Dots at positions 1,3,5,7 and 9 went in without incident. Then came the markers for fret 12. This position gets two dots. I screwed up and put the dots at the 11th fret. Oops..this is bad. Now what? On an unbound ebony FB you can hide such a mistake fairly well with some ebony saw dust and glue. Not so on my pretty maple binding. With some coaching from Ken at KMG, here is how it went down:
I had to connect the two dots (lol) and make a rectangular slit. Then I had to make a little tiny plug to put in the aforementioned slit. Both of these tasks caused great anxiety since I could easily mess up and make things worse. But I did not. I actually made the slit with nice clean edges. Then I made the tiniest plug. Also with clean edges. I also decided to chamfer all of the edges of the plug so it would be like a compression fit piece when installed and glued. I did not take pictures of this process. I am the best documentarian EVER!! Here you can see my plug in place. Its the dirty little line next to the two white dots there. What? The white dots are hard to see on the maple? Yes. I know. I changed them to rosewood plugs. I had a little extra rosewood that came for the heel cap. That gets installed later, but I measured the heel cap and I was able to take off about a 1/8th inch square log from that. I then chucked it into my drill and held it to some sandpaper while I spun the bejeezus out of it. Once the bejeezus was completely removed, it became a round log and lost its squareness. Now that it was no longer square it would be accepted by the cool kids in school. Except I cut it up and did this with it:Then I sanded the plugs flush and it looked like this: Pretty cool. Now my side dots are easier to see. More importantly, they are in the right places!! Which works well since I kind of need to see them. I am an awful guitarist. But not too bad of a novice guitar builder. In fact, I took a poll today and it turns out I am the best luthier in my house. Who woulda thunk it? Actually, I would have and did...even before my poll. Oh...and before I forget, here is my finished repair to my little dot snafu: Not bad for a total hack, eh? Click the picture to see a larger version. Yes. I am totally patting myself on the back. It looks even better now that I sanded it with a finer grit. I just don't have pics of that yet. I am a bad documentarian, remember?

Binding the fret board

The Success Kit from KMG does not include instructions, or materials for binding the fretboard. However, I happen to really like the look of a bound fretboard, so when I ordered the kit, I spoke to Ken and he included plenty of extra maple strips so I could bind my fret board. The strips are the same maple that the guitar body is bound with so everything will have a nice continuity. Binding the fretboard (FB from here on out) is not terribly difficult.
The set up you see here is as follows:
The black board is T shaped. The white board is pushed into the FB and binding which is in turn pushed into the T of the black board holding everything nice and snug while the glue dries.
Gluing the binding on.

This was the easy part.

Well...not terribly difficult ifyou know what you are doing and you have tools and experience with said tools. I have no experience, no workshop, and really had no clue how to cut off the minute amount of material from each side of the FB in order to accommodate the strips of maple I was adding. You see, the FB should have a certain width when its finished. If I add approximately 1/8th of an inch to each side with the binding, the FB will be too wide. Thus, I have to shave off about the same 1/8th of an inch from each side and then install the binding. This is a simple task for a person who knows what they are doing, but for me, not so much. I fashioned a routing set up with a fence and a base for the router to ride on and thought I was A second look at the gluing set up.

good to go. My fence slipped, which meant I took off a little extra material on one spot. Oops. Not good. I panicked and e-mailed Ken. He made me panic more since he had not seen my mistake and my description of the boo-boo was bad. After a day at work, I came home to take a fresh look at the FB. I decided to measure it against my other guitars to see how it stacked up. Turned out, I had not taken off as much as I Giancarlo checked out my set
up. He approved and
told the glue it was
OK to dry.

originally thought. In fact, I still had a bit to go in order to get the binding strips on. I decided to sand the rest of the material off instead of using the router. It ended up coming out pretty good!