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Old 03-11-2009, 09:14 AM
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SteveS SteveS is offline
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Join Date: Jun 2002
Location: Monument, Colorado
Posts: 9,122
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Like so many aspects of building, there are strong opinions on each side. One thing to remember, there are many different ways to successfully make a great guitar. There are of course many ways to make a bad guitar. Scallop bracing is used by many to make wonderful sounding instruments, so anyone that says it doesn't make sense is revealing more about their lack of understanding than anything else. There are builders that know how to position and shape those scalloped bracing to make their guitars sound like they want. It takes year of experience and many builds to be able to do that.
I have built both, but prefer parabolic bracing, make that parabolic lattice bracing. The term parabolic is applied in a general sense to indicate that the transition in height is very gradual, but there is no way any one's braces are actually parabolic.
From an engineering perspective, there is much more unknown than known about guitars. I'm a degreed, practicing mechanical engineer with about 30 years of experience.
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