View Single Post
  #13  
Old 08-02-2018, 11:17 AM
MC5C MC5C is offline
Registered User
 
Join Date: Mar 2016
Location: Tatamagouche Nova Scotia
Posts: 1,136
Default

A maple tree fell down in my friends back yard - I got around 400 board feet of pretty good maple, some of which is now guitar necks, sides and backs (the majority will be kitchen counters...) My first top (I make archtops) was a 2X8 deck board of red cedar from Home Depot - perfectly quartersawn and straight/tight grain. It's perfectly possible to build a guitar from found wood with hand tools - resaw with a rip saw, chisels, knives, shop built circle cutters and gramils, and I build all my instruments on a Black and Decker Workmate. I have lots of other benches, but for some reason all my jigs fit on that little bench the best. You do have to buy things like frets, tuners, a few other bits and bobs, but I bet you could get away with under $100 in materials, and no more than 10 different hand tools if you wanted to really get down with it. figuring out a totally cheap side bend would be an interesting challenge...

On the refurbishing - I have two things to say about that. One is that finishing and refinishing is the hardest and most annoying part of building a guitar. You don't do it often enough to get good at it, and you forget how to do it between times. But I can see it being a lot of fun to play around with, but very hard to get a pro result. As in all things, practice makes perfect... The second thing is that for me, building guitars and repairing guitars are two completely different pursuits. Fixing a guitar that got broken is, for me, orders of magnitude harder than building one from brand new stuff.
__________________
Brian Evans
Around 15 archtops, electrics, resonators, a lap steel, a uke, a mandolin, some I made, some I bought, some kinda showed up and wouldn't leave. Tatamagouche Nova Scotia.
Reply With Quote