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Old 09-02-2020, 07:34 AM
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iim7V7IM7 iim7V7IM7 is offline
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The rough carving of archtop plates can be accomplished a variety of ways. The things that are important that separate a superlative instrument from an average instrument during a carving operation has little to do with the rough carving process in my opinion.
  • The proper split billets, seasoning and drying of the wood, quarter sawing of plates and storage of the woods
  • The selection of the sets by someone skilled in the art
  • The refinement of the plate arches, which is done by someone skilled in the art with scrapers. This can vary based on the properties of the plates. There is quite a bit of work here post-rough carving.
  • The choice of bracing configuration and profiling of them
Most builders start out doing rough carving by hand but later move on either a duplicator or today, CNC. Some will say that the process of rough carving allows the luthier/builder to get to know the nature of the plates by spending extended time with them. After a builder has done say 100 or 200 instruments by hand, they have acquired the knowledge associated with that portion of the build to interpret a top during the arch refinement stage.

These aspects have nothing to do with how the top was rough carved and they do involve knowledge, skill and hand operations.

My $.02


Quote:
Originally Posted by MC5C View Post
I looked at the L-4 that Steve linked to in the "Next best thing to an L-5" thread, and the first thing that leapt of the page was "hand carved spruce top". Gibson and every other factory making archtops used copy routers, they didn't hand carve anything. Maybe in the very early days they did, and maybe pre-war they finished them with hand carving, tuning, graduating, but by the 1940's they were doing all the rough carving on machines, and probably just doing finish sanding by hand. I have nothing against machines doing grunt work (when I toured the Benedetto shop in 2018, the first thing I saw was the CNC machines and the now semi-retired old hand-made copy router). I just wonder if describing every solid top instrument as "hand carved" isn't getting a little romantic and deliberately evoking some fictitious image of a worker with a top on a bench surrounded by shavings knee deep on the floor as he "hand carves" a top (or a back, which is around 10 times harder), which when I do it involves several power tools, and at least three or four days of actual hand and arm knumbing bench time with planes and scrapers. The reality was wood clamped on machine, carved top ready for finish work in 30 minutes, next one please.
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A bunch of nice archtops, flattops, a gypsy & nylon strings…
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