Official Luthiers Forum!

I've been having a great time building flat tops, but after seeing and playing a few incredible archtops at the La Conner Guitar Festival (Megan Wells, Tom Ribbecke, Steve Anderson, McCarthy, Wyatt Wilkie, Ryan Thorell... now I have to build one or two.

I've had the Benedetto Book and DVD on the shelf for some time, but wondering if any of you have first hand experience?

What carving tools are essential for the carved top/back? A gouge or curved bottom plane? Can I get away with only one size/type for the first couple builds?

Are the Benedetto plans the go-to? Any other plans you'd recommend?

I'm hoping to track down a b-grade billet or two for practice carving a top before I invest in top quality wood.

Any thoughts, recommendations or advice greatly appreciated.

Hey Dan, there is a workshop at the Vancouver International guitar festival, on carving the archtop.
Taught by Wyatt Wilke. I have an interest in this also and have signed up.
Maybe see you there.
If you come across any arch top billets I would be interested also. Most of the ones I see are too expensive for me to practice on.
https://www.vancouverguitarfestival.com/workshops/

B

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My memory is so good, sometimes I remember things that never happened.

That sounds really interesting—thank you for the tip.

But what's with these guitar festivals and their dates? La Conner over Mother's Day weekend (I'm both a son, and a father of three) and then Vancouver is always on our anniversary...

I’m “practicing” archtop carving too. I went to a good lumber yard and bought a plank of Sitka “mast and spar” spruce that they stock for boat builders. I was lucky to find several pieces to choose from and found one that was fairly close to quartered. I resawed an 8/4 piece for book match and got something just barely thick enough to carve a top from. The material is really not bad but would probably be considered B grade, at best, for guitar building. Or maybe more likely to be called student grade. Still, for my first attempt it’s adequate and won’t likely be the weakest link in this guitar. (That would be me.) it was certainly inexpensive. I think I paid well under $200 (maybe something like $150ish) for enough wood to make a half dozen student-grade arch tops and several flat tops. It was 8/4 x 9” x 14’.


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The Benedetto DVD's are really helpful along with the book. Carving the top with hand tools is doable. A Maple back is a lot of work.

Lacking a CNC a lot of folks will terrace the plates with a router jig or safety planer and connect with a die grinder with a flap sander attachment. I have not used a Lancelot type device on the grinder but I know they are popular. For the concave inner side drilling as per Benedetto and connecting the drill holes with the die grinder is what I do.

Finish off with scrapers, small planes, electric/air sanders etc. It is MESSY.

You can buy rough CNC carved plates from Smith Creek Mandolin and as laminate plates are actually many times the best for someone that plays plugged in all the time you can get laminates from Acme Archtops (new owner, have not bought from them since ownership changed) and Holst Custom instruments (Maple only).

I am not aware of anyone else that sells CNC'ed solid archtop plates or laminates but would be interested to know if anyone else on the forum knows.

Good luck, archtops are a lot of fun.

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It's not what you don't know that hurts you, it's what you do know that's wrong.

[quote="But what's with these guitar festivals and their dates? La Conner over Mother's Day weekend (I'm both a son, and a father of three) and then Vancouver is always on our anniversary...[/quote]

Are you saying your wife doesn’t want an anniversary trip to Canada? With a guitar show thrown in eh?

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My memory is so good, sometimes I remember things that never happened.

Robert, sounds as though that spruce you purchased would be fine for building. If you have the Benedetto book, you probably noticed the pix of the guitar he built with lumber from a pallet... knotholes and all. He said it came out pretty well. So I think you purchased well.

I yearn to build an archtop, too. I hope I can find wood like you did when the time comes. Good luck!

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"Act your age, not your shoe size" - Prince

I'm in the same boat. Got the Benedetto book and been wanting to build an Archie for a long time but too busy building flat tops. I'm a bit intimidated by it as well. I was thinking of buying the roughed out CNC tops and backs. I guess it takes away some of the romanticism of a lonely luthier carving away under candle light but in the end it's just grunt work to remove a bunch of waste wood and the CNC gets you close then you have to finalize it anyway. The prices at Smith Creek Mandolin seem very reasonable too.

I'll let you know how it works out when/if-ever I finish it! The Benedetto construction grade archtop is encouraging. Archtop sets are soooo expensive it makes the learning curve scary.

I've been puttering around with this build for a long time. The top is carved, maybe even over-carved. I think it may be a bit thin but I'm going to go with it and just see how it works out. I haven't started carving the back yet. I resawed and joined a maple back (flat sawn) but it cupped quite a bit so I think it's pretty useless, and I bent some maple sides that are just barely OK. (The design has a cutaway with some pretty tight bends and the sides were a challenge. Wish I had omitted the cutaway.) I have some quarter sawn cherry and I'm going to try making a back and some new sides from that. I love cherry and I think it'll look great at least.

By the way, carving the top was not so bad. I drew contour lines, drilled to varying depths with a forstner bit, removed the waste between the drill holes with a large gouge, and smoothed it with a little squirrel-tail plane, a tiny violin-makers plane, and a Carruth scraper. In spruce the whole process was pretty satisfying, though it will certainly take more practice to get the contours right. For the back ... that might be another story. Carving hardwood (especially hard maple) will no doubt be a lot of work.

On another thread, Andy Bounsall just posted pictures of an access panel he brilliantly built into his purpleheart & maple guitar. I'm excited to try that. I just recently reattached the dovetail neck on an old Kay archtop I fixed up and found it pretty daunting to get the neck set properly and the dovetail snug. Not really looking forward to doing that again right away so the prospect of bolting the neck through an access panel looks really good to me.

So many things to learn and try out!

Robert, it sounds like you have already carved your top and are well on your way building your archtop. I thought I’d share my experience and some folks might find it interesting.

I haven’t built a true archtop jazz style guitar, but I did build an archtop guitar in the style of a Gibson CS-336. I had only built flat tops and a couple of tele style guitars. This one is sorta like a shrunken ES-335, with the exception that the construction is quite different. An ES-335 has bent ribs (or sides) and the top and back are pressed laminated wood. The CS-336 is constructed by hollowing out a slab of mahogany and the top is carved (like a Les Paul). I started with a 5/8" figured maple top.

I started carving the top by hogging off a large amount of maple using an attachment to a grinder from harbor freight https://www.harborfreight.com/4-1-2-hal ... 66613.html.
Care must be taken to control the grinder, not take too much off, and not remove flesh. That is followed by using a small concave bottom palm plane (from ebay). Of course all of this was followed by scraper action and a lot of sanding... I drew contour lines on the top for reference. Once the top of the top was completed, I started removing wood under the top. I used the end of an old yard tool handle to fashion a jig to use on the drill press to remove some wood and create an index for establishing the top thickness. Then the remaining waste wood was removed with the palm plane.

This was a challenge and probably good preparation for building a jazz guitar at some point.

I hope I haven’t bored you with this… Here is a link to photos of the finished guitar. http://www.swiftcreekguitars.com/cs-336 ... ctric.html

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Steve Sollod (pronounced sorta like "Solid")
www.swiftcreekguitars.com

Steve - nice work. What plane are you using there?

I've received a recommendation for using a #5 sweep, about 15-18mm wide. Any thoughts on what you'd look for?
Have any of you used the Flexcut line?

As well as a larger finger plane - 18 or 28mm blade?

I used the same sort of a jig for drilling to set the depths on the inside. Pretty simple and almost foolproof. That grinder gadget looks great for hogging off a lot of hard maple. I suspect some kind of machine assistance is a must-have for that operation. I recently bought a safety planer from Stew Mac but I haven't tried it out yet. I'm hoping I can roughly graduate the outside with that but I will go back to the drill press with the dowel for the inside I guess.

That blue guitar is a real beauty. I played a similar archtop briefly once - with a hollowed-out, solid back and sides and a carved top. I don't know the species of the top wood but I think it was something quite light. It had a pleasant, though quiet acoustic sound. Unfortunately, I didn't get to hear it plugged in.

I jumped in and used a higher end top and back sets for my archtop, multi-scale build. Based on a Gibson L-5. The basic plans I think came from Georgia Luthier Supply. I changed it to multi-scale, added my own sound holes, and went with a three pot setup (tone, volume, and blend).

I spent far too much time carving with my one tiny thumb plane. Next time will go much faster by being more aggressive in the early stages. That said, I love my little convex thumb plane!


The inside was done with the standard drill and carve out process, though I could have been much more aggressive with that process, too.


Taking my time with small tools resulted in a carve that I really like. So no harm done.


Here's the final, though I am in the process of refinishing it. I tried Sherwin Williams Low VOC lacquer and it never fully hardened. Also, it was a bit on the bright butterscotch for my liking.

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Tony Thatcher
Bozeman, Montana

Daniel - This was the type of plane I used. (I had incorrectly called it a concave plane in my previous post. I meant to say convex...) There are many on ebay. https://www.ebay.com/itm/Thumb-brass-co ... SwEK9UAWWq. The wood handle makes it easier on your hand. It has a 5/8" or 16mm wide blade, which I chose to get the angle I wanted at the edge of the top. ...in case I wanted some recurve. Of course, it might be good to have a few sizes, but after hogging off the bulk of the wood with the grinder tool, this plane worked quite well. The quality is decent even though it comes from china and I could not believe how fast it got delivered (1 week). I tracked it being shipped out from in the middle of nowhere in China and it got to me faster than a lot of things that I have bought in the US.

To see a little more about this build. Go about 1/3 of the way down this link... http://www.swiftcreekguitars.com/on-the-bench

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Steve Sollod (pronounced sorta like "Solid")
www.swiftcreekguitars.com

We recently had this one back in to do a second saddle to handle octave pairs on the bass strings. 8 piece top, but really difficult to pick up on that because all the wood is from a single 2x4, and the orientation is constant, so little differential movement between the sections.

On a recent trip to the local Home Depot for 3/4" ply and other shop supplies, we did a quick check of spruce 2x stock and found several sticks that would make decent brace wood and 6 or 8 piece tops... with Canadian mill markings (red spruce dimensional lumber is apparently a major export from NE Canada). This stock gets bucked to length and stored for a few years, then usually processed into bracing stock for the back, or milled into linings, but would work for making up an arch top blank.

We still have the top templates from the project - the boss reduced Mr. Benedetto's patterns to fit a 14 fret 00 body in width and length...I'd like to make up a nice little 00 sized archtop guitar at some point.

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We have become a civilization that elevates idiots, prostitutes, and clowns. Am I still to defend it? Yes, for its principles. Yes, for what it was. Yes, for what it still may be.

-Mark Helprin, The Oceans and the Stars: A Sea Story, A War Story, A Love Story (A Novel)

OMG! I LOVE THAT COLOR!

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"Act your age, not your shoe size" - Prince

Just an observation but if you are getting into archtops consider 16 or 15” designs. I started with 17” as that is what the Benedetto plans/book/DVDs describe but smaller bodies are getting much more popular as far as sales.

I recently jigged up for a 16” and have built a 15” just using an OM mold and a Florentine cutaway. As a player I have come to really prefer 16” for comfort. Not many of us need to beat out rhythm changes acoustically in a dance band.

I have not tried to squeeze a 16” into a set of Smith Creek plates but I think you probably could. You can definitely do a 16” with the Acme or Holst lams.

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It's not what you don't know that hurts you, it's what you do know that's wrong.

Terry and all, I notice from the latest Smith Creek iteration of the website that they seem to no longer stock the archtop plates, but will take your wood and for $175/each will CNC the plates. I can attest to the beautiful job he does and it is the large Benedetto plan he has programed with the cutaway.

http://www.smithcreekmandolin.com/cncca ... rvice.html

I never wanted to build a "dugout canoe" and drew the line at mandolas. One-seventy-five sounds kinda expensive, but at $50/hour, I can guess how many hours are spent hand graduating and drilling 5,000 holes...

I use the Lancelot carver to rough out the plates on my archtops then go to 36 grit on the 4" grinder , then random orbit (Festool) sanders hand planes and scrapers

I can fully carve one plate in about 6 hours.

Do you terrace your plates first Brad or just go at it with the Lancelot.

Which specific Lancelot model do you use? I am ready to give one a try.

Thanks,

Terry

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It's not what you don't know that hurts you, it's what you do know that's wrong.

Yes, Terence, I forgot that part....

I do terrace the outside of the plate with my pin router and a large bit first. It also set the edge thickness (3/16") with this machine.

The Lancelot I use is the one for the 4" grinder I have the coarse and fine one-I can't remember which one I use-I don't think it matters.

Obviously be extremely cautious with this tool. I use the side handle on the grinder to give the best grip possible...

Thanks
I terrace with a pin router too but follow with the 36G flap sander. Pretty slow on maple. Thanks for the info Brad! Oh yeah, any secrets for avoiding the huge pin router mess? I have been less than successful.

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It's not what you don't know that hurts you, it's what you do know that's wrong.

I don’t terrace first. Never found the Wagner or router set up that didn’t stress me out too much. I drilled for depth indicators on both sides and use the flap sander in a 4.5” angle grinder to remove the bulk of the material. Then refine the shape with the little convex sole ibex plane.

The angle grinder with the flap sander works through material plenty fast enough for me.


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I never tried a flap sander. I used to use a lancelot. Maybe on my next mandolin I'll try the flap sander.

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Hutch

Get the heck off the couch and go build a guitar!!!!

Beautiful work. I don't understand the bridge angle.

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Hutch

Get the heck off the couch and go build a guitar!!!!