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Sound holes - advice?

I have a few boxes which are small but quite deep, and I've started making an acoustic from one of them. What should I be doing to get the guitar as loud as possible? I usually do a neck through design. I know that the main point is how well the lid vibrates. So I'm guessing that glueing the neck inside the lid is a no no, also I should thin out the lid, but what about sound holes. Is bigger better? Is one round hole under the strings in the center best, or should I make several smaller holes? My last build had f holes which were reasonably big and it sounded decent but I just wanted to see what you good people think on this.

Any advice appreciated as always :)

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Permalink Reply by Ron "Oily" Sprague on July 7, 2013 at 4:37am

Yep. You are stiffening the corners when you do that. I do essentially the same thing with pine rails and corner posts on my homemade boxes. It tightens them up, and allows the top to vibrate well.

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Permalink Reply by Clarky on July 7, 2013 at 9:31pm

Thanks for the advice. I put some holes facing the player and on the soundboard, it looks nice, but I didn't notice it was any louder than normal. Some good tips here though, I will take them on board.

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Permalink Reply by Ron "Oily" Sprague on July 8, 2013 at 7:22am

Clarke,

Next time, try a lot fewer big holes, especially. Literally one in the upper left shoulder, or maybe one in the side facing the player, should be enough. Others will undoubtedly disagree ;-).

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Permalink Reply by Bad Finger (Eric) on July 8, 2013 at 7:38am

But not any less louder than normal?

Those patterns look nice and I think that is just as important as their function. Otherwise, just leave the decorative face of the box alone.

I've found that stiffening the long sides of the box with pine or poplar (lightweight scrap) increases the volume nicely.

I could really make an argument either way on gluing the neck to the lid. Have you felt how much the neck vibrates when the strings are picked or strummed? That is mostly wasted energy that might be better transmitted to the lid.

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Permalink Reply by Randy S. Bretz on July 8, 2013 at 7:30am

Just one in the upper corner works well too.

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Permalink Reply by Thomas "Duck" Petry on July 8, 2013 at 9:52am

My best results so far have been these two. The Viejo box is very small with two 1" sound holes in the corners towards the neck and the Partagas box is one of the biggest cigar boxes I've seen, ("Gigante") and I only put one 1 1/8" hole in it. Both have very good voices acoustically. As has been mentioned it seems like bigger holes don't help.