I've found a hook up for luthier-quality wood for building my own boxes, a necessity here in Italy, it costs too much to import them and it'll cost me the same amount to build them with high-end acoustic/violin wood.
Chioces are:
olive (nice looking)
maple
cherry
cedar
walnut
silver fir (specific for instruments)
Also important is that it's not chopped from tropical forests. I like the looks of the olive, but have never heard of it used for instruments. All have the same price. I'm currently using his maple for necks, and starting to add walnut fingerboards.
Any advice or experience would be appreciated.
Replies
Any of those woods will make a lovely box. I agree with the Kid, unless you can also get spruce, cedar is a fabulous, warm-sounding soundboard wood. Yep, 2 mm is perfect for soundboard and bottom thickness; you can go a bit thicker for sides, if you want. For box making, you can glue up butt ends at first, but learning how to finger joint makes an even nicer look. You can make a finger joint jig pretty easily, and even a simple coping or hobby hacksaw can be used to cut finger and dovetail joints. I would also make some 2.54 cm square corner posts out of silver fir to tighten up the box, gives you something to screw the lid into, and maple or cherry for your necks. But that's just me.
Thanks, I'm getting stuff from Filbo, as per your research. They're pretty cool, they're tripping out on the CBG thing! I'll do butt ends for now, but finger joints don't seem too hard, I'll try em with silver fir boxes for crow-style first, so I don't piss good money away learning on expensive wood (about €20/box). For now I'll decoupage some borders over the butt joints, to give the boxes some pizzaz, though I'll limit covering the wood. I think it'll be: 2mm spruce (or cedrela, I think it's cedar, if Filbo recommends it) for the top and back, 5mm olive for the sides, glued on bottom, hinged top. I think the 5mm sides will give me plenty of strength for the glued joints, so I won't need corner posts, but I'm gonna try everything with cheap silver fir and build a few crow-style to display in rehearsal spaces and tattoo shops in the area.
Today was my first sale, as soon as I finished the guitar! The Fuente on my profile! Got 3 more to build, of which 2 will be for sale.
One reason I mentioned the corner posts is that when I glued up my first unbraced boxes out of 3 /16" lauan plywood, they were rather, hoom, bendable. The corner posts stiffened them up some, and then I added inner frame rails, and wow, that stiffened everything up, and the boxes' tone really woke up. Mine are 12 x 10.5 x 3 3/4", for reference. Smaller dimension boxes may not require any internal bracing.
Maybe I'll give corner posts a shot, the first nice box will be for me. The fir I get is cheap crap from the horrible big hardware stores here, I tried building a box for a crow and turned it into a stomp box. I'll get cheap thinner plies, and Filbo sells acoustic fir. I was thinking more or less standard "A4" page size, more or less 20X30cm, 5cm deep, that way I can print a page and decoupage it on if I want.
I'll upload when I can play something that doesn't embarass me. You can always download my punk CD's with my band Ruggine HC, available gratis on punk4free.org, though it's not exactly blues.
Kewl! I'll check it out!
*** nice choices ***
gonna start just simple corner gluing. one step at a time... i've got a low tool budget and no power in the workshop, all manual tools.