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Re: 3/4 size guitar plans

Posted: Wed Sep 14, 2016 5:19 pm
by JLT
tippie53 wrote:I found Antes plans are good for wrapping fish , if you want to bury it. I bought them early and found them to be at best a guideline but not any good. Better stuff is out there.
And, yes, I know this thread is old, but I've just received a beautiful set of guitar parts from pennman, and am preparing to build it. He included all the wood I'd need, including a marvelously inlaid fingerboard ... and the Scott Antes plans.

Since John says that there are better plans out there, I'd appreciate it if he could tell me where to find them. As long as they're close in size to the Antes parlor guitar, I'm sure the parts will work, or I can adapt them to work.

Re: 3/4 size guitar plans

Posted: Wed Sep 14, 2016 6:28 pm
by ruby@magpage.com
If you have all the parts, it could be considered a kit. Bill Cory has a couple of books on building kit guitars - in fact I am a little beyond them now and I could pass them along if you are interested.

Ed

Re: 3/4 size guitar plans

Posted: Thu Sep 15, 2016 6:41 pm
by JLT
ruby@magpage.com wrote:If you have all the parts, it could be considered a kit. Bill Cory has a couple of books on building kit guitars - in fact I am a little beyond them now and I could pass them along if you are interested.

Ed
Sure. Just let me know what you want for them.

This will be my tenth guitar (I think) and a couple of them have been completely from scratch, but I'm not going to claim that I have nothing to learn from the books.

I've found out that the LMI plans are by Scott Antes (he calls it the S6 plan), and the one that pennman sent me appear to be Scott Antes S1 plan. The only other plans are the ones published by the Guild of American Luthiers, but their parlor guitar plan, drawn up by January Williams, is for a scale length of 25.5' and the dimensions of the guitar itself aren't easily read from the web page:

http://www.luth.org/images/plans/pl66.jpg

I'd have to move the bridge a half an inch to make the neck fit, and that might affect the way the braces on the top work.

Re: 3/4 size guitar plans

Posted: Sat Sep 17, 2016 6:46 am
by MaineGeezer
You could just make it up as you go along. Find a guitar you like and copy it. That's what I did for my 2nd guitar. I copied an old Bruno parlor guitar. If you take that approach, you have to make the bending form and the body mold. You have to guess a bit on the bracing. But it's all do-able, and the result will he uniquely your own.

Re: 3/4 size guitar plans

Posted: Sat Sep 17, 2016 11:13 pm
by JLT
Well, I've just spent a glorious Saturday afternoon (actually not so glorious, too hot to take a walk) going over the three other lutherie boards in search of parlor guitar plans. Most of them said that the Scott Antes "Concert" plans aren't so bad, once you:

1. correctly figure out the orientation of the face brace, which seems to be a major stumbling block for first-time users of these plans. Scott drew it as if you were looking through the top of soundboard with X-ray eyes, rather than it appears when you're looking at the back (underside) of the soundboard.

2. reduce the thickness of the braces down to 0.25 from whatever they are on the plan

3. free up the top a little bit by not running the bottom of the x-braces into the lining, but rather feathering them off.

4. Increase the area of the bridge that's under the X brace either by extending the bridge or moving the X downward (away from the soundhole). Pennman included a bridge blank that was a half an inch or so longer than the one on the plan, so he might have had that in mind when he made it.

The most consistent criticism was that the designs were over-braced, but those who have reduced the bracing have had positive results. A few luthiers used the same reduction for subsequent guitars, which tells me that they were happy with the mods.

As for MaineGeezer's suggestion that I take a guitar I like and copy it, well, I ain't got one. My friend Tom has a little travel-sized Yamaha, but I don't think much of it. (He doesn't, either.)

And, John, if I ever get this built and it sounds decent, I'm going to name it "Fishwrap."

Re: 3/4 size guitar plans

Posted: Sun Sep 18, 2016 6:18 am
by MaineGeezer
I copied the guitar I did only because I happen to have a small guitar I like that used to belong to one of my aunts.

Re: 3/4 size guitar plans

Posted: Sun Sep 18, 2016 9:29 am
by tippie53
I use many of Kevins templates
the top is the critical point. The back is pretty much easy to plot. The scale length on these make it hard to find the proper fretboard but often longer scale lengths can be cut off at 1 or 2 fret and get you close .
Size 5 is a good example a 25.4 cut off at the 3rd fret gets you the shorter scale length needed. I think the 7 was a 23 in scale but don't hold me to that.

Re: 3/4 size guitar plans

Posted: Sun Sep 18, 2016 4:01 pm
by ruby@magpage.com
Using John's advice, I built a 3/4 size guitar that had the first fret cut off from a 24.9 fretboard. This left a scale length of about 23-5/16. My aging hands fit this fretboard perfectly and it is a great guitar to sit on the cough with.

Ed

Re: 3/4 size guitar plans

Posted: Sat Oct 21, 2017 8:24 pm
by JLT
tippie53 wrote:I found Antes plans are good for wrapping fish , if you want to bury it.
I'm reviving this old, old thread because I finally finished the instrument and strung it up today. It doesn't sound bad at all, although I expected the treble to be more pronounced. We'll see how it ages down the road.

Please note that I've made all the modifications regarding bracing that I mentioned in my post of September of last year. I also increased the diameter of the sound hole by 1/4".

And, John, the official name for this guitar is "Fish Wrap."

Image

Image

Re: 3/4 size guitar plans

Posted: Wed Jul 18, 2018 2:19 pm
by JLT
Update here:

I've converted Fishwrap from a conventional "nut" guitar to a "zero fret" one. I'd thought about using the ZeroGlide system but decided that it was easier to remove the nut, glue in a small (1/8") shim leveled with the fretboard, and saw a new slot so that the top of the new fret would be exactly on the line of the old nut. Then I took 1/8" off the thickness of the nut, cut the slots deeper so that they'd be level with the fretboard, and replaced the nut.

Results: no difference that I could detect in tone with open string and better intonation, especially when using a capo.