Side slant template

[Steve321]

I am thinking of trying bending the sides on my next guitar. Where do I find a template or accurate to-scale drawing to accurately cut the slant in the sides? Or even the measurements would be helpful.
Specifically the measurements for a Martin 14 fret dreadnought.

[jread]

There’s lots of plans and templates out there. My 1st guitars were bent by hand over a hot pipe. I used a plan similar to this one to make my own mold but later upgraded to the stuff from Blues Creek Guitars.

https://www.stewmac.com/luthier-tools-a ... eyEPe60lPk

[Steve321]

Thanks. I actually had that plan with the first kit I got from them. But figuring it was the only guitar
I would make I discarded it. Doh!

[Stray Feathers]

If you already have a guitar like what you want to build, you can tape paper (onion skin works well) onto that guitar side, and trace it to make a template. But it may make a difference if you are using radius sanding dishes to get the "dome" shape or not. You can also modify the side template by making it deeper, as I do sometimes, particularly on smaller guitars. Bruce W.

[Kevin Sjostrand]

Many builders don't pretaper the sides, just keep them the depth of the tail block. (parallel width). Bend the sides and make your neck and tail blocks the desired height plus maybe 1/16". When your rims are glued up, us a block plane to plane the taper. basically from the waist to the neck block. Then use what ever you've planned yo use (radius dish, radiused sanding sticks are good choices) to refine the shape which you'll need to do even if you pretaper the sides. I've done it both ways and both ways can work just fine.

[jread]

Ah, Kevin is on it. I misunderstood the question. I agree with Kevin in that the important part is getting the neck block and tail block to the right height before you start then cut the sides just proud of the tail block height before bending. If you want a taper, do then what I do is is draw a straight line from the center of the waist to the neck block and that's pretty much your rough taper. Leave a bit more if you are doing a cut-away. The more you leave the more trimming and sanding you have to do after bending and you'll get the feel for it after a few guitars and can trim more. Shaping after bending isn't very hard. Just use a sharp plane and pay attention to the direction of any run-out in the grain and go the opposite way to avoid lifting out a chunk. Remember you are probably putting in 1/4" binding you don't have to be super precise in this step. you can true up the rim using just the purfling.