Building a Kit Guitar...

Believe it or notm the quest is complete!

There is very little to say at thispoint, other than my guitar kit is not longer a KIT and is finally a guitar. I am very pleased to be finished with this effort and even more pleased that the end product is actually playable. There have been many challenges and many redirections, but the project has been rewarding, to say the least. The action still needs some tweeking and I don't think that it will ever reach the standards of the real Martin folks. I haev been playing it quite a bit, and it has a nice sound. I can't tell you how great it feels to pick it up and strum a tune knowing that I actually made it!

In this picture you actually see a lot of small steps rolled into one. I have put the fret into the fret board, to fret dots are in place (including a rather major mis-placement!), and the tuners are in place.		This picture was taken dugin the daunting process of fitting the beck to the body. I would guess that it took more than 30 hours for me to get it where it was OK. (Actually, I ran out of steam and figured it was as good as it was going to get!)
I had a good bit of porbelms getting the perfling and joint chevron to stay in place. I finally got it to stay still with a liberal application of cyano-acrylate glue and a roll of masking tape.		I was getting ready to layout the position for the bridge at this point---a process that is so sensitive to error you would not believe. Fractions of milimeters are important at this phase. This knowledge, of course, developed AFTER THE FACT!
Junping forward in time, quite a bit, the neck is firmly affixed. (Including some extra hardware of which Mr. Martin would not approve.) I have also set the bridge and actually placed strings on the guitar. I have NOT tuned the strings yet as I wanted to get a picture of it BEFORE it collapsed upon itself.		Another view of the top surfaces. With all of the short-comings and detours I decided to take several shortcuts as far as finishing is concerned. I found a spray can product that was polyurethane based and seem to be very durable after a couple of bench tests.
Here are acouple of views of the back surface after my quick and dirty finishing efforts.		Ffrom this distance, it actually looks like a guitar!
I have to say that I am pleased with the way that the top plate turned out. I guess that I spent more time on that than pretty much anything else		While the string have not been brought up to tension yet, it looks pretty good. However, if you look closely...
Now, it is a guitar. I had just tuned the strings, and played a few tunes on it and I was quite pleased. There werre some buzzes and strange hums that I worked to clear up with saddle and nut work. They are gone for the most part. I did have to make some modifications to the way that the neck mounted into the heel block. Modifications that probably made Mr. Martin not just turn over but do the Hokey-Pokey in his grave. Suffice it to say that the neck no longer was pulling away from the heel block!

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Copyright © 2003 by Richard Johnson