iLuthier

First make a plywood base for your router. It’s easy to do this by using the router itself with a trammel or circle cutting guide (if you haven’t made one of these already I strongly recommend you do as they’re very helpful things to have). I usually just use 3/4″ plywood for bases as it’s stable and stiff enough for most uses.

Carefully mark out and drill the screw holes so that you can mount your plywood disk to your router base. Don’t worry about the center hole for the bit right now as you can easily put a router bit in the collet and then plunge rout the hole once the plywood base has been mounted to the router. If you don’t have a bit large enough for the collet to clear you can always drill it out to the right diameter after making a smaller “pilot” hole.

To use the jig, attach the guitar soundboard to a plywood or chipboard base. Drill a hole through the center of where you want the rosette to be on your soundboard and into the plywood/chipboard base. Make sure the hole is the same size as the pin you will use to guide your router jig. I use 1/4″ brass or steel rod and this works well.

Measure out the radius of the rosette you wish to use, allowing for the diameter of the router bit as well. Use this calculation to measure the distance out from the cutter on your new plywood router base. Unscrew the base from the router and drill a hole to fit the pin using a drill press for accuracy. Screw the plywood base back onto the router once you’ve done this.

Now insert the pin through the soundboard and into the backing jig. Position your router over the pin and make sure it slots into your newly drilled hole in the router base. Set the depth of plunge to cover the thickness of the rosette and then start the router up. Make sure though that you make your initial plunge cut where the fingerboard will cover the rosette. The reason for this is that there’s usually a little “kink” when you first plunge the router down so it’s better to have this hidden rather than fill it up afterwards. The width of your rosette is determined by the width of the router cutter you’re using so take care to make accurate calculations on the radius or diameter of your rosette.

Once you’ve made the rebate for your rosette you can now reposition the router – by drilling another hole in the base – to cut your sound hole out. You might want to use a smaller 1/4″ or 1/2″ router bit for this though.

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Here’s a basic rundown on how to go about it…

1:- Spray a couple of coats on the bare wood to seal or wash-coat.

2:- Fill the grain with a natural paste-wood filler (Fender uses a butterscotch colored filler). Wipe the dried filler coat clean with naptha and then add another 1-2 coats of clear lacquer to seal the filler.

3:- Cut back and spray a coat or two of yellow tinted lacquer that’s been tinted with aniline powders. Most yellows have also been tinted with a fraction of reddish brown which is perfect as it adds to the vintage look.

4:- Spray 6-8 coats of clear lacquer over the yellow to seal it. Cut back until it’s perfectly smooth as you won’t have the opportunity to do this later. trying to cut back after the sunburst is sprayed will only get you into trouble quickly so make sure everything is nice and smooth first.

5:- You need two colors for the sunburst – black and a very dark brown (some luthiers also use a hint of red to still achieve a two-tone effect but it’s not necessary. It just depends on how you want your finished sunburst to look). You can also use a mixture of brown and black to take the edge off the pure black.

6:- Tape off the back and front of the body with masking tape and paper so that you don’t have any problems with overspray. Leave about an inch or less along the edge and then spray the edges with the black (or brown/black if you prefer that). Once the edges have dried remove the tape and paper and cut back the feathered edge until it is smooth.

7:- Finish the sunburst by spraying the top and back of the guitar with the dark brown, taking care to spray from the center outwards towards the edges. Make sure that your coats are very light and that there’s not too much color in your mixture. It’s always much easier to add tone by successive coats than to take it away by sanding, so proceed carefully.

8:- Once the sunburst is to your satisfaction don’t wait for it to dry. Proceed straight away to adding your clear coats. 6 to 8 of them should do it but you can add more if you like. It depends on how heavy you make them (always safer to go light) and what you want the finished look to be.

9:- Cut the finish back and then polish and you’re done!

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An internet guitar project spanning 7 weeks and 3 continents? Cameron Miller, formally of Maton Guitars, explains how he and a group of friends came to build a custom guitar for musician Ken Stringfellow.

Ken Stringfellow used to play guitar and sing in the seminal 90′s Seattle band “The Posies”. He also did quite a bit of session work and when The Posies disbanded in 1998 he joined R.E.M. as a session musician, both live and on albums. In late 2000 I got together with a few friends and created a guitar for Ken because…well, because it was a really cool idea to do! Although I did all of the actual construction the project involved 6 people from 3 different continents – 4 in the U.S., 1 in England and me here in Oz. Every one was involved right through from the initial planning and design, selection of materials and the construction methods to the finished instrument and we all communicated by phone and the world wide web.

The entire guitar is made from Australian timbers. The core of the body is made from Western Australian jarrah which has a similar density to Brazilian mahogany. In some ways, working wise, it’s comparable to mahogany as well. The body was constructed with two “sound chambers” so it’s not strictly a solid body but you couldn’t consider it a semi-acoustic either. It’s was just an idea I wanted to pursue for a while to see what sort of sound the guitar would produce.

The face and back are made from bookmatched silky oak from Queensland. It’s in no way related to real oak though – early Australians wanting to “Europeanize” much of Australias trees when they arrived here. People Stateside know it as lacewood and the wood that I used was a leftover flitch from veneer making so it probably would’ve been steamed prior to slicing. As well as making the wood more pliable for slicing steaming also makes the wood much more “stable” when it’s dried.

The “committee” who thought up the design of the guitar couldn’t decide whether to have an f-hole or a lute-style rose on the body so we ended up having both instead. The f-hole design is a direct copy from a 1965 “Mastersound” bass made by Maton Guitars – Australia’s premiere guitar manufacturer which has been going since 1946.

There is a piece of 1/4″ thick solid brass measuring approximately 4″ by 2″ sunk and screwed into the body just under the bridge. This is hidden by the face and added mass to the original Tune-o-Matic bridge that was on the guitar. As the guitar sustains extremely well and has “bell-like” qualities then this bar goes a long way in helping to provide that.

The neck is made of 5 pieces of laminated Australian blackwood and jarrah. The blackwood comes from Tasmania and is what you would refer to as a “true” tonewood. That is, it’s use in acoustic instruments – most notably violins and guitars – is well documented. The truss rod is a Maton style “double thrust” type which was developed in the late 50′s/early 60′s. I used that design because it’s simple, tried and tested and was what I was used to when I worked at Maton Guitars in the late 1980′s

The fingerboard and lute-style rose is made from Victorian redgum which was dug up out of the ground and has been carbon dated as being 16,000 years old. Normally redgum is pink to deeper red but this tree has soaked up various minerals over that time to stain it to a very dark brown/black – similar to ebony. Though not quite as hard as ebony this process has hardened the timber considerably. Like the steamed silky oak, once dried the redgum is extremely stable.

The inlay material is hand made polymer clay glued to a protective layer of 1/16″ thick clear polycarbonate. The two main “styles” of material are mother of pearl and malachite and the polymer “blanks” were made in a suburban house in New Jersey before being shipped to me to be cut to shape and inlayed. Because the polymer itself was so soft when compared to traditional inlay materials I decided to laminate a clear polycarbonate sheet material to it to protect it. To my knowledge this is a totally untested inlay material/process so the jury is out on how the whole thing performs. The emphasis though was not on the material itself but the originality and the handcrafted nature of it.

The scale is a standard Fender scale but there are 23 frets symbolizing the significance of the number “23″ in Posie folklore. The inlay at the 23rd fret is, quite appropriately, the number “23″. The other inlay designs include a bow and arrow (playing on Ken’s surname), a sun (after a song titled “Flood of Sunlight”), a flatiron (for “Ironing Tuesdays”, another posies song), a triptych of posies, Ken’s surname “Stringfellow” at the 12th fret, two “Broken Records” (another song by The Posies), a stylized posy, the name “The Posies” followed by another stylized posy and then the number “23″ as the final inlay.

The fingerboard was to also have featured a set of orange LEDs along the top edge, but this idea was quickly discarded when I accidently sliced through the pre-wired and pre-glued fingerboard while doing the inlays. Had I had even an extra day to repair the damage I would have done so, but it was not to be. The deadline was way too close and the LEDs had to be drilled out and top dots glued in their place. Somewhere inside that fingerboard is the skeletal remains of 10 orange LEDs.

The rose features the initials of the six people involved in designing and making the guitar. From memory I think I also laminated it to give it a bit of added strength?

The guitar took seven and a half weeks from initial conception and design to *almost* finished. Some of that time was spent worrying if the US/Australian postal system was going to be kind to our polymer clay samples. Fortunately they were. An extra day or two would’ve been great though so I’m annoyed I didn’t think about making it two days earlier It was presented to Ken while he was on tour here in December 2000 and, although it still needed setting up because I’d run out of time, Ken was amazed when he received it and now says it’s his most prized material possession.

To check out some pics from the project, click here.

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Guitar maker survives on a string and a prayer

From humble beginnings nearly 50 years ago, the future of Melbourne’s Maton Guitars now looks rock solid, writes Dewi Cook.

A business needs more than passion. Since buying the family company, Maton Guitars, 18 years ago Linda and Neville Kitchen have come to understand this – the hard rock way.

The company, established by Linda’s jazz musician father Bill May in 1946, has sold its guitars to musicians as famous as George Harrison, Ben Harper, Carlos Santana, Tommy Emmanuel and Mark Knopfler.

It began when 18-year-old May, not satisfied with his then imported guitar, decided to make his own. His first forays into guitar making were experiments in simple stringed and fretted instruments but the principals were very straightforward – develop a skill with your hands, know your woods, learn patience and perseverance, develop an eye for line and design, maintain your individual touch, remain open to criticism, surround yourself with a good supporter base, service your product and don’t price yourself out of the market.

Bill May worked during the day and went to night school, graduating as a technical school teacher. In 1944 he and his wife Vera set up the first Maton – a combination of “May” and “tone” workshop in the garage of their first house in the Melbourne suburb of Thornbury. May was laughed at when he decided to give up his safe and secure job as a teacher to work full time as a guitar maker – After all even Leo Fender was at an embryonic stage, business wise, at that time. Determined to succeed though Bill May had to make a lot of his own benches, tools and machinery – Including a bandsaw made from Model T Ford wheels and other bits and pieces.

In 1946 Bill’s brother Reg, a cabinetmaker, came into the business with him and work continued for a few years while they perfected the first Maton prototypes. Also that year the company took out a patent which turned out to be a world first – a simple but effective device which enabled the guitar maker or repairer to ensure that the neck remained true and straight. The device was called the “double thrust truss rod” and was anchored from the base rather than the headstock end of the guitar.

In 1948 the company moved to an old soap factory in Canterbury Road, Canterbury and a year later the first Maton electric guitars appeared. Hawiian slide guitars, solid body electrics, semi-acoustics, classical guitars and electric basses soon followed suit over the coming years. An early innovation came in 1968 when Maton was one of the first companies to make acoustic bass guitars on a larger scale. Named “The Bindara” bass it was of generous proportions, but smaller than the bass guitar-like instruments used in the Mexican marriachi bands.

Maton also adopted a “quick-drying” method to season its wood. The timber was aged in a process called “high frequency dialectric heating” which was developed in conjunction with the Phillips Corporation. It was an artificial drying process which could simulate 15 years of seasoning within a very short time, using microwaves to reduce the moisture content and solidify the timber resins.

When the Kitchens bought Mr May out in 1987, Maton Guitars was in it’s own “dire straits”. The couple inherited a $200,000 overdraft and a declining local demand for top-end instruments. Cheap Asian imports were flooding the market and Linda’s father’s business model – hands-on and with no salespeople – had become, after 40 years, unprofitable.

“When dad retired he found it difficult to let go because a family business, when it’s your blood, sweat and tears, it’s very difficult to walk away from” Mrs Kitchen, 56, says. “It was a gamble financially for us to embark upon it but I suppose, because I was so emotionally involved and had been all my life, that you can always think if you never give it a go then you’ll never really know.”

In its darkest period the Canterbury-bases factory was producing only 30 guitars a month and staff had dwindled to 12. Today it’s up to 60. What sweet chord was struck?

When the Kitchens took over they decided to concentrate on one model, steel string acoustics, and working to establish themselves as top-quality manufacturers.

“I think you’ve got to put all your energies and your money and your ideas into perfecting what you’re best at doing.” Mrs Kitchen says.

In the past 10 years Maton Guitars has been transformed from a brand “like an aunt who’s always there but you never think of” to a premium, made-to-order manufacturer.

A new Bayswater facility and modern equipment meant the company could once again duel with the American super-brands of Fender and Gibson. The emphasis on product design began to pay off.

Two-and-a-half years ago the Kitchens invested about $2 million into a new factory in Box Hill. It’s created a harmony between risk and reward.

That was a gigantic leap for us financially,” Mrs Kitchen said. “We could have lived quite well and maintained that factory (in Bayswater) but it was too small and if we want to maintain the product, and export and look after the staff that we’ve got, we really had to take the plunge.” she says.

“There’s no point embarking on an export drive if you don’t have the capacity to supply,” Mr Kitchen chimes in.

Maton Guitars produce 7000 guitars a year and sends them to about 250 Australian retailers and more than 50 across the globe. It first started to export guitars to England, America and New Zealand in the 1960′s

But with expansion comes added lengths of red tape, mrs Kitchen frets. She nominates payroll tax as the worst – “an insidious tax”. “It’s a tax on employment,” her husband backs up.

They reckon productivity has increased 20 to 30 percent since the Box Hill move, and they hope to be producing 12,000 guitars a year within a few years.

The local market in Australia has been fantastic and has supported us and enabled us to do this,” Mrs Kitchen says. “But I don’t think that can happen forever. You have to have little niche markets all over the world.”

Passion, with a Kitchen twist, is poised for a global tour.

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I’m sometimes asked by people who are starting out “What wood should I use to make my guitar and just how much of it do I need?”. Well the short answer is that there are a lot of woods you can use – especially if you’re making a solid-body guitar – and that you don’t need very much of it at all. Here is a quick, hard-and-fast rundown on the basics:

1:- A body blank (e.g. maple, alder, mahogany, swamp ash, basswood or poplar) 45mm (1-3/4″) thick. The size depends on the desired length and width of the body (350mm x 500mm / 13-3/4″ x 20″ will be sufficient for the majority of guitars). Tthe blank can be glued up from two or more narrower pieces.

2:- A neck blank (e.g. maple or mahogany) 25mm (1″) thick; the length depends on the desired scale length and the width on the desired width of the headstock (690mm / 27″ long and 100mm / 4″ wide for a guitar; 860mm / 34″ long and 115mm / 4.5″ wide for a bass). If you glue “ears” to the headstock the width of the neck blank can be smaller. Try to get quartersawn wood wherever possible.

3:- A fingerboard (e.g. rosewood or ebony) 6mm (1/4″) thick; the neck blank must be 19mm (3/4″) thick in this case. If you’re having a one piece neck then you can disregard a separate fingerboard.

4:- A headstock veneer (any beautiful hardwood) 2mm – 3mm (3/32″ – 1/8″) thick.

So there you have it! Not much wood and as far as costs go you can spend anywhere from about a few dollars right up to a few hundred dollars or more! It just depends on what woods you want your guitar to be made from.

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