Building a Guitar from Scratch (with a pro luthier)

we're making a nylon string classical guitar but you said i was going to be building much of it yeah so a lot of the pressure is on me so let you know everything in this shop is willing to take off a finger in an instant yeah we run fairly open guard on a lot of stuff i've got tools that will make hamburger i've got tools that will cleanly amputate i've got tools that can slice tendons you know you can always tell a good luthier because they can count to ten yeah i'm here today with marshall brunei trained luthier professional guitar builder of very high quality instruments we did a video not too long ago where we looked at a guitar that was worth a quarter million dollars no 275. she said okay a little bit more you let us know like we could build one from scratch yeah absolutely based off of essentially a 37 houser made to be one of the most famous guitars in the world at the end of it it's your guitar that i made kind of with a lot of help one of my big goals with this video is for me and hopefully the people watching having gone through the whole experience of creating one of these instruments coming out of it with an even greater appreciation for them so we have five full days yes to do this and there's gonna be a longer video they are gonna be busy days yeah there is a lot to do normally i like to spend a month building a guitar first off we got to select some wood so what what actual part of the guitar are we making first we're going to start with the top and the bell at the top and the sides okay i think that this would probably be a reasonably good piece or actually let's go with this one if you like this for the top uh for the back that's some indian rosewood we've had this wood since 1986 yeah because it's hard to get rosewood now right it's not as difficult to get indian rosewood because they grow this as a plantation tree in india as shade for the tea plants so when it becomes to maturity and it starts to take up too many resources they cut it down and replant so this is a very sustainable and easily harvested wood so this is also just a different type of rosewood yes it's a little bit of a denser it's got a slightly different sound and it commands a bit of an extra premium this is more traditionally what fretboards were made out of right initial particular type of well it was either uh indian rosewood or brazilian rosewood back in the day when it was plentiful and nobody cared uh now we use ebony wow so that's just a big stack of ebony we've got a couple ebony fingerboards a couple yeah it's clearly growing in popularity you ever need yeah and it's just because it wears a lot slower than anything else and it has a much better vibration transfer yeah this is this feels very familiar we age all of our fingerboards for a minimum of seven years in our humidity controlled environment and that's just to make sure that we don't have any built up stresses uh from putting a board that's a little bit too wet or too dry on which can be a very expensive repair for a guitar to replace it this is some european spruce let's do a little quick if you hold it at about 22 percent of the length down because that's uh the typical normal point that resonates quite a bit i get the mic right here yeah it's vibrating like a drum you can hear that constant tone you get a very strong sense of the sound quality in the wood so you can hear the the highs that sing and you hear the bass notes that resonate you can also get a sense of the duration of the sound that it can carry yeah and with an acoustic or a nylon string like we're using today that is the transfer is it's absolutely apparent yeah totally back indian rosewood yep spruce yep is it standard to have a very hard wood for the back of the guitar and very software for the front and it kind of acts like a drum maybe in that way it acts as a bit of a reflector there is a lot of vibration from the back a lot of your sound comes from the top the back and the sides essentially act as a resonant chamber let's uh take these over and let's get them joined up we make our own glue this is hot animal high glute the renderings of animals so like if you make a thick stock and you simmer the bones and you get all that collagen out that's essentially this in the 80s uh they were they found a bunch of texts attributing this glue to the ancient mesopotamians in use since the dawn of civilization that's a track record that i can get behind we have to establish a straight line we're getting a flat edge to both of these sides so that we can glue them together and then we have enough for the back right use our joiner here and we're gonna get this uh nice flat edge you can hear it coming off oh that's close enough for metal you got this glue ready would you say that one is ready yeah that looks good yeah i got it lined up here okay i'll try to keep this as close as i can get it i can let go of it yep we'll be able to sand this out smooth there's enough thickness here we're going to end up taking about half the thickness out of this oh okay you want to make sure that it's not raising up or anything and we're going to just slide the glue splunk it down very carefully and tight but not over tighten because otherwise it can pop up that's bloody there we go well i think we nailed it i think so too good i think it was mostly luck on my part but that is just right on that wasn't too bad i thought that was going to be way harder so then this we just wait yeah unless we just wait 24 hours later for the expediency of time i've already got it back done oh okay cool we'll send this one through the sander it sounds like an ancient piece of machinery there's only two sanders like this ever made really yes [Music] smells nice yeah it does smell nice that's why they call it rose because it smells like roses it does kind of smell like roses 2.64 millimeters is that what we're looking for that's about what we're looking for we're gonna scrape this out and get a center strip glued right up it have you ever used a scraper before no you're removing all the sanding marks so that way we can get to the beautiful wood without that final sanding it gets hot it does get hot let's put a little sharpen on that scraper it sounds like it's getting dark yeah that's terrifying you get used to it yeah yeah but you're trying to definitely get some pearls so i'm just gonna check it in the reflection of the light it's actually smooth and shiny and shimmery so now we're just doing the same thing with the top yeah let's establish our center line we're going to use our universal template to establish where the sound hole's going to go and since we're going to get 20 frets what's the standard that you use for me it's always been 20. 20 not 19. why why the difference just an extra note yeah there's a lot of modern music that uses a 20th fret it's easier to have it and not need it than to knead it and not have it this is for the center of the sound hole right here where that intersects is where we're going to drill the hole so that way we can inlay our rosette which is a hauser style rosette oh you make this yeah of course this is really detailed yeah that's actually a fairly simple one how do you make this you start off with a good design and and work in the grid and build each vertical column and this do you make these around a circular yeah really really small pieces of wood yeah they're they're basically half millimeter 0.4 millimeter you can kind of see how if you take it in isolation it's kind of pixelated white black white black red black white white and then you make that stack and so on and so forth all the way around that is so cool it's like a sauce then yeah so you make like a sausage and you just slice it off and and you've got your pattern that runs through it yeah you get you know 50 at a time it actually acts to strengthen the sound hole itself so that way it prevents cracks so let's get this drilled in we could just keep it like that all right small sound hole yeah very small oh so you put this into the hole in the middle and then it's just like a really dangerous compass yeah exactly that's all we need to do because oh okay good job all right we're going to get some glue onto this and we're going to get it clamped down it's coming out a tad bit there but i guess that's what the clamp is for yeah we got some uh significant progress here oh yeah how long do we have to wait until that's ready to go 24 hours 24 hours we've taken it out of the clamps i pulled off some of that extra newspaper now all we have to do is scrape it off i guess that's going to be the fretboard's going to be under there right although we have to treat it all with the same level of respect this is all about the intimacy of the joint so we need to cut out this sound hole but first nice right this is your number 96 yep your signature looks a lot better than mine this goes into my permanent archives that's super cool man oh of course and then you just sand off the rest next up we have to get some braces onto it what is the bracing on the inside of the top mainly it's for the classical guitar these are sound control bars so what we are doing is controlling the stiffness of the top across the grain as well as along the grain kind of like tightening a drum almost right it's like tuning a drum tuning a banjo head it's something similar to that we need a form this is our fret ruler so we're going to go 20 frets so we're going to let the 20th hang out a little bit so there is the edge of our body is that the 12th fret this is going to be the 12th fret why is it that the 12th fret is always at the end of the body just familiarity yeah it's like why most steel string guitars have it at the 14th fret it's just the familiarity for classicals it's mostly because you want the bridge to be vibrating in a certain position in the top for the optimum amount of sound and it's really just tone optimization and it just it kind of makes it yeah it kind of makes sense that exactly half of the string would be on the body and exactly half wooden right we're just going to take this and there's our working guitar we need to get our supports onto here first so we're just kind of striking a couple lines this one's vertical which gives our sound hole the reinforcement it needs that's going to be our closing v when this is kind of like a analog eq yeah exactly like the more bracing i imagine that would get a higher pitch than less bracing would get lower yes that'd be right i would think that just like tightening a drum like the more bracing the tighter it would get if you have a low and flat brace it's going to be very flexible right it gives you that really bassy deep tone in this direction it's exceedingly strong but it has the same amount of mass and you get a much higher pitch yeah right and this we want a nice even mix of wool and so we're scooping the mids then right now we've got our top laid out good working surface so where the braces these guys here what type of wood is this this is a cousin of cedar it's got a good stiffness to it we're going to cut these and put them on here yeah every surface must be hit with a hand plane intimacy of compact much better that looks good cool that's a global surface these are off cuts from your top for around the sample okay this brace is way thicker yeah good okay same with that one slather it on there now we have to use our fancy clamping system so let's make a neck all right would you make a headstock for every new guitar or you make headstocks and batches just like you do the inlays i make them in batches and then this is all one piece of wood they this is actually two we cut it off here and then flipped it around oh okay i see the scene you see this yeah right there it gives us the head angle that we need we're attaching the heel what is the heel the part of the guitar that transitions from the neck to the back okay these are you make those in bulk you're making these it's all about the setup time uh once i get the machine set up it's just running one after another much like the next and a lot of the other pieces the neck on its own is pretty small actually it is yeah it starts to shrink pretty quick so now we need to figure out the taper and this one is kind of a crucial this is crucial yeah so stay tuned outside of the line there we go so now you've got more or less a neck so it's going to get a lot thinner than this oh yeah yeah we're gonna put glue here we're gonna just visually center it up get the back edge lined up and get it clamped cool and now you've made a neck excellent we need to bend some sides this is the same wood that's gonna be in the back yeah this is the match set for the wood back and the sides are going to be the sides yeah these have been thinned down so you already sanded these down in that machine yes get into the thickness that they need to be yeah and i've seen this before where you have like a mold and then you need to place that in the mold we're going to do it the good old-fashioned way how is that well we use a blow torch on a pipe yeah buddy okay that looks like it's seen some heat oh this thing has seen some serious heat what you're doing is heating it up so that it can be flexible so that you can put it in that spray we're melting the connective tissue in the wood it's filled with lignans as you heat it up it stretches out and you can reset it into a new shape with the heat let's check the waste not bad all right so let's go for the broad curves so let the heat do it's the job you'll feel it suddenly start to relax [Applause] okay bring that hand down more this way it smells like teeth it does cool it's actually quite good all right all right do a quicker one here yep all right hey hey look you found the guitar yeah this is all workable all workable sweet good job thank you that's really impressive but what keeps it its shape when you clamp it just time you clamp it down and after a while it then just stays there no by clamping it in tightly and marking the center lines uh when we put our spreader bar into it it's going to force it out to the final outline of the guitar oh and the spreader bars stay in the guitar permanently until we're fitting the back and then the back keeps it on there yes okay a very impressive first crack at bending aside thanks get in there are we using these yep and these are another thing that you do like in bulk this is how we bend that it takes about three hours for this thing to warm up and then it's an eight minute cycle so this will come down hold it for two and a half minutes and then these outer arms come down and bring the sides down super cool super cool in case somehow you managed to get your hands stuck in this we've got the safety switch that you can hit with your head get some glue onto here and just glue it up somewhere and this is the back of the neck this is going to be the top along here the neck is going to come out oh okay okay guitar neck and this is the inside that gets the next part yep all we got to do is get some glue on there line it up and clamp it with one of the red clamps all right make our tail block and our neck block and what would that be called the tail block no block so we're putting these into the mold cut off the amounts we don't need glue together yes yeah this just looks like a guitar a ghost guitar uh so we've got our center lines lined up here and then wow it sounds like it's cracking yeah so now we need to put in the linings basically what holds everything together when you cut away the edge we're now putting in the lining that you made on those machines in bulk yes there we go are we cutting these together we are yeah we're going to cut them this is just to hold it in place while we get them marked at bandsaw yep nice let's see how these fit right tuck it in there it looks like we're a little bit long this is a three-quarter inch blade of death that was satisfying yeah perfect we're gonna have to work relatively quickly we're gonna get some glue on to this yeah how much time do we really have until the glue starts to really set about three minutes okay and then we're gonna use these clamps and turn it around the other side getting really used to this smell what does it smell like rob smells very animaly now we can adjust it and start running clamps around now we do the same thing with the other side yeah this thing starts to weigh quite a bit after a while yeah awesome oh yeah i think i got it no it looks good this is a pretty cool looking thing on its own right here it kind of looks like a trophy or or a weird centipede thing we got to finish bracing the top i'll take this one out of the clamps and we can actually get this trimmed down trying to get as straight of a cut as possible yeah that's the shape you want to shoot nice i just got a bit more even pressure on it i'm putting way more pressure at the end it's probably as good as i can do that looks really good yeah it's nice and smooth so this one comes out at five millimeters even and hey close enough yeah what we do is we line up the ruler and just very simply we're gonna and we'll just scrape that a little bit next thing we need to do okay wow terrible this is going to be glued on here and this one's going to be glued on here we need to put a little bit of relief into this one so we're just giving it a arch yep don't rest your arm on this my god it's a little too happy well too happy that's gonna clamp down this way it's gonna give that it'll kind of release up to be a little bit more proud which gives a little bit more for that presence and this one is going to be flat so we have to hit this with a plane it adds to the ring it really does ring so let's get these guys glued down like everything else i like to keep it over the glue pop and let it drip down i like to get one end down and then pull the other end down and then check to see if it needs a middle metal see it just barely curve it yeah that is really satisfying i have noticed that uh in classical guitars and i always thought that just meant it warped a little bit over time i didn't realize that that bit of a like bulge right around the bridge was intentional yeah it is very intentional that doesn't look too bad so now we're gonna make some bridges are these another thing that you make in bulk we make a bunch of blanks that are roughly oversized because again this is like a 14-step process to get to what you're seeing here so everything on the guitar was made by you here yes but some of it makes sense to do involved yeah this is the end goal so this is what we're starting with and what is this that is boom is that real bone yeah it's real bone animal bone is still standard although a lot of companies are using the synthetic resin infused bone-like product which yeah i guess a porcelain or something with resin i've used it i'm not the biggest fan of it i find that it wears a little quicker than natural bone but that said natural bone does have its drawbacks i tend to source my bones from japan this actually used to be a kobe beef cow oh okay so so even even the bone is fancy well in america we've got our big open spaces for cattle to roam and they're putting on weight at a probably slightly unhealthy rate their skeletal structure can't quite take all the extra stress they start to get little micro fractures inside of the bones which turns into voids in the bone which i don't like the kobe beef because they don't have that jarring on their skeletal structure the bones are a lot more consistent and a lot more compact and otherwise they just be you know thrown away and is that bone there too and you don't do any like an electric guitar there's no indent for these strings no on a classical guitar doesn't really matter all these strings are very close to the same amount of tension if you relieve the saddle like you would on an acoustic steel string guitar it's not going to make a difference that's another really interesting thing about classical guitars there's no adjustment in this bridge you just gotta nail the intonation yeah there's also no truss rod no like electric guitar there will be a truss rod all the way through the neck where you can help you know you move the neck and you can adjust micro adjustments on the bridge to get the intonation right because these frets need to be in a very particular spot obviously you know this but i'm saying it out loud enough yeah so the bridge we just need to absolutely put in the right place there's just no way around it it needs to be exact yeah it needs to be exact there's no two ways about it so what we need to do is drill out the holes on the back okay is this one piece of wood that you shaped to be like this yeah that's intense dude yeah you should probably glue down yeah yeah this is actually going to go really really fast we're going to just give this a quick we need to get this lined up on that plinth as best as you can so you put the how do you get the glue on them we use capillary action you just put it on the top and it falls into the yeah that's all you need just a little bit in there yeah it actually wicks down all the way through cool you've got your plate glued onto there so that's in there now that's in there that was really fast that was really fast it was just take out all the machine marks let's see and so what you're doing with this is just tapering off it yes so just like that beautiful great just have to do a little bit of finessing over here and we're good to go cool so you create an even ledge all the way around just like that yeah nice am i going too much maybe i'm going too much maybe let's give it a little cleanup that looks pretty good that looks really good yeah it looks great so now we want to sand off the backside of this the bone does not smell as good no no you know intelligent uh engineering i'm not going to have you do this because i've sliced my thumb pretty badly doing this yeah thanks oh i see yeah i could definitely all right and there we've got six strings all marked out do you drill those yeah we're going to drill into it this way you're going to want to ease into it just go nice and slow take your time because you don't want to blow through and drill into your saddle so you're only go we're only going halfway through it [Music] okay it's uh up and down going up yep then goes down that goes up that's actually a thing on electric guitars i did not intend that but yeah this was totally a mistake but it worked that's how i'm gonna justify it yeah i think the left to right spacing i think is fine yep and ultimately that's that's what matters here you know once we get the the strings on you won't notice yeah i always like to listen to them that concludes what we're doing today with the bridges that concludes what we're doing with the bridges we got a bridge let's get to bracing that so we start with the longest one and then we go to the next shortest and so on and so forth perfect cool so that's by my count seven unfortunately we need to clean all three sides of this oh yeah this is tough there we go okay nice yeah that wasn't too bad that looks about right yeah all right you braced your first guitar top what is the bracing on the back you got your back here now to take it out of this guillotine clamp it provides really nice even clamping without a whole lot of thought and how long has this been sitting in here oh this has been overnight so now we're gonna scrape these up and we'll round it over i'm starting to kind of get the hang of it you know like feeling when it's cutting through and cutting through all the way i'm trying to just slowly change my angle a little bit more every time that looks close enough to sand so i'm going to trim this back so it terminates nicely oh we have to shape our braces oh is it is it gonna look like that yeah it's got this arch built into it it doesn't sit flush with uh the guitar no the guitar backs are not flat they're actually all domed slightly oh of course this back end is not going to stay flat we're going to put in braces on it to curve it yes is this the curve we're going for yep oh and we're going to cut that into it yes so we're not bending it no we're cutting in the arch and then flexing the back to the arch clamp it in and cut it off to that curve yes and there's the curve just a few run throughs yep i just visually line it up to widest part of the base yeah out their widest part of the upper back let's cut in some braces grab the knife and just put a just a light nick right here take your saw put the very tip of it okay now bump this up to it and saw gently let the saw do the work feels like i went there and then you bring this back we bump it up just past it i just saw it strike down almost through i think i might be through now yep there you go you use that guy in that guy make sure to not put my fingers in it yep careful yep got a little bit of the back there it's easy oh yeah this is a little tricky there we go i'm going to get a bit more of the sides i'm going into the wood quite a little bit that's all right most of that will be covered up so i'm not going to worry about that oh there's a little bit of a knit good how was it uh it's a little loose you know once we get some glue in there and we glue it up like that you won't notice but we can show how tight that one is yeah well done that's how professional does it this is how i do it let's check this out [Laughter] but now we're going to glue this down and get the back yeah we're going to press the button down to the arch okay this has the same curvature yeah it has the same curve okay i was wondering about that it's about even yeah that's good that's all you need go ahead and plug it in good enough yeah okay kind of on the side well something over it all right it's a great day one that's a great day one we're making the glue yeah we're making glue this is basically the collagen of uh rendered animals it's just the collagen from the bones yeah and depending on what you do with it it's either jello or glue right this stuff is legitimately stronger than the wood itself so with a good bond it won't break at the joint it will break at the wood if you don't have an exactly perfect joint this will take care of a lot of it all right let's make some glue all right so give me about a finger in there add about an equal amount of water that's good and then all we have to do is heat it up after it blooms for about 15 minutes you've got some carving to do you got to finish out your braces over there yeah you got this all nice now all carved down that looks lovely oh yeah i can hear now with the bracing got a bit of a drum quality and you can hear the the high ends and the low ends across the spectrum a lot of those original qualities that you heard in the piece of wood are really being accentuated in this you have these you've got the size of these just something to get these done so just kind of keeping the chisel really low we're going to want to get it to basically feather in oh jeez how low did you want it in the beginning it's good to take the the heavier cuts okay i didn't intend to but i'm glad that it's uh you're accidentally okay okay i'm accidentally doing the right thing here maybe that was a pretty good cut that was very nice it was very good cool and that's all kind of interlaced over the center line so that way it creates an extra layer of structure all right now we need to fit the sides to this so we can get the sides down onto the top we've got the sides that have been leveled off so we have to get this lined up on the center line looks like we're gonna have to trim the end of this that goes right up to it yeah we're gonna have to trim just a bit right there i believe you're really not used to taking a saw to a guitar no no [Music] okay you can see how i've got that center line resting right on the center line here yeah this is just a piece of an old hacksaw blade that i've ground down we're marking out the location of the braces because it's got this little hook edge on it oh okay get a really exact kind of where that brace is gonna go just giving it a cut across yep because it'll be really really hard to line this back up exactly where it is hopefully we've got everything marked out well you can actually see here the brace positions i don't know if you can see it on camera in real life though it's pretty clear where the lines are so the next step is just to cut these off but keep the height and then you put that depth in there so it clamps in that's what we're doing yeah and then we're going to have to excavate out those little pockets as well ideally it should fit first time for the last time like a lego piece if we did it if we marked these correctly it'll it'll just fit right in yeah glue really had it on there yeah those glues that is really on there and you can see it was the wood that failed not the glue itself wow you want to try popping it give it a shot let's go from there there you go nice nice all right we have to figure out how much to cut these down this is kind of our our depth gauge so we have this nice and easy yeah yes the top um scratch it in right there scratch it in so you can see the line right there we're going to cut right on the line but i'm not cutting through the side okay just cutting through the inside and then we're going to chisel that out right yeah we get to use literally the most dangerous tool in the shop just a really small chisel yep and pop it out that's a just a light push and a quick twist right up to the line really don't want to go into the wood to the side yeah oh i could see how easy it would be to do that though i might have taken a bit too much off there you didn't poke through the outside so you're fine very clean very concise hopefully just this is one of my favorite parts of this there we go that is satisfying i move yeah get an up-close shot of like these joints especially nice now we're going to glue it we apply the glue to the body yes okay we're going to have to move really quickly this does smell fresh what does it smell like i mean it's smells like collagen from bones so we're gonna slather this and we're gonna come back and dab dab dab dab dab if you paint then you end up scraping the brush along it and then you get drips this is going to come up flip over come down that is so satisfying big clamp the neck block big clamp at the tail block i'm just doing this to pull it down to the edge if you hear it go crunch you've gone too far whoa i think that's tight enough that's just a settling in crack not a bad crack last one last one very nice cool all right that's half the guitar that's half the guitar it is kind of almost sad in a way that once this is closed up we're not going to be able to see this well we'll always have this memory to look back on yeah i guess we got plenty of footage of it and give me a smile there we go let's get the back prepping we need to carve the scallops on to the end just like what we did just like we did these bracings but six times yes i've got it marked out to a predetermined length from each end now we're going to take it put it in yes one of the nastiest whoa saw blades so we're just cutting down the sides here yep it's just right up to the line [Music] good call with these that is really loud we have to figure out how thick our body is so we can trim our neck end where the neck is going to attach is 93.5 millimeters from this surface here up to here because we're going to make the heel cap the same thickness as our back so 93 and a half remember that number 93.99 so we want this peel cap to be exactly 93 and a half yes this has the taper of the back onto it as you slide it forward or backwards you can adjust the thickness of the heel cap very simple yeah because the guitar body does have a bit of a right it's it's got the taper it's got a dome and this is extending that line so now we've got our thickness let's get a heel cap onto here what is the purpose of the heel cap it was to keep the neck angle and keep everything together for our purposes it's just decoration awesome this is going to be into the center of the heel full length this is a spline system so and what is that here's a spanish heel so one piece of wood right it's one piece of wood they cut slots into it and slide the sides in the reason this is a poor method if you're gluing the top on and you get glue into there the sides will not go in so you don't ever put glue in that's just a slip fit with the pull of the strings it can actually slide in and collapsing on the guitar causing the action to raise up with electric guitars too that's a very more affordable guitars once you have them for a little while that's a very common thing with them yes the pull of the strings will slowly move it what's the benefit of doing it this way then tradition oh really okay so this way that i do is adapted from the way that the japanese do it which is why japanese guitars never need resets they fit the neck to the body with the neck angle already built in steel strings is a totally different build it is yeah of course and i've done them i've got i actually i don't use dovetails on my seal strings anymore because it's an inferior joint how does a dovetail joint then basically it's a v that's flared and it just wedges into the body yeah it wedges into the body so you're relying on the compression from my world of electric guitars the necks are usually just one big piece that you bolt on and it's literally just bolted right at the body two or three bolts and then maybe a shin pack or something yeah to adjust that angle i use a neck through body where it's just one big piece of wood actually all the way through so very very different than this yes so this one we're going to take the router yeah so you're going to drill into this you're going to slide into there and then are you going to add another piece of wood onto the body and then lego it in like we did with that [Music] nice and easy ready to carve this yeah this is so cool i guess i could wait a second yeah it's kind of like your duplicators yeah it downloaded your neck and then i've never seen any machine like this so this is how we make the next these two are made to be in the exact same spot over the next and then you just trace basically yeah it's a really dangerous tracer yes so you're tracing on the right and what you are tracing with this guy right here this is doing yes what i like to do is use my two fingers out here kind of as a guide so this is extra stability so it doesn't want to kick out are you comfortable barely i mean i am nervous [Music] so get this hand down there you go so that way you're always grasping this and the pin at the same time uh give me a blood cradling stream if something goes wrong okay [Music] oh i've been grasping it's so hard this is a really cool process isn't it wow there was a few times too where it did really yeah you can feel where it wants to kick [Music] that gown i swiped from the hospital when marshall was born okay yeah that is very cool you can kind of keep it this way for a really uncomfortable guitar now it's rustic yeah and on the first day you were telling me how you age the ebony wood for seven years and now i have a clear reason why how the frets jut out from the wood yeah very rough on the edges there that's because the fingerboard has shrunk and the reason it shrunk is because when that fingerboard was glued onto the neck the fingerboard itself had not fully seasoned and come to equilibrium uh to the shop humidity conditions that the guitar was built at it did the final seasoning on the guitar itself so as it shrank the frets are metal and they don't shrink so that it feels like the frets have poked out but what's happened is the fingerboard has shrunk against them after crack repairs and finish touch-ups it's one of our most common repairs yeah that's why you guys keep your ebony for seven years before using it and why on more affordable guitars you always see those types of fret ends jutting out yeah that's why all right so we gotta pop this out of the clamps oh hey [Music] and this is where we figure out if we've glued it in or not which we did that's okay those cracks are i know they're we're supposed to hear that but that's always such a satisfaction yeah it really is wow beautiful next up we're gonna route all the excess off rob are you just standing there admiring your body yet yep it's a really nice body i got here time to cut off the sides you just free hand it yeah this is called a flush trim bit because it trims off flush with this [Music] [Music] that was a lot easier than i thought it was going to be yeah look at that beautiful beautiful work you can also get a good sense of how it's going to stand up i kind of want to just hang this in my house well all right next we gotta plane this down this tool i've always had trouble with sheets i think planing might be my least favorite part the planer to me is just feels finicky and i mean i'm sure if i was actually good at it it wouldn't go that way but okay there we go that looks great awesome that should do it so now we need to clean up the insides a little bit because this is our last chance to make it look pretty what is the reason for the rounded back is that for stability it's a little bit for stability and a little bit for humidity protection you want to get targets dry or at least an acoustic one the back will shrink and so it gives it a little bit more room to shrink in and it also helps to direct the sound because it kind of acts as a bit of a speaker cone or like a parabolic reflector you can do it flat it just doesn't sound as good yeah we're just going to clean up the edge here i'm just going to use a scraper [Applause] oh my god that sound is awful yeah really that sounds like money to me all right there we go so we'll get the back fit we're about to close it up line up our center lines here what makes it pretty easy and then this side yep yep you know we've distilled down a lot of the trial and error to get it to where it's easy grab the saw grab a hammer okay yeah you're getting pretty confident yeah yeah and if i mess it up it's my guitar we'll have to live with the consequences all right i think that's i think that's it all right well keep it low yeah yeah luckily that's outside of that's going to be taken off but good call i put a really good chip into the side there all right it's pretty satisfying very satisfying i could get rid of this yeah those of you need to be kind of clean down to the edge go ahead and see how it fits hopefully this just fits right in oh oh i think it does oh fits all right well done yeah well done to you too spot on all right if you look inside there you can get that perfect mortise beautiful next step clamping this down we got a glue a bunch of glue on it that's it that's the last time you're gonna see the beautiful inside of that guitar man i know and how if you just oh it's really in there yeah it's on there that's so cool looks like we're ready to close awesome so just to be authentic we should put some guitar picks in there even before there we go perfect and same deal gob gob dab dab dab dab dab i'll guide it into the slots over here good it's really snug again we're going to go clamp clamp medium medium medium flip floppers yeah this is beautiful i love a bunch of clamps yeah next up is working on this then i guess yeah we gotta drill out our holes yeah love it let's do it we're gonna line it up here you're gonna step on that hold it until it stops moving and then just release it [Applause] oh that's cool that's all you need so cool because this is our usual headstock that we use so imagine having something like this set up i mean you saw how easy it is and how much time it actually saves we need to carve that down a little bit and at least smooth it out how do we smooth this out just a little bit of a file and shape up the heel here we're not going to worry too much about this because we have to glue the fingerboard down we do want to get this heel portion cleaned up as much as we possibly can what i like to do when i'm trying to make sure that i don't skip a spot i'll take the pencil and draw some lines on it as i'm you know going through right it's obvious if i'm over working in one place versus underworking another that's looking pretty good because the hard part now is going to be oh yeah not rounded off but yeah we're off by just a half a millimeter [Music] all right seems good to me are we getting the blow torch back out for this yes yeah how much are we're only going to use four before unless we break one or two give us our waistline right here we've got a little bit of extra on both sides so we don't have to be super neurotic about our waist wouldn't you have to be really really accurate to get this on or is it still a little bit this is still going to be a bit on the flexy side once we get it in the most important part is getting the waist bent properly [Applause] [Applause] bend i have to heat something together this is within workable but i definitely like to get a little closer than this maybe we can pull it in well there'll be a more idea that goes a little closer not that bad you could tell how much more attention you have to put into this we can work with that we're gonna get your bridge so it does need a it needs a little bit of purpose you just kind of lean on it and as the heat works its way through you'll actually feel it start to go yeah now i feel it yeah kind of cool how it's just like yeah thanks it's like nothing nothing nothing sag is that it yeah that's probably about it yeah yeah it looks pretty good i just didn't realize that that was intentional yeah hmm delicious let's pop this sucker out and we can buzz this one off okay moment of truth sounds good [Music] it's interesting now too to know what these because i've looked into acoustics many times and seen these braces it's fulfilling to see them in the exact angle that i always see them in yes now to know that you are the one who's done it yeah and when we put it in this exact corner that i wasn't really thinking about is what you're going to be seeing when you look into it there's something special about that [Music] good so yeah so that's first time using that machine [Laughter] it's got a nice wooden box we need to cut away this corner here and this corner here so we can give this a quick scrape and then we put an inlay this one we have to be very careful because we're getting really close to our finals [Applause] [Music] you can now get an assessment of the joinery yeah it looks nice and tight on the inside as well good job so we need to scrape this down because we want to get this nice and smoothed out now okay so if you feel on the outside it's pretty rough oh yeah not because we didn't scrape it and sand it it's just because we added water water puffs on the wood we've added glue we've run rudders over it and the router has left these big huge bearing marks they've got some glue drips here got a little bit of char in the waste from bending it not bad so all we have to do is do the same thing for the other side okay what is that this is a veneer that i've dyed point three millimeter black point five millimeter red point five millimeter white and veneer is just very very thin wood like cut like paper yeah yeah yeah basically it is essentially wood paper i glue this all up in a big sheet run it off at an earlier time like many things before it's easier to bulk it out and do a whole bunch of it so there's more decoration then i i was under the impression that it was just this so this is going to go on oh okay now this makes a lot more sense so top of the guitar the mirror is on the inside okay which are those three really small pieces basically a paper of different wood different colors but in the inside to give it some decoration it's like you have a little rainbow with four colors right so what it'll end up doing is looking like this once we're done doing all this as you said for the front the back is gonna take probably about three to four hours yeah what's the most time consuming part the final sanding that's we're working pretty clean here so i'm looking at probably eight hours of sanding everything is done but there's still eight hours of work just to see yeah between that and the french polishing which takes about 12 hours and i'm really plus the plus the eight hours of sanding close to eight hours so you're looking at 20 hours from the point where this is well it looks like it's finishing yeah like in the camera it's going to look totally done and you still have 1200 yeah 20. 20. oh yeah 20 because eight final sanding yeah 12. yeah wow yeah each guitar typically has a hundred plus hours in it and oh my [Laughter] oh my god that really scared me i'm going to take the first pass of this one which is what we've got set for this and then i'm going to do the veneer pass and these we have to be very careful if you're off square of the body itself you can change the depth of the cut that is loud this is one of the loudest guitars i've ever worked on since loud because of the guitar not because of the machine yeah which means it's going to be a good guitar the louder the guitar is when i work on it the the better i know it's going to sound that's so cool looking big veneer shelf small veneer shelf yep i love how you can see the bracing on this side too oh yeah that's very cool find the waist here and that'll bring us to just slightly which is good nothing fancy but just enough to square it and make it nice if you bring it all the way around then you don't see that nobody will ever see the joint because it's where they expect it not to be yeah a special tape that we use really strong it's really strong it's got a psa which is a pressure sensitive adhesive so the harder you push down on it the harder it sticks to the wood okay do you glue the veneer and the inlay all at once yes i guess that would how else would you do it yeah in with a glue like that okay and then we're also going to get this and we'll line up our line oh that's got to be some really heavy duty tape i'm happy with that okay is that veneer in there yeah that's all the way down i don't know how to use this one that's pretty simple isn't it yeah marshall i've been impressed throughout this whole process this time though more than anything else really yeah there's something about this well it's starting to really take the the form of the guitar it seemed a tad bit off but now with the inlay on the sides [Music] all you have to do is trim off the ends that's about it so now it looks like a guitar yeah and i'm sticky kind of surprised that the glue and the tape pull it just seems like it wants to pop off so bad yeah it's good tape now as well understanding how the veneer works here and how this is made i appreciate it even more one of the things i like to do at this point is i just like to hear the guitar because as soon as you cut away all the corners it takes a lot of the resonance out [Music] it sounds so good it's beautiful all right should we get the rest of the table yeah let's get the rest of the tape off at this point in time you know we're really close to to being done in terms of the absolute woodwork and then we get into the finish and set up and and all that sort of fun stuff i also have your tuning machines oh right on whoa these are wood yeah yeah these are ebony i really love the look of ebony for most guitar makers this is the upgrade yeah let's scrape this sucker down this is kind of where you see how good of a job you did lovely i'd say that's fairly tight oh yeah it feels a little wrong [Laughter] [Music] so now it feels you know very guitar-like and then all we have to do is the same for the top speaking of can you see the joint no i don't see it it's actually right here i still don't see it oh i do see it there's like an idea barely though let's go with this one i like that okay yeah that's the front board yeah this is going to be the front board am i sanding everything here including this yeah you're going to sand the whole top because when we glue the neck on we need to have the fingerboard area nice and smooth so just sand the whole area you want to especially focus around the edges especially some glue [Applause] that was satisfying i also like how you can tell how good it is at amplifying things when you put the machine right by where the bridge is going to go it gets really loud well yeah you actually have to be careful because when you have the top vibrating like that you can cause ripples in the top to show up later on because it's sitting there vibrating and you're sending thinnesses and thicknesses into it at that frequency so oh yeah yeah so now all we have to do is take down the edge and i'm going to warn you again when you scrape down this side this is going to turn into a very very very sharp edge to scrape down the sides we're going to need obviously the scraper a sanding block some sanding paper time crystal use a scraper for this one yeah so this is typically where i cut myself either coming across here oh yeah or running down here on my thumb yeah i've done this enough now that it doesn't really feel wrong or at first just taking the scraper to the guitar certainly just feel wrong that's satisfying it is i mean look at those curls those are purple holes that's really satisfying too having the inlay and all of this work here just feel like one piece of wood right like you can't feel yeah if you feel over here you can actually feel oh yeah overhanging mm-hmm i'm going to scrape all that off and you can see how flexy those sides holy cow yeah they're like under one and a half millimeters now that we've got this all scraped down there's still some scraper marks and some chatter we're gonna send in as big a broader strokes as we can and then we just move it around to the other yeah and we do the other side same thing so we're going to make my secret varnish recipe for the absolute basics what is varnish varnish is the protectant that goes on the wood you can add color you can add tint and this varnish goes on everything everything higher guitar gets varnished everything except for the fingerboard gets marked right we're going to start off with ultralight shellac what is it this is the exudation of a bug yeah bug excretions mixed with tree excretions so when a bug bites a tree the tree puts out sap the bug dies gets encapsulated with the sap and that's how you extract that's how we get dinosaurs yeah i don't know which one of us was going to jump on that right very highly refined this has been washed and processed a number of times so it's really really clear this is the rawest untreated form of this is this right chunks of stick and bits of bug and so varnish is this mixed with alcohol 190 proof everglades ever click on an acoustic guitar where you are relying on the wood to make its sound and to make the music the less you can have on the surface the better it is this is basically to protect it from your skin oils not even the elements oh really yeah what did you just put in there oh that's a magnetic stir bar that's so cool it's just a little thing you drop in there then the magnet does the thing and then it spins and then it's stirring it it's so cool how long does this go for about a day about a day or two days of me oh so this is on here spinning for days yeah and then we're ready to put go down the guitar yep oh so we're drilling into the top yeah we're drilling into the guitar so we use this to wrap the the cavity for our neck line this up here center line lined up on the center it's looking pretty on to me this tells you where the bridge will go do all the guitars you make are the same scale length so that you just keep using all the other same tools because as soon as you change scale length all the frets change right uh no uh i use all sorts of different scale lengths so do you have a different tool for every scale length yeah i've got a different ruler for every scale length and if i don't have one then it just involves a lot of math yeah this is off just a little bit and everything after like the 12th fret is wrong right i'm not gluing the bridge on here at this point this is kind of the last thing that's going to go on yeah we've got this converging line here see how those green lines are kind of converging we want to get that right on the joint so then i just put these wedges into it so that way i know it's not going to fall clamps onto both sides [Music] moment of truth look at that whoa that's a groove perfect all right take the dust out get another piece of wood in there and then just leave that on we still have to fit the end of this and we have to establish our necking most classical guitars will have about a three millimeter lift over the entire length of the fingerboard so again if you take from right in front of the bridge to the edge of the body to the end of the fingerboard there's going to be a three millimeter lift look at this thing holy cow yeah we've got our center line struck all the way up here so we're going to slide the neck into this clamp it down this piece has our neck angle already built into it so we put both the body and the neck in here and then just sand it to the right yeah so we've got our center line lined up that's held down don't have to think about that so you got the angle by just putting this okay so that this there adjusts the angle right and then you know we've got our lock nut but we can adjust it up or down as needed but we've got it dialed in for probably 98 of what we do i love how you can see the angle there it's very very slight but so important that that angle is there it's going to jump [Music] yeah it over it really easy right so at this point before i take anything down i like to check and make sure that this is fully sanded and there you've got your angle and you've got your angle there you go and then because you measured carefully you can see exactly what your heel cap reveal is going to be you can actually get a sense of what the guitar looks like all together i love the dust on it too give this a quick stand we're going to move this up and then we're going to get started on our fingerboard lovely and we use the guitar body the very body it's going on is our our reference are you putting it on that way is that oh shoot we did it backwards so this is what your guitar is going to look like i love this get a shot of that ergonomic fingerboard here every time we glue these on we take the straight edge and our our things and we check the angle we check the alignment 40 years of doing this i've never had one that was not in perfect alignment with the perfect angle excellent we just wanted to clean off the sanding blades and so that way we get a really good glue bomb that's going to go in there just hunkers down like that you can see that our center line runs straight up here yeah is this fretboard going to go all the way into here yeah it's going to go all the way to the edge it's going to cover you know most of that we have reached the point where you you could put a string on this yeah and it would work so we're going to take our glue we gluing both in the neck and yeah we're gluing everything together all at once we're gonna paint it into the slot step two biscuit biscuit step three gaba inside here inside here and here all the way around of course we're gonna take this and just rotate it down and we want this to be flush with the body it's flush on the right side just a tiny bit out what do you think good let's clamp it up so now right the neck is attached yeah boom it looks like a guitar down it does right at the center line yeah and look at that the exact amount of elevation you see the gap there that's before you glue it yeah barely people missed this this is where people who aren't familiar with the spanish model guitar miss out and they try to make that neck straight with the body or worse backboat a little bit like steel strings are it won't work wow how easy was that it might be pretty difficult all right let's make a fingerboard this is the fret rule to rule all fret rules so this is for what the 20 and a half scale length that we're using yeah this is a 650 which is uh 25 and change about a fender length 25 yeah this starts at the nut so we have to make sure that we cut all 20 frets this is the octave i'm assuming yep that's a 12. we always have that mark just so we can kind of get a reference of where we are but when we were laying out the scale i also used this to reference the end of the body to where i wanted the sound hole oh because that's also the body of the guitar right as well right so that's a really important one so a lot of reasons so the scale length is here to somewhere over here we know the octave from here to the bridge that is exactly in the middle right so wherever this this length plus that is where exactly the bridge is going to be right and then these other frets are calculated by what is the that's 1 over the twelfth root of two roughly one over eighteen because one over two of two is like 17.8 and on and on and on if you have the full string then to find the first fret you get rid of 1 18. yes it's 1 18 of the overall length you know hypothetically if you had an 18 inch scale the first fret would be at one inch and then you measure again so it's now a 17 inch scale and then it's 1 18. yeah okay i get it and so on and so forth because of the harmonics i know the 12th fret is exactly in the middle seventh is one third yep fifth is one fourth basically these frets need to be in a very particular spot especially up here when you have a fret that's out of place in the first five to seven frets it really doesn't matter at all i've seen some guitars up to almost an eighth of an inch off you have this made so that you don't need to do that right we we had a phd professor from northwestern calculate this for us when we work with our quote-unquote bible this is the code that was used to make this yeah to make this to generate the measurements yeah machine shop that they cut the slots using a melon machine this is the fretboard this is the fretboard calculations that we use basically we go from 12 inches all the way up to almost 37 inches yeah scale lengths from 12 inches to 37 inches oh yeah very tiny increments so you have to make a custom fretboard uh for an odd scale that we don't have one of these made for then we go to this right when we have the measurements already there that is cool now you can go on the internet and actually just punch again and get the same thing right but this is so retro we love it fret scales right there yeah done by our friend robert welland a professor emeritus from northwestern university so we need to true up one side of this fingerboard because this needs to rest against our fence we're deciding what is the front right if we put it on this way you'd have this line kind of falling away just because i like the way it looks that the line will go off yeah i kind of like that too like on my electric guitars i have the in i don't have any inlays up here but on the high side i have them on the top so having that line on the top i think would be cool so now we've got this pin directly over the saw blade the saw blade is exactly the size of our fret wire we have this blade custom made for us we're going to start at the 20th fret and we're going to cut halfway across why halfway because i don't like the look of a full 20 fret running all the way across for most players okay most guitarists are used to seeing a 19th fret that bisects yeah yeah i didn't think about that okay so when you put a 20th fret on and you make that bisect the sound hole a lot of players will lose their visual reference because subconsciously they'll say okay this is like three down from the top fret so we're also going to be cutting this kind of like that yeah we're going to put a little swoop on it it's going to look good and then after that we're going to do a push across and a reset which is why we tape this down if you go across and back the blade will wobble in the slot because it's now unsupported it'll become too big and then it also becomes bell-shaped which is what will cause the front ends to pop up [Music] [Music] all right look at that oh never play the video game limbo no there's a lot of those in there and they're bad news at this point i like to just visually look at it this way because we can see if we missed one we have to taper the fingerboard because this is just a blank yeah definitely a lot to this is like a nine string we gotta trim off this end all right i actually like to fill this end with super glue so that way it makes it a lot more stable we're going to sand the end nice and smooth because we've introduced a lot of heat and stress to it you want to make sure that it's all put together we need to find the center line of this let's go with 51 millimeters very standard not with for a classical guitar forgot to mark our 12th fret oh let me go with my skills [Music] that looks very fingerboarding we're basically down to the lines after this what we're going to do is we're going to hit it with a hand plane to adjust it finally using the planer again yeah we're going to use the big hand plane that looks like serious business right there yeah you can feel how heavy it is oh yeah it's not a lightweight piece not at all we need to mark the 12th fret from both sides just so that way we can keep track of where it is just visually and you get these nice beautiful ebony curls that is satisfying that is satisfied is very satisfying you can hear how it just sings its way through you can see that our pencil line is almost gone so that's a good start the reason i had you cut it a little bit wide and since we are doing a 51 millimeter nut we need to introduce a little bit of flare into the fingerboard on a classical guitar the string envelope of movement is much larger than on a steel string so we have to give allowance for that to happen because the strings are a lot stretchier if you leave this too close to the edge the possibility of pulling the strings off the edge is very high let's flip it over do the same thing on the other side so we can see right here how much of the fretboard i got rid of about that much yeah those are nice big carls no those are fluffy curls when you want to end up at about 51 and a half and we're at like 53 which is perfect because we're going to now introduce the taper we're going to start taking off a little bit so we're going to start like here and then move back to here with the same planer tool yes we'll start here cut through start here cut through so that's all right right four five seven is here about ish and nine and then start from 12. now we want to make sure that there's the right amount of flare oh yeah so as you can see that actually came out at 51 and a half all right we intended yeah you can really see the taper now do you put the frets on when it's on the guitar yes so that way the the relief and the action is exactly what i want it to be why do classical guitars not have inlays or dots because they're snobs no i'm kidding [Laughter] it's just the the the nature of the guitar and going back to olden times you have the hood and the ud doesn't have any position markers it doesn't even have frets it's an extension of that where you don't have that so it just wasn't really something that they thought about right in order to play those instruments you had to go through a very high level of training before you were even allowed to really play those instruments steel string guitar are probably mostly bought by beginners and right now classical because it's born of that highbrow european heritage of the ood turning into the loot turning into the guitar and that at this point is why we don't use them that's it a lot of guitarists use a dot on the seventh fret on the side of the board a lot of them will use five and seven some will use five seven and nine would you make inlays for those oh i'm making lace room and with the right material it can really shine through and just be exquisitely beautiful but you would never put like the dots on on the fretboard even on my electric guitars i have the dots after the 12. i wouldn't say never yeah i have done it for people i prefer the look of at least up to the 12th fret of no dots because i also don't find them to be very useful but i definitely have them at the top always five seven nine twelve and then i have on the fretboard to the higher because if i'm ever up here then i need them i have heard that there are no dots on classical guitars because people would play them with capo so often to change key and so the dots would actually be confusing if you're using a capo is there some truth to that yeah absolutely the that is born of the flamenco tradition yeah you tape out the first and suddenly your seventh fret is your sixth fret were you planning on putting a dot on this one was that part of your plan yeah i honestly haven't really given it any thought that we've got all sorts of different sizes different shapes oh there we go so that's what you would put into the seventh yeah if i'm doing more than one dot i like to do a white purl dot like this at the seventh that's two millimeters and then at the fifth and ninth to do a one and a half millimeter paula abalone dot this lighter green color so you have that reference of this is a seven it's really easy to see here's your other reference points don't worry about it over there and they aren't drawing your eye as much that's cool this is where we're going to playing the underside of the fingerboard so that way we can create a lot of the geometry that we need for the playability on the underside so we don't have to take away our slots that we cut on the tops so we're making a groove into the neck not a groove it'll appear as a twist we can pull the treble side back so we can have a lower action okay and then by rolling off the base side we're going to be able to have more relief on that i do the vast majority of it on the underside and then i do the final shaping on the top side so we're going to work the base side and then the treble side so this one you're going to have to lean into it because now we're actually taking a very healthy bite out of very dense wood i don't fully understand why we're doing this and so it fits to the body a little bit easier it's because of the the angle of the neck right the neck okay that's why we're doing this yeah because that is a straight line but the neck comes up at a bit of an angle on the guitar right okay so i'm thinking back to the the shot the ruler on that showed the small angle right we need to make room for that angle because this is a straight line it's funny holding this now because this exact taper i now recognize from any classical guitar i've ever picked up it's just so exact and pretty much every corner has a different taper on it that you did yeah so now we need to scrape the underside of this because when we put the glue on we actually want it to be slightly hollow in the middle i'm just creating an indent in the middle for the glue right and for the wood expansion there is so much more scraping than i thought yeah this is how a custom guitar is made it's precise fit for every single part every single step along the way oh yeah there it is nice so now we need to fit this onto the guitar we have to have room for the nut up here so we have to scoot this down to the 12th fret this is now really looking like a guitar it's starting to to get there make sure we're centered and lined up there oh of course because we gotta cut the ball around it now we need to figure out how wide our little extra bit here for the 20th is going to be it's the first time actually holding it like this how does it feel feels good the neck's pretty thin currently we'll go just like that well that looks about right smells like oreos it does [Music] beautiful [Music] nice and elegant i love it that's really pretty and then we're going to come in here with a little bit of knife work a little bit of scraper and a little bit of sanding what do you know what the song is yes what is it [Laughter] well done so let's test for this so we need to take a little bit more off of here and while i do this i want to get you starting to french polish the bridge i'm going to have you start by putting a couple of layers of a watch out of the shellac you don't want to go too heavy i want to make sure everything's covered it smells potent well it is fun it's 190 proof alcohol yeah i've got this marked out we've got our edge here our edge very much right here kind of a lead line and then a corner here so that way when we glue this down we know exactly where to put it we're going to do one last sand here we just want to do a quick orbital we want to get rid of all of our fingerprints we want to make sure that we've got a nice smooth surface i always like to get this as cleaned up as as much as possible it is pretty cool seeing it at this point i think when we got here this was just a bunch of wood yeah as tradition dictates i have a message for every single guitar that i built how often is the fretboard then later taken off once every 100 or so years [Laughter] we both have to sign it and i do that for every single one of you yeah do you write that same thing yes what's that super glue it'll make finishing go a lot faster and easier it'll fill the wood and just makes it take the finish a lot faster so you don't have to spend as much time working there you can see how much smoother that is compared to here oh yeah gotta get this lined up here so the glue has somewhere to stick we need to rough it so it grabs and bites it really important to set it correctly right from the get-go because in the first couple of the high glue is wanting to like grab it it's trying to go like this and you don't want to disturb that really the most effective glue joint is right then and there even most professional makers would would recoil and fear at using this glue for this operation because there's so limited time to work right and that will also probably be in horror that we're not preheating this or preheating this so that way you get more working time right move works fast if you know what you're doing yeah all right are you ready yes i believe i am moment of truth all right here goes nothing all right all right that's good that's good you got over the whole thing up there yeah okay you only get one chance for this to be right no hey stop it so this is going to go down one's going to go here good to go all right we're going to get it nice and tight oh look at that squeeze out beautiful keep going keep going you're cranking it yep you're going to have a hard time over time yeah okay then i can really yeah all right worldwide speed driver well you know when you get three hands in there well that was exhilarating did we do it right yeah look at that hey oh this is heavy it's real i mean it is well we added a lot of metal yeah bravo beautiful nice well done guys and the beauty is that fingerboard that top everything it's all at the same equilibrium of humidity nothing is going to be fighting itself that fingerboard has been sitting around since 86 yeah at least well in this shop yeah in our possession so it's all [Music] so how long does this take you next shaping three to four hours cut off the heel cap and get it flushed up because there's a fairly large bump there so we're going back to your favorite plane your very favorite go ahead and give it a try it feels like i'm ruining the guitar i mean how many times have i said that so what are we doing today because there's a lot that you've been doing off camera right right after we got the fingerboard glued on i showed you how starting to finish out the neck and shape it but i always shape the neck for every person's hand just to make sure that it is perfect neck shape is very personal very important for a lot of players at this point i got it mostly roughed out it's pretty close to where you want it unless it's exactly where you want it and in case yay give that a feel as if you are going to play it feels fat anywhere or overly round or whatnot you can always change it up a little bit pretty close i think yeah i mean this is i mean this is lovely i don't see any changes really that i would need also i'm i usually play an electric so it's kind of hard okay to tell like i don't have a a standard classical neck that i would want i'm kind of just taking your word for it um the only classical i've really played is that 50 plastic one that i got right when i was like 13 for my friend's dad so if it feels good then i think that we can do the rest of the cleanup there's some guitars where it's almost a square where they just lightly break the corners and it's completely flat across the back there's some where they're overly round i like to do kind of a you know a little flatter here and a little bit more here with a slight asymmetric round off to this side so that way you've got a little bit more room for your hands it's lovely so the other thing that i've done since the last time i just put a light fill onto it so that way when we french polish it it'll clean up a lot faster what is the fill just a wash of shellac and let it settle in it's pretty matte we need to give this a light sand back because you can feel that there's some grittiness on it yeah just a little here i think i've got close to 15 hours into this since the last time i yeah you saw it just to clean it up it's all little tiny tiny detail work it doesn't read well on camera it doesn't read well anywhere other than in the final product feels great we need to do the last final sanding with some higher grits because it's left off at 100 grit and you already did quite a lot of sanding on the prep board i have done nothing to the top of the fretboard that's one of the things we're going to do today is we're going to get the top of the fretboard shape get the bridge on and the fret's knocked in so what's first step here's the threats in i've already done some of that on this channel and it didn't really go well let's uh start in with the the fingerboard and i've got my guard here we don't uh accidentally dig into the top that would be a real shame at this point yeah it really would be let's get the straight edge so now we have to figure out exactly where we're at we're going to be taking this to it yes pinch the guitar between our hip and the wall it just looks weird to do this yeah yeah and you're putting in a bit of a curve to it too yeah yeah i can see from the top where you're kind of giving a little twist on it to this side and then also to this side we're going to want to take off a little bit more here and a little bit less here ideally if we did things right before we should be able to just smooth out the top side we'll be ready to put in the frets can you put most of the curve on the on the top because the strings are bigger well yeah we put the curve on it because if you have a perfectly flat fingerboard and you do a bar fret it feels like it's concave yeah so your finger will naturally want to curve to it so that's why we want to put a little bit of curvature on the top side yeah and then we also have to put in a relief because one of the misnomers is that that the neck has to be perfectly straight that's not the case at all uh you actually need to have the curvature to mimic uh what i call the envelope of movement of the string yeah because if you have a dead straight neck you have to have the action really really high in order for the strings not to slap around the 12th fret so we're looking to get most of our curve between the first and seventh fret and then after that it should start to straighten out okay let's get this top side flattened out let me know if i'm screwing anything up too bad don't break anything i'm trying not to kind of hard to turn this it's not a natural position is it no it's really weird frankly so careful not to push down too much yeah because now you're starting to flex the neck yeah that's no good it feels like i'm going to get into one of the frets and take it off you know yeah let's see where we're at we're starting to get a little bit of relief here as well i really took off a good chunk here that's right yeah it'll stand out we haven't taken anything to that yet yeah and you want to put more bias over towards the first string so that way your hand can fall into a more natural position we're getting there we need to definitely work more on this upper end and we're getting into really delicate areas here that sounds really good yeah yeah all right we don't want to cause a divot so let's take a check again that's what i would call a medium crown some people want a little bit more some people want a little bit less very little gap here it's about the thickness of a cheap thin business card we use standard measurements around here we also have to take into account the flex of the neck when you look straight down you can see the bow yeah which is what you want because if you if you don't have that bow in there it's gonna buzz this is a classic guitarist move to go into a guitar store and do this and pretend like you know what you're talking about but what you're looking for just a little bit of a curve if you can see it's just very very subtle once we get the string tension onto it it'll pull up just a touch and we'll be a lot more visible but the frets will also counteract that all right so what's next up so now we're gonna scrape the fingerboards and smooth it out we should give it a one last feel it feels good to me all right all we're gonna do is take our sandpaper we're gonna use the flecks of the neck in our favor so by putting the cradle up here push down a little bit and get a little bit of that flex into the neck so now we need to make sure that the slots are completely cleaned out because we're going to be sizing the fingerboard filling all the pores of it and essentially plasticizing the top surface now we're going to go back to our chelsea fan the super glue but we want to do it in a thin layer get a very carefully circle like that spread it out careful not to run over the slots because we don't want to fill them in but we want to have the entire area filled it's just uh oops that's plenty that's funny i think i went a bit overboard there we're putting super glue on it to fill the holes right and then just sanding it all down back to the wood so that it's there's no place for water or other oils to catch in the wood is that right yeah and it'll help make it buff up cleaner and be really shiny and now that we've got the fingerboard done we should also think about dots you mentioned you wanted uh five seven and nine yeah let's do five seven nine it would be playing cool that should be good yeah it looks great we're going with the uh two millimeter pearl and then uh the one and a half millimeter powell i have along here we do a lot of test pieces because there is some variability in the size of the pearl because it's such a small area between the frets i'm very neurotic about this because you get one chance at it so i go one two three four five we need to figure out the exact centers between each fret so if we go from the edge of the frets then i could make it 30 probably okay so we'll make a 15 yeah 15. now we have to measure between the edge of the ebony and that line right there okay we're going to mark our spot here now we've established our hole i'm actually going to pinch this so go for uh nine because it's the same size there we go so here's one with a nice color it's very very small it's really shiny side here now's the hard part get this lined up and get it into the hole lightly just a little bit of glue okay god there we go that's all you need i guess you just supposed to hit it once so there we go not sanding the top and knocking in some frets [Music] that's pretty satisfying so now we need to go in and cut the frets deeper yes because they were at the proper length and then we got rid of a lot of material right so i've got a guard here i've got it set to the depth of the fret tang plus a gnat's hair very carefully okay drop the tail the saw just to touch to mimic the curve of the uh instead once you can see the border starting to move the dust around then you know you've got the right there's a lot of glue in this one sorry well i i'm going to include it looks like you can really see too why you have this yeah yeah texting over it you know i don't want to put an accidental saw cut into a 100 000 or 200 000 guitar at the end of the fret wire this is not a perfectly right angle here where the tang meets the fret head the fret end is kind of like a mushroom from super mario brothers type shape so what i like to do is break the corners of the fret slots so that way this edge will actually sit down flush against the top of the fingerboard oh okay to round off the edges so it's not right i mean there's really no right angles just about on the guitar no straight lines no right angles no nothing even in the frets even in the frets is this so that it goes in better now or so that later it can be worked on more easily both it only takes a minute or so to do but it makes all the difference in the world i remember at ska taylor guitars you guys kind of put in the front wire rather flat we did and long yeah something like something like this yeah that looks right so you won't be doing that today no we're not going to be doing that today i like to have the the hands of my clientele be uh intact at the end of the day we're going to take the fret wire we're going to bend it and we're going to put an arch into it put a little bit of an arch for this right so we're not having to pull it down we're actually smooshing it on the slot and do you put glue in there too or no we put glue in after the fact because we want to make sure that everything is down so that way if we've got a little fret end that's sticking up we can give it a whack so you're you're just getting rid of the extra oils and stuff that the company put on the front you can see how much extra oil yeah yeah you can actually yeah yeah we tune everything including the front wire let's hear that note again make sure it stays straight up and down give it a crank and it's already set into the angle like oh and this is going right into my face you should be familiar with the front wire in your face by this point in time and all we have to do is clip it to the exact size that we want ever so slightly long it's looking a little [Music] is satari decibels yeah we gotta check our work a little bit of a rock here [Music] and then to get some of the extra relief we're going to dress all these frets with the exception of the first fret and we're going to leave that one relatively undressed so that way it helps to add some more of that relief in and what is dressing the frats filing finally yeah do we put the first thread in now or do we do that after dressing after dressing after dressing so now we glue chop off the ends file down the sides and then do all the same for the first fret yes as you can see i'm just putting a drop of glue we're using gravity for us so it runs along the edge now we have to clip off the extra ends and then i'll put a guard oh yeah just up against here before i move the guitar i like to just kind of make sure that i've got all of them before i move because the worst thing that you can have happen at this point is to have one of these little guys on your bench like that and you flip the guitar around awesome 17 18 19. perfect okay yeah we did get that one we're actually gonna have to go outside and fluff off the towel just to be safe now we have to file off the edges it would be so easy to go into that headstock right now it is this is where it gets [Laughter] difficult the thumb right against this so use your thumb as a spacer nice we got a little bit more to take off here yeah yeah how do you round off the sides instead of holding the file like this hold it like this next step is filing the tops of it so do you need to do some filing for your file before we file no but i'm going to file it away to do it later okay we're just getting the frets straight yeah even even we've got this all evened up all we have to do is bump in this last fret this is one of those things where it makes all the difference in the world on how it plays i love how there's extra care to just the first fret oh it's the most important one the nut is set to the first fret which then sets up everything downstream so if you aren't paying attention to the first fret and the positioning of the nut then everything else just kind of falls on its face oh those are the frets those are the frets frets are in beautiful yeah it's still pretty sharp i would not recommend playing this way you're just tossing a little angle off the edge quite a bit of an angle actually and that's why we don't stand on the top of the fence until after this yeah well the important thing was getting the dots in yeah they look beautiful i see a lot of handmade guitars and older guitars where those dots aren't perfectly there and i've kind of wondered like why did it end up going to the side now i definitely know that seventh fret is a little bit to the right and that's because i didn't do a super great job with the drill bit i got it into the hole where it's supposed to go and then it just moved to the side actually you know what i've rationalized that to myself with other guitars where when you're playing it it looks like it's in the middle if it's a little bit to the right oh if you're yeah at this angle it's it's right in the middle which was intentional clearly of course i was thinking that yeah they were thinking of the player when they sent that out exactly yeah genius we're gonna give the top a light sand but i wanted to get a lot of the ebony dust off but you can feel that this is all nicely grounded over oh yeah yeah the sides are nice and rounded off how long did it take you to round the edges off here i typically spend about an hour rounding the edges i've done the first pass of sanding on the back let's show that so first we start with sandpaper all right we're going to use my fancy dancing sandpaper all right working only in line we can't even go slightly across we have to go perfectly in line now we're getting into really really fine yeah you can hear that versus oh yeah i think that should be good it feels really nice we need to round these corners just like that all right and then repeat the process for all this this is a really crisp and sharp edge we could go with just like a round over on it but i never liked that look so i like that crispness but softened and this is yeah that's nice basically any place where you're going to feel like you're going to cut yourself is where you need to do this just getting in every corner after that all the corners so as we're getting ready for finish for every minute that you spend on prep work it saves you 10 to 15 minutes and i was noticing here about a couple streaks over here it's kind of hard to see just barely it's barely but that's the difference between a guitar that looks like it's been well made versus something that's cheap and it's got to be perfect before we put the shellac on it because then it's right i'm going to go through the same process for the rest of the instrument you feel the difference now yeah yeah i do but to me that's too rough on the surface so i'm just walking out for a 320 pad uh because i've worked through 120 150 180 i actually don't know what those numbers really mean the number of grits per certain size and now we're getting to much much finer is this going to be the final sand before this is a final sand before we put down our first wash coat of shellac and we're just going to do one [Music] now it almost feels like it feels like a finished guitar yeah like it doesn't even feel like wood at this point because it's so smooth well the finish that we're going to be putting on to it is so incredibly thin it has to feel like this before we can go on out of the 100 hours it takes to build a guitar like this how many of those hours are dedicated just to sanding probably close to 15 hours 16 hours maybe more we're gonna do our first wash coat of shellac on the back so we need the same shellac that we started making yeah i'm going to be using that because we made that last week this is all i've got left for now and this will be used up we've been using this bottle for i can't even tell you how many decades it looks like it bridge already has a well that's just ready for buffing at this point french polishing is nothing more than putting on really thin layers you just take the cheesecloth put it on there and then i'm just gonna blot it out you can see yeah see why it looks like that the bottle is properly shellacked i like to start at the corner and seal in this is probably where most of the openings are you see how much color is being picked up on the pad what is that color that's the alcohol soluble dyes in the wood naturally so i don't want to pull them onto the lemon wood all the way around the perimeter and then i recharge and here's where it gets pretty oh you really goop it on there too now watch out that's really starting to come together you can start to see the natural beauty of the wood come out that's all we need for our first wash coat we'll do that over the entire guitar and how many coats are there thousands upon thousands of coats because you're constantly going over and coming back and forth feel this you feel how it's kind of now yeah wood filler you take this and smear it in so in the old days they would use sawdust and this is now synthetic oh okay okay and it basically fills all the pores filling all the cracks in the web yep remember how i'm always saying go this way this one you actually want to go against the grain to get that in there i'm not leaving a whole lot on the surface this is one of my favorite places to send a client a photo of their guitar i mean it does look like we just made a fine piece of art now we're just rubbing mud all over it adjust a little extra moisture we'll call that good for now do you put this wood filler on everything i choose the colors so i'm not going to use this on the neck of course so there's different types of wood filler this is now dry to the touch we can sand this back and now when you feel it you can also feel how smooth it is then you essentially do the same thing to every single side except for the front yes but without the orbital sander yes and i'll have a mountain of dead sandpaper yeah and i'll be covered head to toe and dust the interior of my car is dirtier than the exterior of my car because of sanding this so now we can actually throw on another wash it smells like a pretty heavy booze smell i'm putting a very very heavy coat on for this first coat we got it finely sanded wash coat of shellac wood filler wash coat of shellac and now we're on to putting shellac on in a different way to make it shiny yeah the shellac is this constant building process so we're going to add and take away and add and take away 320. we're just going to sand this so as you continue going every layer you just get more and more careful with it until you're on to the fine linens and that's where you have the french polish yes so now we've got our egyptian lining we're just going to go back and forth like this we're just going to do this probably two or three times so now it's just a process of repeating this yes if you could handle me the bottle of olive oil this is just same olive oil you would put on a pan if you're cooking yes i'm going with a medium pressure and you can see that it's really starting to yeah come up and pop it's really really thick too like it really takes a lot of pressure to just move it around you're starting to get a nice shine already like even just looking at the back versus the side is wild most varnishes you can't touch it this soon but go ahead that's fine it's dry and it's smooth wow okay so now we can come back and just fan it we're gonna move to the 600 grit sandpaper and then 1200 1500 and 2000 and then work it just with pure everclear to wipe it away now you can see why i go through mountains of sandpaper yeah yeah totally i know this is like watching grass grove was slightly less exciting there's really a lot of steps to finishing wood and it takes a long time to figure it out too and to learn the process yes it's just pure this is pure everclear pure green up if you finish it with like a high grade whiskey tequila well i mean you wouldn't want to no you wouldn't want to it's just a waste tequila do some guitar builders distill their own alcohol allegedly yes allegedly this looks amazing and this is just getting started it'll be not even close to being done we have many hours of this left comment if you want a 30 hour shellac video yeah i can real time i can do a live stream on this one if you want so now we're going to do all those same things with the top yes well you must listen to a lot of podcasts i do a lot of books on tape a lot of podcasts giraffe femur is what you make the net out of like real draft yeah is the draft okay it's feeling much better now why draft because that was what was for sale on ebay so any femur will do yes yes can you legally buy giraffe femur yeah it's on ebay this giraffe had a full life and then died though right yes yes it died of natural causes it was a former zoo born in captivity raising captivity i think it was like 50 somewhat years old when it died so and then the zoo still sells the femur and other bones too the the draft economy is just totally new thing to me when i die you can take my femur and use it on the note of a guitar i would actually love that i would love for my femur to be on you know what the problem with human femur is i mean not that i have a whole lot of experience with human femur it's just too small and you can't get a good sized nut out of it you can't no at this point we've got the top mostly french polished it needs to be buffed and whatnot now we have to put a little bit of a hollow into the bridge so what i'm really interested in here is how do you make sure that the bridge is in exactly the right spot because if it's not this guitar is ruined do you double check it with a string or something or is it is that measurement no in typical fashion we've got a tool to take all the thought out of it we're going to score this up yeah back to gluing yeah there we go first we need to drill these out again okay just very gently roughly here now just eyeball it tell me where you think it's going to be and then we'll measure it okay i'm going to say this is too far right here no wait that's that's wrong do we want to point out the big thing comment down below if you can see what's wrong with this there you go really yeah of course wow i'll go with that i'll go with that oh what is it what is that okay it was really close okay that was really close we're gonna tape this to this measurer put a couple pieces of tape on the back side once we've got our tape placed onto here we're going to put this down onto the top at that point we're going to take our knife we're going to hold it down and we're going to scribe a line around the perimeter of the top and then you're going to cut out and then we're going to scrape out all the finish that we've just put down yeah this is definitely at the part of the process where you're taking over taking this to the guitar but first well we're going to give this a quick buff so we take away any of the excess oils and stuff like that this is really nerve-racking buffing this close to the finish time it's been less than about 15 minutes and normally i like to give it at least 12 hours or overnight the finish is really really soft and has a really high potential of burning [Music] i'm filming now i'm getting ready to splunk this down to figure out exactly where i want this to be so i'm going to start with that i'm going to sight down the fingerboard and check my left to right i can definitely come over just a smidge for the scale it should measure out at 650. all right very carefully take my scraper and uh all this beautiful french polish that we just put on last a little bit coming in all right and there we go we're back to bare wood all right so we've got a good idea you know this way i can get the light into the guitar i can see exactly what i'm doing as i position oh i didn't realize you're putting the light so that you can see through and see the braces yeah high braces oh i remember those what i i won't need to do is put this in underneath here and i want to make sure that i'm not you know crooked like this by using the light kind of as an x-ray machine yeah we can see exactly where we're going to go with it so that way we can when we glue the bridge it can clamp with that on the other side right all right it works thread our clamps into place tape over the bridge holes so we don't get glue back into them after we just clean them out just make sure everything's in place and ready to go glue is being spread so we are at the front of no returns all right that goes there all right and the bridge is down so we went from essentially raw wood today to having a bridge glued on with frets installed and a back filled and my work cut out for me for the rest of the week yeah it always looks so cool with the clamps too all right and that stays in there for about 24 hours yeah this is at least an overnight glue all right cool just gonna leave me hanging like that oh i thought you were telling me to stop no no i was giving you a high five all right yeah day five our hundred yeah we're getting right down to the end of it what you aren't seeing on camera is that i'm doing a lot of work in between and this one it doesn't look like a huge change from where we left it last time i think i've got 30 somewhat hours since last week so what beauty in those 30 hours yeah the sides now good grief i continued to polish up the top i did a double fill over the entire guitar so that means putting that filler on like i showed you last week sanded that back wash coated it put filler on sanded it back wash coated it and that was all after a major final sanding this is all hand-padded french polish wow no spray gun no nothing this is all done by hand and it just takes hours upon hours because of the style of music that you play and personally i believe that every single guitar should have one of these i put a clear pick arter in the classical world we call it a tapping plate or a goldbedor it's more removing that final boundary of trepidation for most classical guitarists it prevents nail marks it'll keep a lot of great guitars in circulation if they had them this will allow you to play whatever you want however you want it because this finish is micro thin plated the surface with the shellac instead of causing an actual physical buildup like you see on a lot of mass-market guitars today we're gonna start off by polishing up the frets we're gonna buff the guitar we're gonna polish the frets one more time we're gonna get the tuning machines installed we have to cut a saddle and a nut for it put the label on last and then strings i'm assuming did you bring any no we're going to start off with the 320 sanding the surface of the wood we're sanding the surface of the frets we're gonna get right up against the edge now we've done that with the 320 go straight to the 600 same deal same deal it feels smooth it really is it doesn't feel like wood anymore no it doesn't got a lot of ebony on my fingers here uh let's get this sucker polished up this one it's really easy to throw the guitar [Applause] beautiful that's shiny yeah you just kind of get the excess wax off all right so now we have to buff up the the guitar this is a automotive polish this is usually for cars yeah we're gonna constantly be moving [Music] there's so many layers over the wood [Music] see the reflection you can see jake there so we're going to just do that for the whole guitar and it just comes up beautifully yeah there he is yeah i can read what lens you're using even through the headstock oh yeah [Music] at this point in time i do like to try to keep my grubby hands off the guitar as much as possible i intentionally don't finish my ramps nor the tip of the headstock just because i actually like that textural contrast between the shiny and the yeah i like it too we have to sand this with a block of 120 grit sandpaper and then sand it with 220 and 320. then we're going to take it to our polishing wheel and polish it on the guitar without touching any of the other finish and almost at this point doesn't seem real like do you get that sense too like when you look because now that it's shiny and finished like like we didn't make this yeah listen like we didn't put that in i don't know all polished up it just doesn't it just looks so much different i'm so used to it looking like that and wipe it up yeah next up we're gonna install the tuners four screws each the ebony is so pretty it is each roller has a bearing on the inside and outside edge so that way if there's any goop inside of the holes it doesn't creak it doesn't make a whole lot of noise and everything turns a lot easier so it's a lot easier on the gears and yeah ball bearings on both sides yep when we drilled the holes we actually drilled it undersized so do you drill it again yeah how much is this set about 350 oh really yeah 300 wow nice yeah they're not well they're my entry level yeah this first pass is literally just getting rid of the goop second pass starting to cut into the wood a little bit and the last thing you want to do is go all the way through and this one brings it to the proper size for the machines right we are ready for the machines it's such a huge moment when tuners go onto a guitar beautiful like it was made wars damn like a big lego piece look at that that the tuning pegs match the fretboard is so lovely i'm also oddly particular about the way that the screws go into the head is it that you want them all to be i want them using the same way yes and i don't want them over tight either all right got a sheet of label so this way if we screw up we've got another we're gonna just number this real quick it's fitting too that your number 96 looks like you've done that 96 times and mine looks like i've never written anything but we have to lock in the signature you're going to shellack it that's it all right and now we need to make a saddle what is this atom the saddle is the piece of work that's here we're gonna have to fit him up for this as well now we're going on to what the string is going to be touching yes this is the actual playable part of the string yeah the actual setup this is a chunk of draft female bone dust yes it's going to smell like the dentist in here a really intense dentist it's now nice and smooth so you just got to do the rest of it here yep how thin do we oh we're going to get down to 2.2 or 2.3 millimeters all right this is kind of the adjustable part of the bridge yes this is a very adjustable part of the bridge this should never ever be glued in so it's just on there by a good fit and once the strings are on that'll keep it down oh and you measure the action that way yeah and then i'm going to come over to the sixth string and calling that three and a quarter and then you just shape it with the standing wheel i don't know if that's really nice but yeah bring that across there [Music] i see you have just the slightest curve in there a very well-defined edge you've got a very defined stopping point for the string if it's too flat or if it's rounded you don't have that crisp edge which gives you the crisp no a common mistake i see with a lot of really well-known makers is that they'll round it over because it looks nice but the problem is that you get a very indistinct and fuzzy end of the note you want all the energy to be reflected well done here to here to that to here just polishing it up now it looks so much like guitar saddles i've seen so many times it's just i haven't been aware of any of the process up to this point how it was made was really a mystery this is the kobe sand this down until it fits because there's an ever so slight taper we're going to have to work with that and make sure it stays square it's wider over here and narrower over here is this not glued in either no that's like never glued out do you just file in where the streams go oh yeah all right yeah that fits [Music] and get out of feel yeah it's just barely wider so now all we have to do is file these down [Laughter] it feels like this is just one thing three different pieces of wood here and bone it just feels like it's one thing very nearly done this is essentially the string height line gonna sand this down a little bit put a little curvature on it so we've got a wide angle on there one of my dad's vintage business cards here's the outside edge of the nut outside edge of the nut first string your sixth string or uh you can see i've left a thick pencil line you don't want all the slots to be the same depth you want to have the first string a little lower second higher and third even higher you're going to cut the first string down to the bottom of the pencil line second is going to go to the middle and third is going to go to the top of it this is really really really specific yes i'm surprised that you're using the same file for all of them i figured they would all be different for a classical it's about the depth change not the diameter change because the size difference is almost not that all right there we go yeah can you see the little steps of each string so now it's just a matter of turning the edge over all right let's polish her up all right boom all right so polish the fingerboard we'll polish the fingerboard one more time the label in lunch strings that goes back to smelling good yes we cleared the bone dust from the air throughout the course of the build of the guitar there's a lot of stuff that just kind of falls in so yeah you always want to oh yeah how did that make it in there don't even use picks on classical guitar well that's how ubiquitous the problem is i know here's our treated label this is the only place where we're going to use white glue on the entire guitar it all now just doesn't feel like wood anymore it feels like a piece of marble or something i mean i understand why you're doing it it's just funny that this also requires sanding because every and the only reason i use the wood glue for this is because it is waterproof and it cannot be undone every other joint on here has been done with a glue that can be easily undone either through solvent or moisture in hand from label that's awesome i love it the guitar other than the strings is done it is done yeah now it feels like this is a real guitar now it is we're at the beginning of this it was just a there's a lot of wood it was a pile of wood that we fished out of my wood room all right show us how to restring your classical guitar really simply it goes in we loop around one two three times for the first string for this one it comes through it's actually taught you go one two times around in the direction that you want the string to wind roll it over so that way the string is pinching down on itself it's first note it's happening it's happening [Music] i was like we used to wind yeah [Music] this one you just bring it around here oh that's it pull it tight the trick with this is making sure that all the last loops are locked down behind the bridge so that way it's pulling into it i just go around once because these strings are pretty grippy [Music] make sure everything is in place we got ourselves a two string [Music] i love that was told as a kid to do two and then five because it would stretch the neck or yeah that's do you stretch them no no so you don't want to do that everything i was told about street stringing allowance strings is just yeah all wrong [Music] yeah i love the gold strings too you can see how we've got the fingerboard set to mimic the envelope of movement yeah of the string nylon strings vibrate so much wider than electric guitar steel strings do i think this is really like look how big that is yeah it's like two centimeters there we go and that is a completed guitar thank you so much sir thank you i hope you enjoy it we all roll on everything yes sir awesome [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] do [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] do [Music] i think that's it yeah thank you yeah all right well thanks so much for being along for this very long journey um special thanks to marshall for giving us the opportunity and giving me the opportunity to build my own guitar and making this this this beautiful instrument this took 100 hours to build we were there for 40 of it and marshall took care of all the stuff that didn't end up on camera like a ton of sanding and varnishing marshall wanted to give a discount to anyone who would want to get a beautiful instrument from them that's in the description you can use the coupon code scallon and yeah i'm sure this isn't the last time i used this guitar so if you'd like to subscribe that's right here um as well as i'm sure we'll be on a lot more musical adventures so thanks so much for watching especially something of this length we appreciate you and we'll see you soon

Channel: Rob Scallon

Views: 603,374

Rating: 4.9756055 out of 5

Keywords: Rob Scallon, music, musician, guitar, guitarist, building a guitar, profession luthier, building a classical guitar, nylon string, every step of building a guitar, build a guitar by hand, luthier, pro, pro luthier, building a guitar from scratch, sca-taylor, build, instrument build, instrument, wood working, wood, every step, how to build a guitar, how guitars are made, how it's made, how a guitar works, classical guitar

Id: qmDAIlEGO_Q

Length: 141min 26sec (8486 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 15 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/kermathefrog]

Not sure if this is against the sub rules, but I thought this was a nice video because they explain how the process works to a layman Rob (and by extension, the viewer).

[u/II_M4X_II]

I watched this a few days ago and it's a great video.

What I like about Rob is that he is constantly asking the Luthier interesting questions.

[u/GroovinDrum]

I like the video, however, it has a bit too much of a cooking show vibe with 'I have prepared this already' moves in it (for e.g. carving the braces, finishing the meck profile, etc.)

But overall, catched a few nice things, a few I would make differently (e.g. why not get a CNC instead if having this copying jig for the neck).