All of the wood for this guitar will be cut from the same billet, except the soundboard and bridge. The chosen billet is sliced into thin sections to get quartersawn back and sides. Disclaimer: Even though I wrote some of these articles, I make nothing from the sale of these books.Īll of my maple is figured (also called fiddle-back, tiger-stripe or flame maple). The Big Red Books, published by the Guild of American Luthiers, contain a wealth of information for builders and should be in the reference library of every luthier.
An explanatory article and reduced plan appears in Big Red Book #2.
5 double courses, 9 tied frets highly vaulted back. This guitar may have been owned by Marie Antoinette. I now get so many requests for baroque guitar plans that I need to direct builders to this page: This is a technical drawing of a baroque guitar that was measured by R.E. I monitor both my workshop and wood storage areas with certified hygrometers. I bought this piece of figured maple from a lumberyard here in Ohio about 30 years ago and stored it in a low-humidity environment. I only use perfectly quartersawn wood in all of my instruments, simply because it is the only way to insure that the wood will not twist or warp later on. This allows me to resaw it with the grain exactly at right angles to the flat side of the board (quartersawn). Building a baroque guitar, building early instrumentsīack to Building Historical Musical Instruments