Guitar Building
2007/2008

A brief display of my journey into guitar building.

As of February 19th, 2008
David N. Sillars

^ ^ Nope, I'm not behind bars, I'm building a guitar.

On Saturday, June 16, 2007 at 9:00 AM, I started on a six-month journey to build a steel string guitar. I completed the guitar on December 21. I started the next guitar on January 12th, 2008.

I enrolled in the Spring of 2007 in a class held at Gary Rogowski's Northwest Woodworking Studio in Portland. My wife, Carol, and I travelled on Friday up from Corvallis (100 miles south) and stayed the evening and that weekend so that I could attend the class. Carol attended a class in cooking at the Oregon Culinary Institute, which she loved.

The class met on three weekends during the summer--one weekend in the middle of each month of June, July, and August. A new class, formed for the summer of 2008, now is structured as six weekends. I think this will make the class better by providing more instruction between in-studio sessions.

The instructor was Dan Biasca (that's him to the right above, demonstrating how to bend the guitar sides), who is teaching this class of six students how to make a steel string guitar.

The guitar we built? The small jumbo steel string guitar shown on the photo to the right that Dan brought to and played for us on that first Saturday. Our workbenches are ready...

Dan Biasca demonstrating side bending

Biasca guitar at the Northwest Woodworking Studio

The following links will take you to some of the various stages of the guitar construction so far, and a few of my successes and lessons learned the hard way: A map of the process is available here. Or, you can see the Cliff Notes version here (be patient, it takes a few moments to load).

Note that I started Guitar #2 on January 12, 2008.

For a comparison of work hours, I've included a column that shows what the learning curve will do to reduce worktime on the second guitar.

Activity	Step completed	Work Hours	Cumulative Hours	Guitar #2 Hours	Guitar #2 Cumulative
Assembling the top and back	June 17	10	10	4	4
Crafting the rosette	July 02	11	21	4	8
Installing the back braces	July 21	16	37	11	19
Fabricating the kerfing	July 10	3	40	1	20
Bracing the soundboard	July 21	25	65	9	29
Building the neck	October 6th	49	114	12	41
Trimming and bending the sides	July 15	12	126	3	44
Cutting the soundhole	July 21	8	134	1	45
Side assembly	August 22nd	31	167	18	63
Assembling the body	September 9th	14	181	3	66
Fabricating the fingerboard	August 20	4	185
Crafting the bridge	December 2nd	10	195
Installing Bindings and Purflings	October 7th	22	217
Connecting neck to body and detailing	October 14th	10	227
Final sanding and applying finish	November 25th	44	273
Installing the bridge and hardware	December 8th	13	286
Setting upthe guitar to play	December 21	5	291