I was in the room I use for playing guitar. This room doubles as a room where my grandson creates his playdoh figurines. He is six, and loves making characters out of Playdoh. Anyway, I was at the other end of the room noodling around on one of my guitars. I had just finished playing a Les Paul, and wanted to mess with the Mustang for some surf sounds. Instead of putting the Les Paul back where I keep it, I decided to put it on a stand next to me. My grandson came over to me, and accidentally bumped the stand. The guitar fell from the stand, and hit the headstock of the Mustang I was playing. My grandson felt horrible as it left a ding in the neck of the Les Paul. I could tell he was really sad. I think he saw the initial look on my face, and knew it wasn't good that it happened. He went back over to play with his playdoh but I could tell he was totally crushed. So I went over, and explained to him that it was just as much my fault, because I should have put it away. That made him feel better but I could tell, not totally because after that, he was always afraid to come back by me after that, when I was on the guitars. I totally hated that because him and I are very tight. He always came over to me before, and I would let him try a little guitar stuff. He is always with me when they come over. Fast forward to a couple weeks ago. I was in a Guitar Center, in a state 1300 miles away from where we live. I seen a very nice Les Paul on the wall for sale. It looked very close to the one that got dinged. So I bought it on an impulse. I gave the other one to my nephew, and told him it was an early Christmas present. He didn't care about the ding whatsoever. I then took the new one I bought, and the next time my grandson was over I showed it to him. I generically told him the neck issue was resolved. He looked at the guitar gave me a huge hug, and we are back to normal. He has no reservations about coming back when I'm on the guitars anymore. Which is great!!Some will say I shouldn't have lied to him. But in reality I didn't. I thought long, and hard to ensure that later on when he was old enough to understand I could tell him, and show him i didn't lie. If the topic ever came up. The issue was in fact resolved. So there was no lie. I think had anyone seen the look of relief on his face, and had gotten that big hug that I got from him, they would have done the same thing. He is way too young to be going day to day heartbroken because he thinks he ruined a guitar of mine. Plus he is a very high spirited little boy. I want him to stay that way.. Guitars are replaceable, grandchildren are not. Anyway, that's how I resolved the problem. Sorry it was a bit long.
@@bradleymerino1531 I totally agree 100%. It was just one of those moments. I went in to get strings, and I came out with strings. Except they were attached to a guitar. This is one time when I bought something and didn't have even a second of buyers remorse
I'm in the middle of mine right now. I've been working on a prototype of my own electric guitar. Drew it out. Roughed out a template. Sanded and finished the template shape. Put the template on a body blank with a spalted maple cap. Cut and routed the body. Put it on my lap to get a feel for the shape and realized I put the template on the wrong way. Oh, well the prototype is going to be a lefty.
I had just finished building one of the fanciest classical guitars I had ever made at the time. I was so proud of it, it had to be perfect. I strung it up, tuned it, played it, and noticed a little hazy spot on the finish. Took it to the buffing wheel real quick and the guitar was pulled from my hands by the buffer at light speed and thrown to the ground. Sorry to say, there is no happy ending to that story.
The difference between an apprentice and a journeyman is that a journeyman knows how to fix their mistakes and make it look intentional 😉🤪 Good story and a fun adventure! Thanks, fellas!
I was routing the binding and purfling channels on my first guitar. I had already routed my neck mortise. I did the purfling pass and remembered to stop at the neck mortise. On the second pass for the binding, the router bearing dropped into the mortise and routed a chuck out my back. I was freaking out but, luckily, didn’t throw it across the room. I have learned in woodworking to walk away, so I did. I had been reading Larry Robinson’s The Art of Inlay, so the next day something occurred to me. I designed a crest and inlayed it. It has become my signature on all subsequent guitars. I made it a design element.
Trained as a watchmaker/clock repairman the best advise I ever got was “Sometimes it is best to walk away for a while.” Indeed! Applies to my guitar building hobby even more!
The first mandolin I ever made completely collapsed under the string pressure after about 5 minutes, I carved the top far too thin. I also didn't test it before applying the sunburst with leather dyes and french polishing it all by hand. That was the only time I literally cried over a mistake lol
I love all of your videos, especially the "series" videos. The advice Chris gives about stepping away from the mistake and sleeping on it is dead on. So good. Thanks.
Only on my first guitar currently, but already had some challenges. One was breaking bindings while getting ready to install them (I had already broken 4 before that while trying to bend them). The biggest one which made me almost give up and start over from scratch was getting the neck angle drastically wrong! Fortunately I was able to fix both. Hey guys, love this series already! Keep it up!
Oh yeah... Years ago I was making #7 - my first cutaway for my nephew. Typically I trim the sides for the radius on the back before bending. Out in the garage I go bending the Wormy Maple (Ambrosia Maple) on a pipe with a torch. The bending went really well for my forth time and first cutaway. A couple days later, I begin to attach the heel and tail blocks, throw it into a mold, then realize I reversed the top and back! Slept on it... I started to level the (new) top side and radius the (new) back side, hoping I don't end up with a 2 1/2" thick body :( I press on, finish the build and gave it to him. He was over the moon! He's played the @#$% out of it. A couple months back I visited him and the guitar was out on a stand. I picked it up and eyeballed it, noticing my obvious mistake and recovery, but he still loves it as one of his prize possessions. And it sounds really good in his hands. Thanks for leading this off gents.
I'm only in the pore filling stage of my second acoustic guitar. I had a lot of help on my first two so far but instead of building a kit and buying jigs and forms I bought blueprints and built all my forms. Even then I'd made plenty of mistakes: - working with western red cedar for a top on my first. Smells pretty but it seems like you're forever sanding out scratches and gouges. - i have a friend who is actually a luthier with over 100 guitars under his belt. When I showed him my newly braced top he did a deflection test, clucked his tongue, then proceeded to chisel of my poorly executed lap brace, the gave me one of his X braces and sent me home feeling very humbled - I tried to make a single wooden ring rosette our of some scrap rosewood but the first few attempts disintegrated and made a set of coasters. #2 ended up having a radial rosette. - Mahogany back and sides crack VERY easily. Once it's in the mold, KEEP it in the mold until you close the box. - I bent THREE left sides - and my friend got a guitar-shaped hanging basket out of the deal - made my own go-bar deck using driveway markers but didn't use any cauls. One of the gobars slid into the soundboard and speared a ladder brace that I had to then repair. - after the box was closed I realized that my sides had cupped, which made routing for binding channels problematic. I scraped the sides for what felt like weeks and now they're VERY thin - when cutting the binding channel the jig traveled and I ended up having to make a wider channel for purfling than I'd intended. - the binding strips do not line up where the two halves meet so I ended up creating an inlaid mirror to the heel cap to cover up the mistake. It actually looks nice - I also made a laminated neck with an MT neck joint but I followed Cumpiano's old style of tenon using a barrel bolt that is inbedded through a hole drilled laterally through the tenon. Unfortunately I used a very soft wood for the center laminations and when I tightened the bolts the tenon actually broke. My luthier friend fixed it for me and introduced me to threaded brass intserts and epoxy. - laminate necks can be hard to carve. I'm still shaping the neck even after finishing the guitar several years ago. #2 hasn't been any easier - especially in the purfling dept. I also sanded the top too thin.
I work in a body shop and itscall about making mistakes, fixing them and learning from those experiences. Been at it 7 years now. I started building tube amps last year and that was a fun learning experience. Again it's all about learning from our mistakes for sure
OMG! Great story and great subject man! Speaking of smashing guitars in my younger years, It was 200 degrees in my hot Texas garage. I just turned on my radio listening to the Astros game while I sprayed on my VERY last coat of LMI Waterborn finish on my VERY first acoustic Dreadnought that I had been building for the last several months. Literally just a day or two from strings. This was a neck-on finish. (I now know!) I had this guitar hangin from one of my garage door tracks with a bent piece of coat hanger through one of the tuner holes. Anyway, the hook somehow unbent. Maybe it was the Wife opening the garage door when she got home. (That was three wives ago. I blamed my second one on this incident also.) The guitar fell straight down and then did a lomcevak through my garage. The heel completely snapped off and hit a wall, parts and pieces if headstock everywhere. I stood there holding the sticky neck over my head ready to smash it all. That was 30 years ago. I repaired that guitar and learned a lot. It’s played all over Houston to this day. Thanks for the story’s man!
When I was 17 my dad and I decided to build a body for a StewMac neck. Fun process, built an Ibanez style body with a Nashville bridge and stop tailpiece. Didn't know to put a neck angle in the neck pocket so string tension was a problem. Added a Floyd style string bar at the headstock and that helped. Dad sprayed it with the paint he was using on his project car and ended up stripping and respraying it 3 times. Didn't know a thin finish was important. It looks good now, just doesn't play the best. Also we were in a rush to get it done to take on a trip to show my grandpa so ended up using a string for the grounding wire into the tailpiece stud. It worked, but our wiring job doesn't look the best.
29 years ago, I built a viola to play along with my son who was taking cello lessons ( he still plays cello as a member of the Pittsburgh Symphony). It took me the better part of a year, and I probably could have built a small house with the pile of mistakes I had left over. I threw out 8 or 9 scrolls before I finally got one that looked half decent. These days I am retired and making ukuleles for my grandsons, and the viola still is sitting, still is sitting in my chamber (with apologies to Edgar Allen Poe).
Failing is not a bad thing that's when the true learning happens took me building guitars to find this out, you guys are awesome keep up the great work
I’m a furniture maker who is in the process of building my first guitar ( you channel has giving me so much insight so thank you so much ) … being a professional woodworker I see so many issues with my first build, and my ego got ahold of me… on my first guitar I decided not to use super expensive wood, I went with some of the last pieces of walnut from my great grandfathers farm for the back and sides … turns out sentimental value trumps any amount of money for wood. The sides aren’t 100 percent perfect but the will work just fine… however I wanted to make everything but the top from wood my great grandfather cut down over 100 years ago… I used white cedar for the kerflling … horrible mistake! It’s so brittle / soft and crumbly, seems like it has white rot from sitting outside to long, every attempt to notch the sides for the braces on the top and back… causes Devastating… well not even tear out… just complete failure of the kirfling .. It’s horrible … I eventually just stabilized it all with bottles of thin superglue… but because the wood means so much I can’t start over. So on your first build don’t use any wood that means anything, financially of sentimentally … even if you think you know WTF your doing! Thank you guys again for all the info.
My 5th guitar, a commission. Like a doofus I glued down the fretboard in the wrong spot. It was set off center about 1/8” to the left. The guitar had a gorgeous sunburst finish that was a custom burst by a friend and well known builder. I re-glued the fretboard to its proper position which exposed bare wood along the fretboard extension. I had to hand paint the exposed top wood to match the burst of the guitar. Of course I did a crap job and it lived like that forever. Too many mistakes to mention here, but I learned from each of them and only made the big ones once. The key to fuckups is to walk away. Approach the mistake the next day as a learning challenge. Also, big mistake: never promise a specific delivery date on a guitar that you’ve never built before! Thanks for this series guys. Most enjoyable.
Omg "That's how the inlay was invented" perfectly sums up my biggest mistake (so far) and the exact reason that I learned how to do inlay! I was routing the truss rod access in a slotted headstock and failed to fully retract the bit before exiting the cut so I ended up with a 1/2 inch wide groove about 1/16th of an inch deep and 1 inch long down the middle of the headstock. So, I bought some strips of abalone and the Inlay book from Stewmac, and now the guitar has a beautiful inlay extending out form under the truss rod cover!
I’ve only built 4 electric guitars but on the last one I did a multi scale fanned fret 7 string. It came out amazing other than on the long scale I did 27” and on the short scale I did 25”. I should have done 25.5”. There’s bridges made for these specific scale lengths. I already had the fretboard done, neck was glued and all finish was applied. The fix I found was a LP tunomatic type 7 string bridge and made it work. It’s not ideal and the bridge angle is ridiculous, but it works and plays really well and sounds great. Lesson learned!!
I inherited my late uncle's vintage acoustic guitar in Jan. First musical instrument anybody ever showed me when I was a toddler. 20 years in a hot dry basement under string tension, belly bulge like a mountain. Didn't know anything, so I got some advice from youtube, indiscriminately. First I put a sopping wet rag in a styrofoam bowl inside the guitar and then stacked a bunch of books on the guitar belly. It actually worked well, in a couple days. Bridge still had a little bit of tilt forward though ruining the break angle. Next I put nails in the peg holes and married them together into an assembly and pulled them back towards the butt of the guitar with a pair of vise grips and a ratchet strap, to tilt the bridge back up perpendicular with the top (yeah the internet really did that). I also used a whole house humidifier to blow massive amounts of humidity right into the sound hole while I did that. A few hours. I could tell I was pushing it, but it worked perfectly. I played the guitar for the first time with a good break angle and it sounded magical. Half a day later the belly and the tilt were back. ... It sounded so amazing that I thought it would be worth it to have professional make it really right... Had some bad experiences with the local "guitar tech"s. But I found someone who was a real luthier, nice guy, told me to bring it by for him to take a look at. When he saw the guitar he panicked, he really freaked out (this guitar was mutilated in a lot of different ways, my uncle was from West Virginia and they 'fix' their own stuff out there and they didn't have UA-cam back then). I couldn't get the luthier guy to calm down until I explained that I actually preferred to fix this myself if it was possible. Once he knew that he didn't have to fix it he lightened up, and he gave me like an hour long free guitar repair lesson, it was really nice of him. He told me that bulge/tilt is just going to come back without a bridge doctor (I guess he assumed removing the back and replacing the bracing would be over my head, rightfully so). I asked him if the bridge doctor would kill the tone, and he tilted his head and shrugged his shoulders a little and said, "you'd be surprised". At any rate it had to be done. This is where it went south... I was too greedy for tone. The sound of the guitar for those precious moments when I had the break angle right, It made me lust after perfection for this old guitar. I thought about replacing the bridge plate and seeing if it held. At the end of the day I decided to listen to the luthier guy and put the bridge doctor on, and I can always take it off and replace the bridge plate later, and the wood will have benefited from gaining some memory back in a flat position because of the years with the bridge doctor. But I was not content to let the bridge doctor pull that bridge straight. I decided that I was going to try that trick with the nails and the ratchet strap one more time so that I can install the bridge doctor on a straight bridge and get it perfect. ... And because I didn't break my guitar the first time, I was way too bold the second time. ... I thought it would be good to humidify the guitar beforehand to soften it up, So I placed the guitar over the whole house humidifier for about 3 hours before putting the rig in with the nails. That was bad. When I went out there to put the rig on with the nails and the ratchet strap, the guitar had swollen up like a balloon. Literally round as a beach ball. So I decided to flatten it out with two boards and ratchet straps pulling them together, one across the back and one across the top. I think there are ratchet strapless along tool for that. It was the wrong tool being used to do the wrong thing in the first place. As soon as I attention on the ratchet straps pushing the boards to sandwich the (round) guitar flat, I heard a loud pop sound. I broke the deepest back brace right off the back, the end of it that was under the curving broke right off too. 2/3 of the brace was just flapping in the air, as round as the beach ball guitar it had broken off of. I didn't notice at the time but the second furthest brace was also coming unglued. Also, the top was ungluing from the sides and the neck block where the top meets the neck. ... ... I was so upset... ... I called the luthier guy to get his advice. He panicked. Started yelling. ..."you don't know what you're doing!" "I know!" ..."why are you putting humidity in your guitar???" "UA-cam" "I've told people 1000 times! Guitars are sensitive tone woods, you don't take your guitar in the shower with you! You don't put a bowl of water in your guitar! Wait until you get string tension on that thing, it's going to fall apart. The back is going to unglue. ... ..." He went on and on. He chastised me for every guitar humidity UA-cam I thought it was okay horror story he'd ever encountered from customers. I was so upset about the guitar that I didn't really care he was telling at me. So I say, "So if you were going to fix this guitar..." And he's like, "oh no, I'm backed up I don't have time to fix that guitar, you got this far you're going to have to put this thing back together." ... He was hysterical so I couldn't really get any information out of him on how to fix it. I was too distraught anyway. I put the guitar back in its chipboard case with three of those humidity control packs and hit it in the closet so I wouldn't have to look at it. I basically just wrote it off as ruined, and decided I would return to it and try to unruin it when the sands of time had washed away my sorrow. That was 6 weeks ago. And the interim I've watched a thousand hours of good guitar repair videos. Very discriminating on who I watch... Only RSW, that guy Randy, and you guys. Try not to get any information from anywhere else. A few days ago the swelling in the guitar and the pain deep in my heart both had went down enough for me to try to put this guitar back together. The braces glued back up nicely. The bridge doctor went in fine (I practiced by installing one on a cheap laminate guitar I have). The top glued back down to the next joint and the sides/binding nicely. Binding didn't quite close up so I added a little CA glue after the wood glue cured. ... The guitar is all better, except that the truss rod is seized (and now stripped) and there's way too much back bow. ... I've watched enough repair videos since that fateful beach ball guitar day that I don't think it would be a problem for me to pull the fingerboard off and replace the truss rod, if it has to be done. I would go super slow. Only it's a last resort though, in the meantime I tuned up all the strings to increase the string tension a lot, and I'm just giving it a few days to try to pull that back bow out. I've learned to let time work for me with this kind of thing. We'll see how it goes. Now I have two friends who have something for me to fix. Is this my "how I became a guitar tech" story? I guess we'll see.
1st 2 ukulele I ever made had bridges fly off after 2 weeks in Hawaii (I live and work in Wales UK). Saviour in the guise of Bob Gleason came to my rescue, gave me some good advice and started a long and continuing mentorship/friendship. We ll need mentors. And my the - don't make for money or friends until you totally know what you are doing.
Love the channel. My last build went south. I got tunnel vision, did a body shape change mid build, lack of attention cause me to keep on carving, pickup cavities ended up 3/4" out of center! I abandoned the build! Got a great neck out of it though! It's just really nice wood!
I totally get the screw up thing. You've worked so hard and something stupid happens. I admit I have cried when that happens when you are so close to perfection and then something stupid happens. They are definitely teachable moments. I had carved the most coolest neck and then it cracked. Fit perfect, looked amazing. All that time gone. When you build everything by hand and not CNC or whatever, it's a lot of time lost when that happens. But you are absolutely correct that it is all about learning and just part of the process. Nice to hear I'm not the only one and that someone like you has the same experiences. Kathy
I setup the bandsaw angle wrong when cutting the arm bevel on my p-bass. Ended up having the cut 2" further down than expected. Basically cut the side of the guitar off. I was able to plane the surfaces flat, line up the inlay features, and glue it back together. I had to change the shape a little, but its still great. the seam looks like a slightly odd wood grain. It's now a slab body P-bass with a slightly different profile. No one can tell the difference.
I'm at the finish line of my first ever build. There were some mistakes along the way. I used the wrong saw to remove material from the neck tenon and cut where I shouldn't have, almost nicking the truss rod. I fixed that by cleaning up the angles and fabricating a piece of purple heart. The PH stands out from the maple so I will always remember that mistake, but also completely fixes it and actually looks really cool, even intentional. Then I made an open front template for the neck pickup because I had already glued the neck in... and of course routed the neck right down to the 24th fret which is where the bearing stopped it. I once again fabricated a piece of curly maple and glued it in. Then created grooves around the piece and inlayed lava orange mica powder with epoxy and sanded it all flush. Makes it look like the neck pickup is oozing lava and the maple is on fire. Once again mistake fixed. Finally, I did not have the bit I really should have to drill the channel from the control cavity to the neck pickup and just broke through the top at the very edge of the pickup route. This was the most difficult to make look like something intentional because the piece is so small. Luckily it's almost hard to notice, almost. The top is stained, which came out really cool. Red underneath and sanded back so the stripes are red and then an amber yellow over that which makes the guitar look like fire. It looks good with just raw dry stain. Can't wait to put the finish on. About to finish and wire it up this weekend. It plays great! tested it prior to finishing in case I needed to make adjustments. For a first build from a guy who's previous projects were in middle school and consisted of a box that wouldn't close and a coat tree that falls over, I'd say it's an incredible feat that proves what I set out to prove as a doctor of education. A person can learn anything they want to, and almost nothing they don't. I did ALL the work, made the five piece neck, made the fretboard and cut the slots, installed the frets, literally everything from lumber to finish. I'm pleased as punch.
I don't build guitars but love the craft of it. I build drums. So I had a give away build for raffle for a local benieft . Solid steam bent birds eye maple snare drum. 8 lug with special made single point lugs. Did a nitro finish on the shell let it dry for 30 days or so. Wet sanded and Polished it, I only had 2 weeks left til the raffle. Put the shell on my drill pattern and laid it out. Drilled the shell, did the edges and started assembly. Only after I went to put the heads on and tension rods I realized I drilled two holes off..like they will not line up with the hoops at all. I had to get another shell finish it in oil finish and make sure I drilled it correctly. Finished it the morning of the raffle. Messure twice...and again..then drill or cut!
I made a laminated back for a guitar out of mahogany with tamo ash veneer either side, and glued it together with epoxy so as not to warp the veneer. However, when it came to gluing my bracing in place, the back was so rigid that it bent the bracing out straight. I eventually installed carbon fibre through the centre of the braces to overcome the rigidity of the laminated back, an engineering feat of great complexity. I now have a RIGID laminated back which has a surprisingly good tap sound. I hope the sides aren't as challenging.
I could probably fill a book with all my screwups that are related to not having good enough tools. But I think the one that caused the most despair was when I was making a special guitar for my daughter. I had made several guitars but this one I was wanting to make everything from scratch and had even made a side bender so I could say I bent my own sides. I had put a little strip up the back of the guitar like on a Martin, and I glued the back onto the guitar with this huge rubber band cut from a bike innertube that was so long that it covered the entire back from sight. Next day I took the rubber band off and I noticed that the back had slid over about 1/8" and the stripe was way out of alignment. I had put so much effort into making her guitar perfect. I have learned that I never start fixing things right away. I go think about it for a few days and usually decide on something good. I took my router and routed out the strip and inlayed a strip of mahogany where it was and then inlayed a new strip in the right place. It looks perfect and I showed it to my daughter only after she had the guitar for 15 years and she had never noticed it. You would have to pull up that center (you call it backstrap) strip from the inside of the guitar to see the remains of the original strip to figure out what I did. Now, when I see that repair, I think of it as one of my clever moments and I willingly show the repair to people.
Trying to compensate for a very high action on a friends acoustic/electric guitar, we made a slight adjustment to the truss rod, then opted to file the saddle a bit...Simple job... but we were on the road! So I didn't have a way of keeping the saddle square. Long story short, we didn't realize how uneven the saddle was until he plugged in to play live! THAT was very unfortunate and embarrassing for both of us - for different reasons! My takeaway, 'tis a true axiom, "The right tool for the right job." Fun series guys! Let the catharsis begin!!
I'm not sure that I'm ready to talk about it just yet, but I have a story about my 1965 Gretsch Chet Atkins Nashville. I got it when I was 14 and, 42 years later, it's still with me. Give me time....I might open up and get it all off my chest. 🥺
My biggest mistake by FAR was during my first electric build, which I'm still doing. I was working with some spalted maple, cutting out the fingerboard with my tablesaw. I made the cut properly, used the push stick to get the fingerboard through properly. But the waste piece was looking like it was headed towards the blade, and I was stupid and didn't have my riving knife on. So I went to just wipe the piece away from the blade and ended up cutting the pad of my left thumb across and down to the bone. Cut through the nerves and 60% of the tendon. Paramedics came by and cleaned all the blood out of my garage as I drove myself to the ER. Surgery and 4 months of physical therapy later, I'm finally back to building, but I'm definitely much more cautious. So what if a cut takes me 3x as long, I'll at least keep the rest of my fingers!
After I finished the binding I was finish sanding an electric I was building. I put it in my quick release bench so I could sand the cutaway. If you've never used a quick release vise sometimes when you tighten it after using the quick release adjustment it pops back a thread. So as I was tightening the vise it pops and drops this guitar body onto my super rough cement floor. It dented up the end grain and binding really badly. I just put it on the shelf and walked away for about two months. Since it was end grain I couldn't steam out the dents I tried to fill them with sanding dust and wood glue and it looked ok but the binding channel dented into the top so it's super obvious to me what happened. Luckily this guitar was a surprise gift for a friend so he got what he paid for! And I put a thick rubber mat under my work bench.
I built every part of all electric guitar, but every part I build doesn't make a guitar like a neck I'm satisfied with. Like a neck I built had a trust rod that was installed to low inside the the neck! So I'm making a laminate thru body, telli's, a strat, 2 Les Pauls and one full Bowed sized bass (on a stick) to use here at home. I have really no working space and I'm 64. I have stocked away of many woods collected from all over the world and I think there going to great places after I'm done with that.
Grabbed for the naptha and got the denatured alcohol instead. Destroyed a perfect sunburst right down to bare wood. Took a couple days off, cooled down, learned how to read labels, and started over.
Doing my first finish on a Tele made me feel sick to my stomach. I started by working my way up to 240 grit on the sanding for the body. It's a flame maple top with Ash back and sides so I dyed the top black and sanded away the top coat to bring out the flame. Was looking good so far. Mixed a deep blue dye for the top and a black dye for the back and sides. Applied the dye and the guitar looked spectacular. I live in a small place with dogs and no real room or area to pull off a spray finish so hand rubbed it was. Decided to go with a Tung oil lacquer. For real Tung oil in this lacquer though. Applied a couple of coats and went to level sand and burned right through the dye at the edges. There was no way to cover this up I knew what I had to do. Strip sanded it and then sanded back up to 240 and started the process again. This time I get through 5 coats with level sanding and boom I burn through the finish on the edge again. I'm weeks into this dumb finish which requires significant dry time between coats. I'm now ready to turn the thing into fire wood. I'm looking at the label of the lacquer and realize the stuff is self leveling. Could it be? Can I get away with not level sanding? Did it all over again and sanded up to 800 before dying. Miraculously enough the dye still takes at that grit level and I apply five coats and get a beautiful 50/50 gloss/satin finish smooth to the touch. The guitar is deep blue with black flame top, black back and sides, has a purple heart neck with flame maple fretboard, and gold hardware. It's stunning. I go to tighten the neck plate and the screw driver slips and scratches the back. I decided that scratch will be my signature on that one since it's my first build and it's my guitar, but I honestly didn't want to even touch the thing for a few days after that. It's all in all a beautiful guitar that plays and sounds great so I figure it's still a success for an experiment to see if I could pull off a build.
Cool little video. I fully agree with the "walk away from it" technique. when it happens your head just can't contemplate a solution. I have a lot of experience on doing that. :)
Hey guys, I’m 61yrs old legally blind former finish carpenter, I decided about 2yrs ago that I wanted to try to build some guitars for my sons. So I started with building tenor Ike’s first I built 4 of them the first 2 ended up being firewood, This past summer I desired to try to build the guitars I have been working on them for 2 months now, I completely screwed up both necks so I just finished building 2 new necks the issue I had was the tennons I finally broke down & bought the elevate M & T jig ( that saved my ass)_ Anyway thank you I love your channel.🎸🎸🎹🎼📐🔨🪚🚪🪟🪑👨🏻🦯👨🏻🦯
On my third guitar build I installed the neck with at the wrong alignment angle and then applied finish the guitar. I noticed the error when I strung up the guitar. I had done several neck resets and felt comfortable removing the neck to correct the alignment error. Also I had used hide glue to assemble the guitar. When I applied steam, with way to much pressure, the guitar disassembled. I mean the braces, back, and tail block fell off the guitar. It’s still disassembled but number four isn’t to bad.
I build custom drums and I was building a kit out of 900 year old wood that took 6 months to get in. I was up against a deadline of giving it to someone as a surprise and at 4am rushing to finish (which was my first of many mistakes….) I was drilling the holes for the bass drum legs/spurs and I figured all was well and I was moving right along. Well….I put the spurs on and instead of both sitting nicely on the ground supporting the bass drum, one was on the ground and one was way up in the air at about 3 o’clock - I had drilled it in the wrong spot. 😳🤦🏼♂️😫 After my “oh 🤬” moment I cut out some dowels of the wood by hand (didn’t have any other way) and inserted them into the wrong holes and lined them up with the grain and you couldn’t tell at all. It looked perfect and actually was one of the best sounding kits I ever made and was used for some high profile records and everyone was super happy. All worked out but man was I terrified and mad at myself.
One moment that comes to mind. I was was playing trumpet in a big band. We were rotating seats a little bit. My buddy put his flugel on a chair. I forgot it was there and sat on it. I was over 300 pounds at the time and did some pretty serious damage to it. I felt so bad about it!
My most recent screw up was on the first guitar I ever owned....an Epiphone El Dorado FT-350. Not an expensive guitar but I have had it since 1975. (Yes I am that old). My intention was to re-finish the top of the guitar which had multiple dings and depressions in the finish, and I though with my background in furniture finishing and spraying I could do a passable job. I have finished and restored electrics and thought I knew what I was doing. What I did not know or failed to realize was when I scraped and sanded the top....IT WASN'T A SOLID TOP! So I sanded through the spruce layer of a LAMINATED TOP! Arggg! Now I am wondering how I can mask / dodge / shade the spots to make a passable refinish! Inexpensive guitar, as I said but still heart rending!
I have started building an acoustic guitar (after watching videos on this channel), and have been trying to bend sides. i have just ordered my THIRD set of sides for it because i keep messing up the hand bending. its a nightmare, but you have to learn somewhere!!!
You become a better Tech and Luthier by learning, and doing. Mistakes are opportunities to learn. I took on a project build with every intension of selling the guitar when the build was done. I found a vintage 1980's American, San Francisco made Chandler Super Strat style guitar with matching neck. The body and neck were never completed and built into a guitar. It had just sat under a bed for decades. The body and head stock had a nice custom paint job. A medium metallic blue/green paint with a hint of silver ghost hot rod flames. It had a very cool look, and the artwork was very well done. I carefully taped off all the areas of the guitar I needed to. I had to drill mounting holes for the Floyd Rose tremolo. I had to route out the tremolo cavity larger for a Floyd Rose tremolo. I also had to drill mounting holes for the pickup ring, back plates, make back plate covers, drill and mount a jack plate, and other things. When it came time to assemble every thing. I started to remove the tape. It was then I realized that I didn't use a low tack tape. With every pull of a piece of tape. The vintage, aged amber clear coat would peal off in random patterns. At first it was a small piece, but the problem kept getting worse and worse. Chunks of clear coat were peeling off with the tape like skin from a bad sun burn. I had to set it down and walk away. I was convinced the finish was just ruined and I would have to take it all apart and repaint it. The next day I decided to finish building it, just because I wanted to know what this guitar sounded like after sitting almost 40 years. It sounded amazing. It is an amazing sounding guitar in every way. I then removed the rest of the tape. To my surprise a very interesting pattern started to emerge from the random removal of finish. A odd but kind of cool camouflage/relic patina was happening. I decided to use more tape and try to randomly accentuate the look. At first I thought it was cool, but maybe too strange for some. Almost every one that has seen the guitar now has told me they love the finish. My mistake turned into something unique. Now I can't part with the guitar and sell it. I like it too much. LOL. [img]i.ibb.co/W6rLRpq/20190327-173648.jpg[/img]
I learned first hand about routing correctly. Built a laminate neck of maple and zebra wood, routing too quickly in the wrong direction. Needless to say the next thing I know the neck is flying across my shop and split in two. Offered a cool opportunity to graphs in some Purple Heart to fix it!
I don't have any instrument building horror stories yet (though I'm sure I will, in time), but I do have a home improvement one from just yesterday. I just moved, and took the washer and dryer with because we paid for them, and they're old enough to not be gimmicky garbage. So hooking the washer up was mostly straightforward (apart from the minor issues of someone at some point having connected the "hot" hose to the "cold" inlet, and vice versa; which I fixed, and then Sharpied on labels so it won't happen again; oh, and the drain standpipe in the new house had an awkward little ledge that I couldn't get the blasted drain hose past until I tore apart an old cookie tin from a couple Christmases ago, and used a strip of the side of that as a ramp to get the end of the hose to slide past the issue) but the dryer... oof. So it's a gas dryer, which is great in some ways, but means you're having to deal with gas. I tried contacting an appliance repair place I'd had good experiences with in the past, but they still haven't gotten back to me and it's been over a week. Yesterday was the point at which my impatience won out over my healthy fear of messing with gas. So I go to the hardware store, pick up a kit. I've checked the specs, it matches the numbers on the dryer it's supposed to, this should be easy, right? Not so much. So it comes with a fancy safety valve that automatically shuts it off if there's a significant leak, only the inlet side of that valve is a thread that's totally incompatible with the shutoff valve on the pipe coming out of the wall. So I find the necessary horrific stack of adapters necessary to connect that, slather it in the sealing grease, and hook it all up, and just keep applying more goop and going more gorilla on the fittings until it finally quits blowing bubbles when I spray it with soapy water. Level the machines, run a couple loads, it all seems to be going fine. And then, this morning, I go to run more laundry (because moving REALLY messes up your whole laundry routine, I tell ya) and I smell the stuff they add to the gas to make it smell. So we rapidly exit the house, call the gas company, and I've already shut off the original valve because hell if I'm gonna let the house fill with gas and explode, my stuff is in there. Guy arrives, and it turns out I did basically everything wrong; the stack of adapters is an abomination, the fancy automatic valve is pointless junk, the hose I got in the kit is too small, and the whole thing is utterly terrible and I should have just gotten a half-inch flex line for way less money. Which I did, because PG&E won't do hookups. Even though I would happily have paid them a fee to have that done, and then they'd have not needed to send someone out as an emergency, PG&E will not help you beyond the unofficial "Oh, you just needed a half-inch flex line" the guy told me. Anyway, the TL;DR is that dryer hookup kits are a goddamned scam, and you should Sharpie the installation details on the back of your appliances if you ever plan to move with them. Also, gas is way less scary than I had considered it to be. Now, if I can get all these damn boxes out of the garage, I've got some plans to take the little work space there is in there and make some instruments. Probably start with solid-body electrics and ukulele kits, but eventually there'll be carved top stuff going on. I'm only gonna be able to get the mandola I want if I make it myself.
Literally just had one of my first big issues with the ukulele I'm building. As I was flush trimming the top to the sides, the router bit caught a piece of the top and broke it off along the grain. There were several other issues with the top, particularly concerning the grain structure and stability. Pulled the top off completely, re-leveled the sides and began glue up for a new mahogany top. Your video on sound boards is going to be helpful to properly gauging the thickness, which is where I think this whole problem stemmed from.
So i've been a luthier apprentice for almost 2 and a half years and I've scuffed a few headstock breaks for respray but mostly intermediate range acoustics. Earlier this year my boss handed me some vintage reissue Gibson LP that belonged to a session muso that needed it back asap. Without thinking twice I grabbed some sand paper and in less than 5 seconds I removed half the logo from the headstock. It's an easy fix but being in South Africa means shipping is a pain. The job got delayed by two weeks while we waited for a new logo to arrive. Not the most epic of fails but lesson learnt.
I was building a Strat style guitar. I inadvertently routed the truss rod slot a bit too deep in one area, then when I was shaping the back of the neck, I punched through to the truss rod slot. Grrrr :( My recovery was to setup a jig to route a very shallow slot on the back of the neck so I could fill in with a walnut stripe. Whew.
I was doing the final buffing on what I felt was the best build I've done. The finish was looking amazing. I was just doing the very last corner of the Strat type body and I must have relaxed my hands and the guitar flew out of my hands and onto the floor, taking a large chip down to the wood out of the just completed finish. It was everything I could do not to just throw up my hands and move on. I'm currently trying to fix the chip. We'll see how it goes.
Watching your videos has inspired me to try to build acoustic guitars. "Thanks a Lot!!!" I have built a bunch of electric kits and even made a few with my own scratch built bodies with necks from others online. I pride myself as a pretty good woodworker so in my retirement I decided really challenge myself. So purchasing a bunch and varied tonewoods I chose 4 guitars to build...1 - Wiessenborn lap steel 2 - OM Style 3 - Dreadnought 4 - Gibson 1940 L-00 . Nothing like jumping head first into a hobby eh? So my 1st guitar top is a sitka spruce top thicknessed to about 3.4mm with rossette installed and sanded flat and pretty then braces and rosewood bridge plate glued on and shaped .....ummmm this seems rather dead ummmm did I forget to finish thicknessing the top to around 2.85mm? Yup I am old and so, so forgetful! So out comes the multi tool and zip of those oh so beautiful braces and back through the drum sander till i have what looks like a perfect top ready to hit the go-bar deck and start bracing it up once again! I love my hobby. LOL
So I've only built one guitar, a telecaster based off of a '69 thinline with a super cool dead tree outline for the f-hole, and I had sunk probably 200 hours into this thing, when disaster struck. I had been super careful with everything, I had gotten the body dimensions perfect, and the neck pocket perfect, and the f-hole perfect, I just had to route the last pickup cavity for the neck pickup, and then I would be ready to do the binding and finish. I was routing in pretty thin passes and going super slowly, but for this last pass I must have been going to deep or the blade just wasn't sharp enough, because the router got away from me and just chewed up the entire pickup cavity. There was this look of horror on my face for like 2 hours, and I don't think I've ever been so mad in my life. The entire area is covered by the pick guard so it doesn't really matter at the end of the day, but it just crushed my soul when it happened. Thankfully it didn't sully my experience to much, and I can't wait to build my next guitar!
This wasn't me, but I was taking a guitar building class and my buddy had been waiting for the vacuum clamp all night. He ran over with 10 minutes left in the class, and proceeded to activate the clamp over the sound hole. Instantly imploded the guitar. Luckily we had laminated the sides and the back held, so the only thing that couldn't be salvaged was the top.
Hi Chris, I am in the last stages of my first cut away guitar. This is number 9. Everything is going great. By far the best guitar I ever made. However, when I temporarily attached the neck (bolt on) I realized that the front end was not square to the center seam causing the strings to angle off center about 3/4 of an inch at the bridge. So it sits on the bench waiting rescue somehow.
Hey guys. I started fixing cars in service stations in my teens, paying my way through university. I "officially" started apprenticeship when I was 20. I've had 30 years of breaking shit, professionally and personally. I've recently started dabbling in guitar repair and minor luthier work. My first build was a high end Les Paul kit from a Canadian body maker. I used high end parts for everything except the tuners. Which I intend to swap out for open gear Waverley Tuners at some point. I can relate to the neck angle misstep, because I set my neck before measuring the angle, and now the axe suffers from action that is permanently a hair high.
Horror story. When routing out a battery compartment, the router tore through my jig and I made the battery compartment too big for the battery box. Also on the same guitar. I used a band saw to cut out the guitar body and messed up the next joint on the body. I also learned to be very careful with routers and table saws. Since I tried to build a les Paul style guitar for my first one, I had to lower the router but so much that while routing out for the pickups the bit was barely in the router and flew out and hit me in the back of the hand. I had a nice gouge in the back of my hand. I never finished that guitar. I still would love to build a guitar, but have not had time or probably better worded made time.
Putting together a 335 kit the wife got me, I felt the “finish it before you put the neck on”. On the upside, I’ve invented 4 or 5 fiddly little sanding implements.
One time I was gluing the bindings on the back of a lovely walnut classic guitar that had a quite pronounced curve. I crushed the guitar with rubber bands! I remember I was able to salvage the build but that was years ago and I don't recall quite how I did.
A while back, after some successful (and some not) projects involving buying damaged instruments and fixing them up, (ukuleles and old mandolins), I decided to explore building cigar box guitars. It seemed like a fun way to learn some guitar building techniques without having to do it all. Part of the first (and so far only) build involved building a fret board from scratch. I mostly went well, got the frets in clean, took off the fret ends, and even put fret marker dots in. It was a painstaking process, carefully lining up the fretboard under my small drill press, getting the hole width and depth to match the bone dots I had was tough, but I did it, and the fret board looked pretty good. After putting everything together and stringing it up, I couldn't get the intonation in, or even close, even with the floating bridge. I measured the the fret board from the 0 fret to the 12th, and then to the bridge to make sure my math was right, and then it hit me. The fret markers for the 12th fret were on the 13th fret. I was using a baritone ukulele scale, and usually on those the first fret marker is on the 5th fret. I had set it in AFTER the 5th fret, and the placement of the 7th, 12th, and 15th markers followed that mistake. I was mortified, it was such a pain in the ass to get those markers in, and all they did was mess with your mind when you played that thing. I thought about trying to replace the fret board, but instead it stays as a reminder to pay closer attention to....stuff.
Drilled my 4th or 5th 2 point tremolo on a strat style guitar. One of the posts were not lined up correctly and the bridge would not fit. This was a VERY expensive ash body with a Spalted and Flamed Maple top. I had to plug the hole with maple and redrill. I thought I would not be able to recover from this and figured I had wasted this body. But another lutheir/repair person always says that there is (almost) nothing you can do to a guitar that you cannot recover from. I guess they were right!
I built a one piece mahogany lap steel for a friend. The router caught it and blew the bottom out. I freaked! I took a minute, had some coffee and went back to it. I scraped the blown out chunks off of the floor and pieced them back in with Titebond. I then, FEARFULLY, took the router back over it (after a few days). The repair disappeared. Thank the Lord! The guitar turned out great.
I remember buying a ukulele (stew Mac kit ) to build for my oldest daughter , I wanted to make it a little more special for her, I decided to install tortoise shell binding on it. I first tested the cut on a piece of scrap wood and the depth looked good, but I forgot to tighten the depth stop down and when I went to cut the top I started cutting into the top and almost cut 3/4 of the top away from the body. I felt horrible, angry and sad all at the same time😬😂I’ve always had the dream to build my four kids ukuleles or guitars and my self one as well, but I’ve always been a bit apprehensive to put the time and money in to it just to mess up . Thanks for the video and encouragement to help us see, we have to make mistakes to learn what not to do, and you can almost always recover from any mistake:) thanks guys:)
On my first violin repair, I had to remove the top because one of the ribs needed replacement. It had some signs of mildew. I had bought it to practice varnishing, and it was still in the white, so I wasn’t too worried about the potential for a rib replacement to look terrible. But since it was still such new hide glue, it was not really brittle yet. When I got my seam knife into the joint, everything went fine for about half of the instrument. However, as I got to the lower treble bout, it split the top. And then when I was on the upper treble bout, it cracked pretty bad. I got the top off, but then instead of just replacing a rib, I had to do crack repair and place about 15 cleats on the top. I was able to reshape the blocks and the linings to how the factory should have in the first place. And it has been valuable experience. But I am still so frustrated with it that I haven’t yet accomplished the goal that I had when I bought it. It’s still in the white. I think I’ll finally close it back up and finish it in the new year. My first guitar build is still in progress. It’s a renaissance style guitar, which is basically a ukulele with the middle strings doubled in unison and the bottom string doubled in octaves. Because I knew more about violins than guitars at the time I started, and because I was making too many assumptions, I took the thickness for my sides down to 1.2mm. I thought it would be fine because that’s still thicker than violin sides usually are. But I’m currently working on binding the instrument. The sides are so thin that my binding channels go all the way through them. I’ve had to adjust several things, and I know that it won’t be as stable as I had hoped, but I still plan to finish that instrument.
Great video, not gonna lie I was caught off guard when you went to a second camera angle and all the sudden I'm like "am I watching UA-cam or cable TV?!", It's amazing how changing cameras like that make the video feel so much different and give it more depth. You guys have given me a hell of an education ahead of trying to do the PA solid body electric version of what you're doing, thanks for all the help!
around 10 years ago, I think, I wanted a headless guitar. Back then Steinberger and Spirit by Steinberger were difficult to find in my country, and I didn't know that someone carries Hofner headless here. Anyway I saw someone posted guitar kits in the classified section of local guitar bulletin board. Basically the seller has a deal with a Chinese factory to sells unassembled guitars. I decided to give it a a try without careful thought, and that bites me in the end. To make it even more disastrous, I add some more extra options which I think it'd be cool. After a couple of delays, I finally got the kit. Some of the options were not included in the guitar, but I didn't really mind it at that point (as it's been almost a year after the promised delivery date). Anyway I put the kit together (which is basically the whole guitar and hardware not installed) and found that the bridge cavity is too shallow. I had to buy a router and a router bit to cut a deeper cavity. After a few tries I managed to get an ok cavity to install the bridge. But the disaster didn't end there. Next I found that the finger board was not prepared at that point. The frets are in, but the level is all over the place. Putting the string on would buzz badly. At that time I don't know any fret jobs and don't event know it needs to do leveling and crowning and stuffs. .... that guitar was not playable. Later I made a trip to Japan and found a couple of Spirits. I bought one of them (the HSH model). That kit guitar became a proof of my incompetence lol. I decided to trash it after a few more try on that guitar.... Thinking back, may be I can fix that guitar if I have the right tool and a good advice. I didn't have any of those back then. PS. That Spirit guitar also has its own story. That will be the next time :D
Love this video. lol “don’t smash the guitar”. Sooo...speaking of not having a vacuum clamp. I am working on the end graft after assembling the body and drop the whole body off the tall table. As it crashes into the hard floor and cracks the back I didn’t even pick it up I just walked into the other room speechless. My wife was like 😮. I was able to fix it but it was devastating. I think I have like 10 more stories from my first guitar. The neck....agh
Online forums and chat groups are the best for beginners. If I'm doing something and I feel I need some expert advice forums are great. You'll get many different answers and opinions and you can weed through and assemble the best advice. Plus remember there is no question too stupid when you're a beginner and people will share stuff like this. There is always going to be some common mistake people make and they'll let you know right off the bat what to avoid, what to buy, how to prepare, what to look out for. Take your time and do a lot of research, don't just dive in with an arrogant "Oh this is easy! I know what i'm doing!" attitude.You will suck and learn from each mistake, but if you do your homework it will be less costly and angering.
Great video! I appreciate the fact that you guys are down to earth and humble enough to share your mistakes and how you overcame them. Learning from your mistakes makes you better and ultimately more successful and efficient at your craft
Biggest fuck-up I made was printing out a template too small and not double checking it’s size before cutting out the shape of the guitar and not leaving a big enough border around the guitar.
Router got away from me when cutting the binding channel Cut saddle slot too wide Cut fret slots incorrectly Sloppy side dots Dropped an almost finished ukulele and split the top Many broken sides while bending Broke head off tuner screws Dropped and lost tuner bushing Soundhole cut off center from the rosette - I don’t know how that happened Neck carving mistakes so bad it went into the burn pile Glued kerfing below the edge of the side And I could go on forever
Lets just say I've had a few random chip outs while doing round overs on electric guitar edges. Normally it ends with me texting the client a picture with binding installed with the comment "I just couldn't not upgrade you to binding...it's on me ;)" haha. I've had a quite a few beauty blunders though! Most of them I was able to recover from!
We used to have a saying when I worked in a machine shop-the difference between a journeyman and an apprentice is the journeyman knows how to cover up his mistakes. Enjoy your videos.
building a ala carte strat guitar. Used cheap chinese neck screws. Stupidly bought a vintage accurate Fender style neck. So I am at the set up phase and need to tweak the truss rod. Go to take neck off, 3 of the 4 neck screws had broken off in the neck. Had to Incredible Hulk the neck off, then remove screws. Filled all holes and repaint, refinish.. only to learn the spray on Poly I have used now is cracking off the entire body of the guitar. Walked away from it. Repainted it and now am getting it finished at a friends Auto Shop with pro level clear coat. I swear this guitar is cursed!
Thanks for an excellent video. I really appreciate not only the quality of your work but also the practical helpfulness of your teaching. You have helped me substantially in my building and for that I am grateful. Request: I would like to learn to make the molds and templates you're using. A video on mold building would be a big help. The ones I've made have those big awkward latches in the way and are not elegant and sleek like yours. Thank You.
Just starting my journey. Ordering a set of nut and fret files in the next day or so. No doubt I'll have some amazing mistakes in time. Though I'm mostly working on banjos, so popular opinion might say their destruction would be a public service.
I was doing my first fret level on my own guitar. I was using a radiused sanding block and got the wrong one. I used a 9.5" block on a 12" radius board. I was a mess but I got it sorted out.
Shoot I just cut out a control cavity on the FRONT of an LP jr body. Had to throw the whole thing out. It was a learning and yelling experience for sure. Also neck pockets are a nightmare when doing them without a router.
I'm a mid-level tech at best, and usually, just make some minor adjustments for people, so no real opportunity to screw up royal yet. But I inherited a late-60s Gibson J-45D that someone must have almost literally thrown under a bus. They tried to "fix" the adjustable bridge & saddle it came with by epoxying what looks kinda like a scallop shell into the bridge as a saddle. The upper part of the side looks like it was cracked all the way around and fixed with who-knows-what and the neck "reset" that has 4" of bold protruding past the wood and into the bowl. egad... It reminds me of the saying, "They know just enough to be dangerous."
My basic philosophy in woodworking/guitar building is that it's not a mistake until it leaves your shop. While it's in your shop it's a design change...
I was swaping pickups in a thin body kiesel. The screw went straight through the body afterwards. I tried to fix my mistake, and made it worse. we had to send that guitar to a shop that had a spray booth. It wasn't my guitar.
Well, here she goes. When I was building my first guitar I put a large padouk bridge plate on the top. But a few days later I really regretted that decision, and decided that I wanted a smaler maple bridge plate. So that day got out a pallet knife and a steaming iron en went to town on the bridge plate, I got some cuts on my fingers and a big part of the underside of the to was covered in blood (no big deal) but then I accidentally Pushed the pallet knife THROUGH the top. Luckily most of the scar got covered by the bridge, but you can still see a 1/4” scar behind the bridge. Well that is one of my horror stories.
Not my biggest mistake, but the bridge placement on a flat top has given me many challenges. When installing a pre routed saddle bridge, I have to take in consideration the deformation of the top plate in order to get a better intonation margin. This is why having a tail piece like jig isnt the best to achieve the bridge placement. Its going to intonate fine but with the string pull everything will go sharp as soon as the top starts to deflect.
The only difference between a master and apprentice is the number of mistakes made and learned from. I'm paying my dues right now. Started my first guitar about a month ago.
I built a carved top electric. Put led flames on it, tried to epoxy. Picked wrong epoxy, it ran off all sides, like a stack of pancakes. It is terrible, but one day,, I will get up epoxy to finish the flash.
Unfortunately you'll not know that til after you've recorded with it. Fortunately for me, most, if not all of my mic work was live, so you can get the read "live" and fix it on the fly...but you scramble your butt off to get it right.
Would drilling right through the back of the body not once, but twice qualify? So now I have an otherwise beautiful ash bass body with two fairly well matched plugs...
I make electric solid-bodies as a career, but i dont know anything about properly making an acoustic, and the biggest mistake I made on the last of 3 hollow bodies i've built, is kinda funny. I assumed that an acoustic guitar topwood needed to be super hard like maple (violin logic) and I thought well what's stronger and harder than any wood...bulletproof glass, hear me out. big chunk of lexan polycarbonate, smoked clear, looked cool as hell, transparent top, felt cool, looked spectacular. glued it up, sanded it. the most dead silent guitar i have ever heard. like you took a shitty pawn shop acoustic and stuffed it with pillows. I was baffled. I mean it;s harder than wood and then it dawned on me that it;s a plastic designed to take an impacting blow and deaden it without breaking. I made a guitar with a top made of high tech material designed to absorb vibration. I made a silent acoustic guitar. I felt very stupid, ended up just throwing it away. looked sleek, but it sounded like playing air guitar. I was so disappointed.
Okay, here's my little story, a costumer who later became a friend of mine brought me an inexpensive Ibanez RG copy for me to customize it for him, the beginning of the process was like izi pizi, I sanded the finish down to the sealer and proceeded to start with the custom finish but the customer wanted to sign the guitar before the clear was applied to seal the finish, this is when disaster stroke, I unintentionally touched the marker and left a nice big dark impression of my thumb on the white lacquer on the top of the guitar, and it gets worse cause I didn't notice the huge thumb on the finish and decided to clear cote the guitar body ._. and yup I noticed it was there just when the finish was already dry, I tried sanding it off but I made it worse ._. god knows I masked off the signing on the top and proceeded to put another Cote of white and then sand and seal now when it was time for the neck oh my got, I forgot to take off the masking tape off of the heel, which I put there to protect it from getting hit and dented or whatever could happen to it, long story short i screwed up big time my first custom finish
I was in the room I use for playing guitar. This room doubles as a room where my grandson creates his playdoh figurines. He is six, and loves making characters out of Playdoh. Anyway, I was at the other end of the room noodling around on one of my guitars. I had just finished playing a Les Paul, and wanted to mess with the Mustang for some surf sounds. Instead of putting the Les Paul back where I keep it, I decided to put it on a stand next to me. My grandson came over to me, and accidentally bumped the stand. The guitar fell from the stand, and hit the headstock of the Mustang I was playing. My grandson felt horrible as it left a ding in the neck of the Les Paul. I could tell he was really sad. I think he saw the initial look on my face, and knew it wasn't good that it happened. He went back over to play with his playdoh but I could tell he was totally crushed. So I went over, and explained to him that it was just as much my fault, because I should have put it away. That made him feel better but I could tell, not totally because after that, he was always afraid to come back by me after that, when I was on the guitars. I totally hated that because him and I are very tight. He always came over to me before, and I would let him try a little guitar stuff. He is always with me when they come over. Fast forward to a couple weeks ago. I was in a Guitar Center, in a state 1300 miles away from where we live. I seen a very nice Les Paul on the wall for sale. It looked very close to the one that got dinged. So I bought it on an impulse. I gave the other one to my nephew, and told him it was an early Christmas present. He didn't care about the ding whatsoever. I then took the new one I bought, and the next time my grandson was over I showed it to him. I generically told him the neck issue was resolved. He looked at the guitar gave me a huge hug, and we are back to normal. He has no reservations about coming back when I'm on the guitars anymore. Which is great!!Some will say I shouldn't have lied to him. But in reality I didn't. I thought long, and hard to ensure that later on when he was old enough to understand I could tell him, and show him i didn't lie. If the topic ever came up. The issue was in fact resolved. So there was no lie. I think had anyone seen the look of relief on his face, and had gotten that big hug that I got from him, they would have done the same thing. He is way too young to be going day to day heartbroken because he thinks he ruined a guitar of mine. Plus he is a very high spirited little boy. I want him to stay that way.. Guitars are replaceable, grandchildren are not. Anyway, that's how I resolved the problem. Sorry it was a bit long.
A hug worth every penny. Not to mention that nephew is STOKED. Well done sir. Well done.
@@bradleymerino1531 I totally agree 100%. It was just one of those moments. I went in to get strings, and I came out with strings. Except they were attached to a guitar. This is one time when I bought something and didn't have even a second of buyers remorse
That's fantastic. Good man
I'm in the middle of mine right now. I've been working on a prototype of my own electric guitar. Drew it out. Roughed out a template. Sanded and finished the template shape. Put the template on a body blank with a spalted maple cap. Cut and routed the body. Put it on my lap to get a feel for the shape and realized I put the template on the wrong way. Oh, well the prototype is going to be a lefty.
I had just finished building one of the fanciest classical guitars I had ever made at the time. I was so proud of it, it had to be perfect. I strung it up, tuned it, played it, and noticed a little hazy spot on the finish. Took it to the buffing wheel real quick and the guitar was pulled from my hands by the buffer at light speed and thrown to the ground. Sorry to say, there is no happy ending to that story.
Oh my god. How terrible! That my nightmare
Oh man!
E#
The difference between an apprentice and a journeyman is that a journeyman knows how to fix their mistakes and make it look intentional 😉🤪
Good story and a fun adventure!
Thanks, fellas!
I was routing the binding and purfling channels on my first guitar. I had already routed my neck mortise. I did the purfling pass and remembered to stop at the neck mortise. On the second pass for the binding, the router bearing dropped into the mortise and routed a chuck out my back. I was freaking out but, luckily, didn’t throw it across the room. I have learned in woodworking to walk away, so I did. I had been reading Larry Robinson’s The Art of Inlay, so the next day something occurred to me. I designed a crest and inlayed it. It has become my signature on all subsequent guitars. I made it a design element.
This was a common occurrence at my luthiery school. I think most guitars had an inlay of some sort in that area haha.
Trained as a watchmaker/clock repairman the best advise I ever got was
“Sometimes it is best to walk away for a while.” Indeed! Applies to my guitar building hobby even more!
The first mandolin I ever made completely collapsed under the string pressure after about 5 minutes, I carved the top far too thin. I also didn't test it before applying the sunburst with leather dyes and french polishing it all by hand. That was the only time I literally cried over a mistake lol
God that sounds just soul crushing
@@qtoelke6208 it was the worst pain I'd ever experienced
I love all of your videos, especially the "series" videos. The advice Chris gives about stepping away from the mistake and sleeping on it is dead on. So good. Thanks.
Only on my first guitar currently, but already had some challenges. One was breaking bindings while getting ready to install them (I had already broken 4 before that while trying to bend them). The biggest one which made me almost give up and start over from scratch was getting the neck angle drastically wrong! Fortunately I was able to fix both. Hey guys, love this series already! Keep it up!
Love your channel and your build, buddy. You're bossing it!
@@anthonypoole4933 thanks man!
Oh yeah... Years ago I was making #7 - my first cutaway for my nephew. Typically I trim the sides for the radius on the back before bending. Out in the garage I go bending the Wormy Maple (Ambrosia Maple) on a pipe with a torch. The bending went really well for my forth time and first cutaway. A couple days later, I begin to attach the heel and tail blocks, throw it into a mold, then realize I reversed the top and back! Slept on it... I started to level the (new) top side and radius the (new) back side, hoping I don't end up with a 2 1/2" thick body :( I press on, finish the build and gave it to him. He was over the moon! He's played the @#$% out of it. A couple months back I visited him and the guitar was out on a stand. I picked it up and eyeballed it, noticing my obvious mistake and recovery, but he still loves it as one of his prize possessions. And it sounds really good in his hands. Thanks for leading this off gents.
I’ve done the exact same thing and had to start over! I feel your pain.
I'm only in the pore filling stage of my second acoustic guitar. I had a lot of help on my first two so far but instead of building a kit and buying jigs and forms I bought blueprints and built all my forms. Even then I'd made plenty of mistakes:
- working with western red cedar for a top on my first. Smells pretty but it seems like you're forever sanding out scratches and gouges.
- i have a friend who is actually a luthier with over 100 guitars under his belt. When I showed him my newly braced top he did a deflection test, clucked his tongue, then proceeded to chisel of my poorly executed lap brace, the gave me one of his X braces and sent me home feeling very humbled
- I tried to make a single wooden ring rosette our of some scrap rosewood but the first few attempts disintegrated and made a set of coasters. #2 ended up having a radial rosette.
- Mahogany back and sides crack VERY easily. Once it's in the mold, KEEP it in the mold until you close the box.
- I bent THREE left sides - and my friend got a guitar-shaped hanging basket out of the deal
- made my own go-bar deck using driveway markers but didn't use any cauls. One of the gobars slid into the soundboard and speared a ladder brace that I had to then repair.
- after the box was closed I realized that my sides had cupped, which made routing for binding channels problematic. I scraped the sides for what felt like weeks and now they're VERY thin
- when cutting the binding channel the jig traveled and I ended up having to make a wider channel for purfling than I'd intended.
- the binding strips do not line up where the two halves meet so I ended up creating an inlaid mirror to the heel cap to cover up the mistake. It actually looks nice
- I also made a laminated neck with an MT neck joint but I followed Cumpiano's old style of tenon using a barrel bolt that is inbedded through a hole drilled laterally through the tenon. Unfortunately I used a very soft wood for the center laminations and when I tightened the bolts the tenon actually broke. My luthier friend fixed it for me and introduced me to threaded brass intserts and epoxy.
- laminate necks can be hard to carve. I'm still shaping the neck even after finishing the guitar several years ago.
#2 hasn't been any easier - especially in the purfling dept. I also sanded the top too thin.
I work in a body shop and itscall about making mistakes, fixing them and learning from those experiences. Been at it 7 years now. I started building tube amps last year and that was a fun learning experience. Again it's all about learning from our mistakes for sure
OMG! Great story and great subject man! Speaking of smashing guitars in my younger years, It was 200 degrees in my hot Texas garage. I just turned on my radio listening to the Astros game while I sprayed on my VERY last coat of LMI Waterborn finish on my VERY first acoustic Dreadnought that I had been building for the last several months. Literally just a day or two from strings. This was a neck-on finish. (I now know!) I had this guitar hangin from one of my garage door tracks with a bent piece of coat hanger through one of the tuner holes. Anyway, the hook somehow unbent. Maybe it was the Wife opening the garage door when she got home. (That was three wives ago. I blamed my second one on this incident also.) The guitar fell straight down and then did a lomcevak through my garage. The heel completely snapped off and hit a wall, parts and pieces if headstock everywhere. I stood there holding the sticky neck over my head ready to smash it all. That was 30 years ago. I repaired that guitar and learned a lot. It’s played all over Houston to this day. Thanks for the story’s man!
When I was 17 my dad and I decided to build a body for a StewMac neck. Fun process, built an Ibanez style body with a Nashville bridge and stop tailpiece. Didn't know to put a neck angle in the neck pocket so string tension was a problem. Added a Floyd style string bar at the headstock and that helped. Dad sprayed it with the paint he was using on his project car and ended up stripping and respraying it 3 times. Didn't know a thin finish was important. It looks good now, just doesn't play the best. Also we were in a rush to get it done to take on a trip to show my grandpa so ended up using a string for the grounding wire into the tailpiece stud. It worked, but our wiring job doesn't look the best.
29 years ago, I built a viola to play along with my son who was taking cello lessons ( he still plays cello as a member of the Pittsburgh Symphony). It took me the better part of a year, and I probably could have built a small house with the pile of mistakes I had left over. I threw out 8 or 9 scrolls before I finally got one that looked half decent. These days I am retired and making ukuleles for my grandsons, and the viola still is sitting, still is sitting in my chamber (with apologies to Edgar Allen Poe).
Thanks guys. I have a telecaster I built that has a nice big scratch on the top that I saw after the finish was on. The scratch is well protected!
Failing is not a bad thing that's when the true learning happens took me building guitars to find this out, you guys are awesome keep up the great work
I’m a furniture maker who is in the process of building my first guitar ( you channel has giving me so much insight so thank you so much ) … being a professional woodworker I see so many issues with my first build, and my ego got ahold of me… on my first guitar I decided not to use super expensive wood, I went with some of the last pieces of walnut from my great grandfathers farm for the back and sides … turns out sentimental value trumps any amount of money for wood. The sides aren’t 100 percent perfect but the will work just fine… however I wanted to make everything but the top from wood my great grandfather cut down over 100 years ago… I used white cedar for the kerflling … horrible mistake! It’s so brittle / soft and crumbly, seems like it has white rot from sitting outside to long, every attempt to notch the sides for the braces on the top and back… causes Devastating… well not even tear out… just complete failure of the kirfling .. It’s horrible … I eventually just stabilized it all with bottles of thin superglue… but because the wood means so much I can’t start over. So on your first build don’t use any wood that means anything, financially of sentimentally … even if you think you know WTF your doing!
Thank you guys again for all the info.
My 5th guitar, a commission. Like a doofus I glued down the fretboard in the wrong spot. It was set off center about 1/8” to the left. The guitar had a gorgeous sunburst finish that was a custom burst by a friend and well known builder. I re-glued the fretboard to its proper position which exposed bare wood along the fretboard extension. I had to hand paint the exposed top wood to match the burst of the guitar. Of course I did a crap job and it lived like that forever. Too many mistakes to mention here, but I learned from each of them and only made the big ones once. The key to fuckups is to walk away. Approach the mistake the next day as a learning challenge. Also, big mistake: never promise a specific delivery date on a guitar that you’ve never built before!
Thanks for this series guys. Most enjoyable.
Omg "That's how the inlay was invented" perfectly sums up my biggest mistake (so far) and the exact reason that I learned how to do inlay!
I was routing the truss rod access in a slotted headstock and failed to fully retract the bit before exiting the cut so I ended up with a 1/2 inch wide groove about 1/16th of an inch deep and 1 inch long down the middle of the headstock. So, I bought some strips of abalone and the Inlay book from Stewmac, and now the guitar has a beautiful inlay extending out form under the truss rod cover!
I’ve only built 4 electric guitars but on the last one I did a multi scale fanned fret 7 string. It came out amazing other than on the long scale I did 27” and on the short scale I did 25”. I should have done 25.5”. There’s bridges made for these specific scale lengths. I already had the fretboard done, neck was glued and all finish was applied. The fix I found was a LP tunomatic type 7 string bridge and made it work. It’s not ideal and the bridge angle is ridiculous, but it works and plays really well and sounds great. Lesson learned!!
I inherited my late uncle's vintage acoustic guitar in Jan. First musical instrument anybody ever showed me when I was a toddler. 20 years in a hot dry basement under string tension, belly bulge like a mountain. Didn't know anything, so I got some advice from youtube, indiscriminately. First I put a sopping wet rag in a styrofoam bowl inside the guitar and then stacked a bunch of books on the guitar belly. It actually worked well, in a couple days. Bridge still had a little bit of tilt forward though ruining the break angle. Next I put nails in the peg holes and married them together into an assembly and pulled them back towards the butt of the guitar with a pair of vise grips and a ratchet strap, to tilt the bridge back up perpendicular with the top (yeah the internet really did that). I also used a whole house humidifier to blow massive amounts of humidity right into the sound hole while I did that. A few hours. I could tell I was pushing it, but it worked perfectly. I played the guitar for the first time with a good break angle and it sounded magical. Half a day later the belly and the tilt were back.
... It sounded so amazing that I thought it would be worth it to have professional make it really right...
Had some bad experiences with the local "guitar tech"s. But I found someone who was a real luthier, nice guy, told me to bring it by for him to take a look at.
When he saw the guitar he panicked, he really freaked out (this guitar was mutilated in a lot of different ways, my uncle was from West Virginia and they 'fix' their own stuff out there and they didn't have UA-cam back then).
I couldn't get the luthier guy to calm down until I explained that I actually preferred to fix this myself if it was possible. Once he knew that he didn't have to fix it he lightened up, and he gave me like an hour long free guitar repair lesson, it was really nice of him.
He told me that bulge/tilt is just going to come back without a bridge doctor (I guess he assumed removing the back and replacing the bracing would be over my head, rightfully so).
I asked him if the bridge doctor would kill the tone, and he tilted his head and shrugged his shoulders a little and said, "you'd be surprised".
At any rate it had to be done.
This is where it went south...
I was too greedy for tone. The sound of the guitar for those precious moments when I had the break angle right, It made me lust after perfection for this old guitar. I thought about replacing the bridge plate and seeing if it held. At the end of the day I decided to listen to the luthier guy and put the bridge doctor on, and I can always take it off and replace the bridge plate later, and the wood will have benefited from gaining some memory back in a flat position because of the years with the bridge doctor.
But I was not content to let the bridge doctor pull that bridge straight.
I decided that I was going to try that trick with the nails and the ratchet strap one more time so that I can install the bridge doctor on a straight bridge and get it perfect.
... And because I didn't break my guitar the first time, I was way too bold the second time.
... I thought it would be good to humidify the guitar beforehand to soften it up, So I placed the guitar over the whole house humidifier for about 3 hours before putting the rig in with the nails.
That was bad.
When I went out there to put the rig on with the nails and the ratchet strap, the guitar had swollen up like a balloon. Literally round as a beach ball.
So I decided to flatten it out with two boards and ratchet straps pulling them together, one across the back and one across the top.
I think there are ratchet strapless along tool for that. It was the wrong tool being used to do the wrong thing in the first place.
As soon as I attention on the ratchet straps pushing the boards to sandwich the (round) guitar flat, I heard a loud pop sound.
I broke the deepest back brace right off the back, the end of it that was under the curving broke right off too. 2/3 of the brace was just flapping in the air, as round as the beach ball guitar it had broken off of. I didn't notice at the time but the second furthest brace was also coming unglued.
Also, the top was ungluing from the sides and the neck block where the top meets the neck.
... ... I was so upset... ...
I called the luthier guy to get his advice.
He panicked. Started yelling.
..."you don't know what you're doing!"
"I know!"
..."why are you putting humidity in your guitar???"
"UA-cam"
"I've told people 1000 times! Guitars are sensitive tone woods, you don't take your guitar in the shower with you! You don't put a bowl of water in your guitar! Wait until you get string tension on that thing, it's going to fall apart. The back is going to unglue. ... ..."
He went on and on. He chastised me for every guitar humidity UA-cam I thought it was okay horror story he'd ever encountered from customers.
I was so upset about the guitar that I didn't really care he was telling at me.
So I say, "So if you were going to fix this guitar..."
And he's like, "oh no, I'm backed up I don't have time to fix that guitar, you got this far you're going to have to put this thing back together."
... He was hysterical so I couldn't really get any information out of him on how to fix it. I was too distraught anyway.
I put the guitar back in its chipboard case with three of those humidity control packs and hit it in the closet so I wouldn't have to look at it.
I basically just wrote it off as ruined, and decided I would return to it and try to unruin it when the sands of time had washed away my sorrow.
That was 6 weeks ago.
And the interim I've watched a thousand hours of good guitar repair videos. Very discriminating on who I watch... Only RSW, that guy Randy, and you guys. Try not to get any information from anywhere else.
A few days ago the swelling in the guitar and the pain deep in my heart both had went down enough for me to try to put this guitar back together.
The braces glued back up nicely.
The bridge doctor went in fine (I practiced by installing one on a cheap laminate guitar I have).
The top glued back down to the next joint and the sides/binding nicely. Binding didn't quite close up so I added a little CA glue after the wood glue cured.
... The guitar is all better, except that the truss rod is seized (and now stripped) and there's way too much back bow.
... I've watched enough repair videos since that fateful beach ball guitar day that I don't think it would be a problem for me to pull the fingerboard off and replace the truss rod, if it has to be done. I would go super slow.
Only it's a last resort though, in the meantime I tuned up all the strings to increase the string tension a lot, and I'm just giving it a few days to try to pull that back bow out.
I've learned to let time work for me with this kind of thing.
We'll see how it goes.
Now I have two friends who have something for me to fix.
Is this my "how I became a guitar tech" story?
I guess we'll see.
1st 2 ukulele I ever made had bridges fly off after 2 weeks in Hawaii (I live and work in Wales UK). Saviour in the guise of Bob Gleason came to my rescue, gave me some good advice and started a long and continuing mentorship/friendship. We ll need mentors. And my the - don't make for money or friends until you totally know what you are doing.
Love the channel. My last build went south. I got tunnel vision, did a body shape change mid build, lack of attention cause me to keep on carving, pickup cavities ended up 3/4" out of center! I abandoned the build! Got a great neck out of it though! It's just really nice wood!
I totally get the screw up thing. You've worked so hard and something stupid happens. I admit I have cried when that happens when you are so close to perfection and then something stupid happens. They are definitely teachable moments. I had carved the most coolest neck and then it cracked. Fit perfect, looked amazing. All that time gone. When you build everything by hand and not CNC or whatever, it's a lot of time lost when that happens. But you are absolutely correct that it is all about learning and just part of the process. Nice to hear I'm not the only one and that someone like you has the same experiences. Kathy
I setup the bandsaw angle wrong when cutting the arm bevel on my p-bass. Ended up having the cut 2" further down than expected. Basically cut the side of the guitar off. I was able to plane the surfaces flat, line up the inlay features, and glue it back together. I had to change the shape a little, but its still great. the seam looks like a slightly odd wood grain. It's now a slab body P-bass with a slightly different profile. No one can tell the difference.
Scotland here. My wife says my biggest mistake was picking up a guitar.
drop it instantly (the wife)
I'm at the finish line of my first ever build. There were some mistakes along the way. I used the wrong saw to remove material from the neck tenon and cut where I shouldn't have, almost nicking the truss rod. I fixed that by cleaning up the angles and fabricating a piece of purple heart. The PH stands out from the maple so I will always remember that mistake, but also completely fixes it and actually looks really cool, even intentional. Then I made an open front template for the neck pickup because I had already glued the neck in... and of course routed the neck right down to the 24th fret which is where the bearing stopped it. I once again fabricated a piece of curly maple and glued it in. Then created grooves around the piece and inlayed lava orange mica powder with epoxy and sanded it all flush. Makes it look like the neck pickup is oozing lava and the maple is on fire. Once again mistake fixed. Finally, I did not have the bit I really should have to drill the channel from the control cavity to the neck pickup and just broke through the top at the very edge of the pickup route. This was the most difficult to make look like something intentional because the piece is so small. Luckily it's almost hard to notice, almost. The top is stained, which came out really cool. Red underneath and sanded back so the stripes are red and then an amber yellow over that which makes the guitar look like fire. It looks good with just raw dry stain. Can't wait to put the finish on. About to finish and wire it up this weekend. It plays great! tested it prior to finishing in case I needed to make adjustments. For a first build from a guy who's previous projects were in middle school and consisted of a box that wouldn't close and a coat tree that falls over, I'd say it's an incredible feat that proves what I set out to prove as a doctor of education. A person can learn anything they want to, and almost nothing they don't. I did ALL the work, made the five piece neck, made the fretboard and cut the slots, installed the frets, literally everything from lumber to finish. I'm pleased as punch.
I don't build guitars but love the craft of it. I build drums. So I had a give away build for raffle for a local benieft . Solid steam bent birds eye maple snare drum. 8 lug with special made single point lugs. Did a nitro finish on the shell let it dry for 30 days or so. Wet sanded and Polished it, I only had 2 weeks left til the raffle. Put the shell on my drill pattern and laid it out. Drilled the shell, did the edges and started assembly. Only after I went to put the heads on and tension rods I realized I drilled two holes off..like they will not line up with the hoops at all.
I had to get another shell finish it in oil finish and make sure I drilled it correctly. Finished it the morning of the raffle. Messure twice...and again..then drill or cut!
I made a laminated back for a guitar out of mahogany with tamo ash veneer either side, and glued it together with epoxy so as not to warp the veneer. However, when it came to gluing my bracing in place, the back was so rigid that it bent the bracing out straight. I eventually installed carbon fibre through the centre of the braces to overcome the rigidity of the laminated back, an engineering feat of great complexity. I now have a RIGID laminated back which has a surprisingly good tap sound. I hope the sides aren't as challenging.
I could probably fill a book with all my screwups that are related to not having good enough tools. But I think the one that caused the most despair was when I was making a special guitar for my daughter. I had made several guitars but this one I was wanting to make everything from scratch and had even made a side bender so I could say I bent my own sides.
I had put a little strip up the back of the guitar like on a Martin, and I glued the back onto the guitar with this huge rubber band cut from a bike innertube that was so long that it covered the entire back from sight. Next day I took the rubber band off and I noticed that the back had slid over about 1/8" and the stripe was way out of alignment. I had put so much effort into making her guitar perfect. I have learned that I never start fixing things right away. I go think about it for a few days and usually decide on something good. I took my router and routed out the strip and inlayed a strip of mahogany where it was and then inlayed a new strip in the right place. It looks perfect and I showed it to my daughter only after she had the guitar for 15 years and she had never noticed it. You would have to pull up that center (you call it backstrap) strip from the inside of the guitar to see the remains of the original strip to figure out what I did. Now, when I see that repair, I think of it as one of my clever moments and I willingly show the repair to people.
Trying to compensate for a very high action on a friends acoustic/electric guitar, we made a slight adjustment to the truss rod, then opted to file the saddle a bit...Simple job... but we were on the road! So I didn't have a way of keeping the saddle square. Long story short, we didn't realize how uneven the saddle was until he plugged in to play live! THAT was very unfortunate and embarrassing for both of us - for different reasons! My takeaway, 'tis a true axiom, "The right tool for the right job." Fun series guys! Let the catharsis begin!!
I'm not sure that I'm ready to talk about it just yet, but I have a story about my 1965 Gretsch Chet Atkins Nashville. I got it when I was 14 and, 42 years later, it's still with me. Give me time....I might open up and get it all off my chest. 🥺
My biggest mistake by FAR was during my first electric build, which I'm still doing. I was working with some spalted maple, cutting out the fingerboard with my tablesaw. I made the cut properly, used the push stick to get the fingerboard through properly. But the waste piece was looking like it was headed towards the blade, and I was stupid and didn't have my riving knife on. So I went to just wipe the piece away from the blade and ended up cutting the pad of my left thumb across and down to the bone. Cut through the nerves and 60% of the tendon. Paramedics came by and cleaned all the blood out of my garage as I drove myself to the ER. Surgery and 4 months of physical therapy later, I'm finally back to building, but I'm definitely much more cautious. So what if a cut takes me 3x as long, I'll at least keep the rest of my fingers!
After I finished the binding I was finish sanding an electric I was building. I put it in my quick release bench so I could sand the cutaway. If you've never used a quick release vise sometimes when you tighten it after using the quick release adjustment it pops back a thread. So as I was tightening the vise it pops and drops this guitar body onto my super rough cement floor. It dented up the end grain and binding really badly. I just put it on the shelf and walked away for about two months. Since it was end grain I couldn't steam out the dents I tried to fill them with sanding dust and wood glue and it looked ok but the binding channel dented into the top so it's super obvious to me what happened. Luckily this guitar was a surprise gift for a friend so he got what he paid for! And I put a thick rubber mat under my work bench.
I built every part of all electric guitar, but every part I build doesn't make a guitar like a neck I'm satisfied with. Like a neck I built had a trust rod that was installed to low inside the the neck! So I'm making a laminate thru body, telli's, a strat, 2 Les Pauls and one full Bowed sized bass (on a stick) to use here at home. I have really no working space and I'm 64.
I have stocked away of many woods collected from all over the world and I think there going to great places after I'm done with that.
Grabbed for the naptha and got the denatured alcohol instead. Destroyed a perfect sunburst right down to bare wood. Took a couple days off, cooled down, learned how to read labels, and started over.
Doing my first finish on a Tele made me feel sick to my stomach. I started by working my way up to 240 grit on the sanding for the body. It's a flame maple top with Ash back and sides so I dyed the top black and sanded away the top coat to bring out the flame. Was looking good so far. Mixed a deep blue dye for the top and a black dye for the back and sides. Applied the dye and the guitar looked spectacular. I live in a small place with dogs and no real room or area to pull off a spray finish so hand rubbed it was. Decided to go with a Tung oil lacquer. For real Tung oil in this lacquer though. Applied a couple of coats and went to level sand and burned right through the dye at the edges. There was no way to cover this up I knew what I had to do. Strip sanded it and then sanded back up to 240 and started the process again. This time I get through 5 coats with level sanding and boom I burn through the finish on the edge again. I'm weeks into this dumb finish which requires significant dry time between coats. I'm now ready to turn the thing into fire wood. I'm looking at the label of the lacquer and realize the stuff is self leveling. Could it be? Can I get away with not level sanding? Did it all over again and sanded up to 800 before dying. Miraculously enough the dye still takes at that grit level and I apply five coats and get a beautiful 50/50 gloss/satin finish smooth to the touch. The guitar is deep blue with black flame top, black back and sides, has a purple heart neck with flame maple fretboard, and gold hardware. It's stunning. I go to tighten the neck plate and the screw driver slips and scratches the back. I decided that scratch will be my signature on that one since it's my first build and it's my guitar, but I honestly didn't want to even touch the thing for a few days after that. It's all in all a beautiful guitar that plays and sounds great so I figure it's still a success for an experiment to see if I could pull off a build.
Cool little video. I fully agree with the "walk away from it" technique. when it happens your head just can't contemplate a solution. I have a lot of experience on doing that. :)
Hey guys, I’m 61yrs old legally blind former finish carpenter, I decided about 2yrs ago that I wanted to try to build some guitars for my sons. So I started with building tenor Ike’s first I built 4 of them the first 2 ended up being firewood, This past summer I desired to try to build the guitars I have been working on them for 2 months now, I completely screwed up both necks so I just finished building 2 new necks the issue I had was the tennons I finally broke down & bought the elevate M & T jig ( that saved my ass)_ Anyway thank you I love your channel.🎸🎸🎹🎼📐🔨🪚🚪🪟🪑👨🏻🦯👨🏻🦯
On my third guitar build I installed the neck with at the wrong alignment angle and then applied finish the guitar. I noticed the error when I strung up the guitar. I had done several neck resets and felt comfortable removing the neck to correct the alignment error. Also I had used hide glue to assemble the guitar. When I applied steam, with way to much pressure, the guitar disassembled. I mean the braces, back, and tail block fell off the guitar. It’s still disassembled but number four isn’t to bad.
I build custom drums and I was building a kit out of 900 year old wood that took 6 months to get in. I was up against a deadline of giving it to someone as a surprise and at 4am rushing to finish (which was my first of many mistakes….) I was drilling the holes for the bass drum legs/spurs and I figured all was well and I was moving right along. Well….I put the spurs on and instead of both sitting nicely on the ground supporting the bass drum, one was on the ground and one was way up in the air at about 3 o’clock - I had drilled it in the wrong spot. 😳🤦🏼♂️😫 After my “oh 🤬” moment I cut out some dowels of the wood by hand (didn’t have any other way) and inserted them into the wrong holes and lined them up with the grain and you couldn’t tell at all. It looked perfect and actually was one of the best sounding kits I ever made and was used for some high profile records and everyone was super happy. All worked out but man was I terrified and mad at myself.
can you do a guitar with a full body, no glue, and no division (front,back,sides,even braces!,maybe even neck and fretboard all the same wood log)?
or one just without glue at all? this is a lot to think about...
One moment that comes to mind. I was was playing trumpet in a big band. We were rotating seats a little bit. My buddy put his flugel on a chair. I forgot it was there and sat on it. I was over 300 pounds at the time and did some pretty serious damage to it. I felt so bad about it!
I dropped a cam clamp on a finished guitar and the bar went right through the soundboard. It was so exciting to learn, or invent new vocabulary…
My most recent screw up was on the first guitar I ever owned....an Epiphone El Dorado FT-350. Not an expensive guitar but I have had it since 1975. (Yes I am that old). My intention was to re-finish the top of the guitar which had multiple dings and depressions in the finish, and I though with my background in furniture finishing and spraying I could do a passable job. I have finished and restored electrics and thought I knew what I was doing. What I did not know or failed to realize was when I scraped and sanded the top....IT WASN'T A SOLID TOP! So I sanded through the spruce layer of a LAMINATED TOP! Arggg! Now I am wondering how I can mask / dodge / shade the spots to make a passable refinish! Inexpensive guitar, as I said but still heart rending!
I have started building an acoustic guitar (after watching videos on this channel), and have been trying to bend sides. i have just ordered my THIRD set of sides for it because i keep messing up the hand bending. its a nightmare, but you have to learn somewhere!!!
You become a better Tech and Luthier by learning, and doing. Mistakes are opportunities to learn.
I took on a project build with every intension of selling the guitar when the build was done. I found a vintage 1980's American, San Francisco made Chandler Super Strat style guitar with matching neck. The body and neck were never completed and built into a guitar. It had just sat under a bed for decades. The body and head stock had a nice custom paint job. A medium metallic blue/green paint with a hint of silver ghost hot rod flames. It had a very cool look, and the artwork was very well done. I carefully taped off all the areas of the guitar I needed to. I had to drill mounting holes for the Floyd Rose tremolo. I had to route out the tremolo cavity larger for a Floyd Rose tremolo. I also had to drill mounting holes for the pickup ring, back plates, make back plate covers, drill and mount a jack plate, and other things.
When it came time to assemble every thing. I started to remove the tape. It was then I realized that I didn't use a low tack tape. With every pull of a piece of tape. The vintage, aged amber clear coat would peal off in random patterns. At first it was a small piece, but the problem kept getting worse and worse. Chunks of clear coat were peeling off with the tape like skin from a bad sun burn. I had to set it down and walk away. I was convinced the finish was just ruined and I would have to take it all apart and repaint it.
The next day I decided to finish building it, just because I wanted to know what this guitar sounded like after sitting almost 40 years. It sounded amazing. It is an amazing sounding guitar in every way. I then removed the rest of the tape. To my surprise a very interesting pattern started to emerge from the random removal of finish. A odd but kind of cool camouflage/relic patina was happening. I decided to use more tape and try to randomly accentuate the look. At first I thought it was cool, but maybe too strange for some. Almost every one that has seen the guitar now has told me they love the finish.
My mistake turned into something unique. Now I can't part with the guitar and sell it. I like it too much. LOL.
[img]i.ibb.co/W6rLRpq/20190327-173648.jpg[/img]
That is a really cool and interesting look!
I learned first hand about routing correctly. Built a laminate neck of maple and zebra wood, routing too quickly in the wrong direction. Needless to say the next thing I know the neck is flying across my shop and split in two. Offered a cool opportunity to graphs in some Purple Heart to fix it!
I don't have any instrument building horror stories yet (though I'm sure I will, in time), but I do have a home improvement one from just yesterday. I just moved, and took the washer and dryer with because we paid for them, and they're old enough to not be gimmicky garbage. So hooking the washer up was mostly straightforward (apart from the minor issues of someone at some point having connected the "hot" hose to the "cold" inlet, and vice versa; which I fixed, and then Sharpied on labels so it won't happen again; oh, and the drain standpipe in the new house had an awkward little ledge that I couldn't get the blasted drain hose past until I tore apart an old cookie tin from a couple Christmases ago, and used a strip of the side of that as a ramp to get the end of the hose to slide past the issue) but the dryer... oof.
So it's a gas dryer, which is great in some ways, but means you're having to deal with gas. I tried contacting an appliance repair place I'd had good experiences with in the past, but they still haven't gotten back to me and it's been over a week. Yesterday was the point at which my impatience won out over my healthy fear of messing with gas. So I go to the hardware store, pick up a kit. I've checked the specs, it matches the numbers on the dryer it's supposed to, this should be easy, right? Not so much. So it comes with a fancy safety valve that automatically shuts it off if there's a significant leak, only the inlet side of that valve is a thread that's totally incompatible with the shutoff valve on the pipe coming out of the wall. So I find the necessary horrific stack of adapters necessary to connect that, slather it in the sealing grease, and hook it all up, and just keep applying more goop and going more gorilla on the fittings until it finally quits blowing bubbles when I spray it with soapy water. Level the machines, run a couple loads, it all seems to be going fine. And then, this morning, I go to run more laundry (because moving REALLY messes up your whole laundry routine, I tell ya) and I smell the stuff they add to the gas to make it smell. So we rapidly exit the house, call the gas company, and I've already shut off the original valve because hell if I'm gonna let the house fill with gas and explode, my stuff is in there. Guy arrives, and it turns out I did basically everything wrong; the stack of adapters is an abomination, the fancy automatic valve is pointless junk, the hose I got in the kit is too small, and the whole thing is utterly terrible and I should have just gotten a half-inch flex line for way less money. Which I did, because PG&E won't do hookups. Even though I would happily have paid them a fee to have that done, and then they'd have not needed to send someone out as an emergency, PG&E will not help you beyond the unofficial "Oh, you just needed a half-inch flex line" the guy told me.
Anyway, the TL;DR is that dryer hookup kits are a goddamned scam, and you should Sharpie the installation details on the back of your appliances if you ever plan to move with them. Also, gas is way less scary than I had considered it to be.
Now, if I can get all these damn boxes out of the garage, I've got some plans to take the little work space there is in there and make some instruments. Probably start with solid-body electrics and ukulele kits, but eventually there'll be carved top stuff going on. I'm only gonna be able to get the mandola I want if I make it myself.
Literally just had one of my first big issues with the ukulele I'm building. As I was flush trimming the top to the sides, the router bit caught a piece of the top and broke it off along the grain. There were several other issues with the top, particularly concerning the grain structure and stability. Pulled the top off completely, re-leveled the sides and began glue up for a new mahogany top. Your video on sound boards is going to be helpful to properly gauging the thickness, which is where I think this whole problem stemmed from.
So i've been a luthier apprentice for almost 2 and a half years and I've scuffed a few headstock breaks for respray but mostly intermediate range acoustics. Earlier this year my boss handed me some vintage reissue Gibson LP that belonged to a session muso that needed it back asap. Without thinking twice I grabbed some sand paper and in less than 5 seconds I removed half the logo from the headstock. It's an easy fix but being in South Africa means shipping is a pain. The job got delayed by two weeks while we waited for a new logo to arrive. Not the most epic of fails but lesson learnt.
I was building a Strat style guitar. I inadvertently routed the truss rod slot a bit too deep in one area, then when I was shaping the back of the neck, I punched through to the truss rod slot. Grrrr :( My recovery was to setup a jig to route a very shallow slot on the back of the neck so I could fill in with a walnut stripe. Whew.
I was doing the final buffing on what I felt was the best build I've done. The finish was looking amazing. I was just doing the very last corner of the Strat type body and I must have relaxed my hands and the guitar flew out of my hands and onto the floor, taking a large chip down to the wood out of the just completed finish. It was everything I could do not to just throw up my hands and move on. I'm currently trying to fix the chip. We'll see how it goes.
Watching your videos has inspired me to try to build acoustic guitars. "Thanks a Lot!!!" I have built a bunch of electric kits and even made a few with my own scratch built bodies with necks from others online. I pride myself as a pretty good woodworker so in my retirement I decided really challenge myself. So purchasing a bunch and varied tonewoods I chose 4 guitars to build...1 - Wiessenborn lap steel 2 - OM Style 3 - Dreadnought 4 - Gibson 1940 L-00 .
Nothing like jumping head first into a hobby eh? So my 1st guitar top is a sitka spruce top thicknessed to about 3.4mm with rossette installed and sanded flat and pretty then braces and rosewood bridge plate glued on and shaped .....ummmm this seems rather dead ummmm did I forget to finish thicknessing the top to around 2.85mm? Yup I am old and so, so forgetful! So out comes the multi tool and zip of those oh so beautiful braces and back through the drum sander till i have what looks like a perfect top ready to hit the go-bar deck and start bracing it up once again! I love my hobby. LOL
So I've only built one guitar, a telecaster based off of a '69 thinline with a super cool dead tree outline for the f-hole, and I had sunk probably 200 hours into this thing, when disaster struck. I had been super careful with everything, I had gotten the body dimensions perfect, and the neck pocket perfect, and the f-hole perfect, I just had to route the last pickup cavity for the neck pickup, and then I would be ready to do the binding and finish. I was routing in pretty thin passes and going super slowly, but for this last pass I must have been going to deep or the blade just wasn't sharp enough, because the router got away from me and just chewed up the entire pickup cavity. There was this look of horror on my face for like 2 hours, and I don't think I've ever been so mad in my life. The entire area is covered by the pick guard so it doesn't really matter at the end of the day, but it just crushed my soul when it happened. Thankfully it didn't sully my experience to much, and I can't wait to build my next guitar!
Loving your channel watching from Northern Ireland a land of music
This wasn't me, but I was taking a guitar building class and my buddy had been waiting for the vacuum clamp all night. He ran over with 10 minutes left in the class, and proceeded to activate the clamp over the sound hole. Instantly imploded the guitar. Luckily we had laminated the sides and the back held, so the only thing that couldn't be salvaged was the top.
Hi Chris, I am in the last stages of my first cut away guitar. This is number 9. Everything is going great. By far the best guitar I ever made. However, when I temporarily attached the neck (bolt on) I realized that the front end was not square to the center seam causing the strings to angle off center about 3/4 of an inch at the bridge. So it sits on the bench waiting rescue somehow.
Hey guys. I started fixing cars in service stations in my teens, paying my way through university. I "officially" started apprenticeship when I was 20. I've had 30 years of breaking shit, professionally and personally. I've recently started dabbling in guitar repair and minor luthier work. My first build was a high end Les Paul kit from a Canadian body maker. I used high end parts for everything except the tuners. Which I intend to swap out for open gear Waverley Tuners at some point. I can relate to the neck angle misstep, because I set my neck before measuring the angle, and now the axe suffers from action that is permanently a hair high.
Horror story. When routing out a battery compartment, the router tore through my jig and I made the battery compartment too big for the battery box. Also on the same guitar. I used a band saw to cut out the guitar body and messed up the next joint on the body. I also learned to be very careful with routers and table saws. Since I tried to build a les Paul style guitar for my first one, I had to lower the router but so much that while routing out for the pickups the bit was barely in the router and flew out and hit me in the back of the hand. I had a nice gouge in the back of my hand. I never finished that guitar. I still would love to build a guitar, but have not had time or probably better worded made time.
Putting together a 335 kit the wife got me, I felt the “finish it before you put the neck on”. On the upside, I’ve invented 4 or 5 fiddly little sanding implements.
One time I was gluing the bindings on the back of a lovely walnut classic guitar that had a quite pronounced curve. I crushed the guitar with rubber bands! I remember I was able to salvage the build but that was years ago and I don't recall quite how I did.
A while back, after some successful (and some not) projects involving buying damaged instruments and fixing them up, (ukuleles and old mandolins), I decided to explore building cigar box guitars. It seemed like a fun way to learn some guitar building techniques without having to do it all. Part of the first (and so far only) build involved building a fret board from scratch. I mostly went well, got the frets in clean, took off the fret ends, and even put fret marker dots in. It was a painstaking process, carefully lining up the fretboard under my small drill press, getting the hole width and depth to match the bone dots I had was tough, but I did it, and the fret board looked pretty good. After putting everything together and stringing it up, I couldn't get the intonation in, or even close, even with the floating bridge. I measured the the fret board from the 0 fret to the 12th, and then to the bridge to make sure my math was right, and then it hit me. The fret markers for the 12th fret were on the 13th fret. I was using a baritone ukulele scale, and usually on those the first fret marker is on the 5th fret. I had set it in AFTER the 5th fret, and the placement of the 7th, 12th, and 15th markers followed that mistake. I was mortified, it was such a pain in the ass to get those markers in, and all they did was mess with your mind when you played that thing. I thought about trying to replace the fret board, but instead it stays as a reminder to pay closer attention to....stuff.
Drilled my 4th or 5th 2 point tremolo on a strat style guitar. One of the posts were not lined up correctly and the bridge would not fit. This was a VERY expensive ash body with a Spalted and Flamed Maple top. I had to plug the hole with maple and redrill. I thought I would not be able to recover from this and figured I had wasted this body. But another lutheir/repair person always says that there is (almost) nothing you can do to a guitar that you cannot recover from. I guess they were right!
Part of the creative art of building custom guitars comes from fixing mistakes. We all make them. It’s how u recover that counts.
I built a one piece mahogany lap steel for a friend. The router caught it and blew the bottom out. I freaked! I took a minute, had some coffee and went back to it. I scraped the blown out chunks off of the floor and pieced them back in with Titebond. I then, FEARFULLY, took the router back over it (after a few days). The repair disappeared. Thank the Lord! The guitar turned out great.
I remember buying a ukulele (stew Mac kit ) to build for my oldest daughter , I wanted to make it a little more special for her, I decided to install tortoise shell binding on it. I first tested the cut on a piece of scrap wood and the depth looked good, but I forgot to tighten the depth stop down and when I went to cut the top I started cutting into the top and almost cut 3/4 of the top away from the body. I felt horrible, angry and sad all at the same time😬😂I’ve always had the dream to build my four kids ukuleles or guitars and my self one as well, but I’ve always been a bit apprehensive to put the time and money in to it just to mess up . Thanks for the video and encouragement to help us see, we have to make mistakes to learn what not to do, and you can almost always recover from any mistake:) thanks guys:)
is investing in large brazilian rosewood log stocks a good idea for the future?
I think Breedlove Guitars beat you to it.
@@ErnieB trust me, there is no competition. there is still much enough to gather, yet few enough to make it very expensive. and what a wood that is
On my first violin repair, I had to remove the top because one of the ribs needed replacement. It had some signs of mildew. I had bought it to practice varnishing, and it was still in the white, so I wasn’t too worried about the potential for a rib replacement to look terrible. But since it was still such new hide glue, it was not really brittle yet. When I got my seam knife into the joint, everything went fine for about half of the instrument. However, as I got to the lower treble bout, it split the top. And then when I was on the upper treble bout, it cracked pretty bad. I got the top off, but then instead of just replacing a rib, I had to do crack repair and place about 15 cleats on the top. I was able to reshape the blocks and the linings to how the factory should have in the first place. And it has been valuable experience. But I am still so frustrated with it that I haven’t yet accomplished the goal that I had when I bought it. It’s still in the white. I think I’ll finally close it back up and finish it in the new year.
My first guitar build is still in progress. It’s a renaissance style guitar, which is basically a ukulele with the middle strings doubled in unison and the bottom string doubled in octaves. Because I knew more about violins than guitars at the time I started, and because I was making too many assumptions, I took the thickness for my sides down to 1.2mm. I thought it would be fine because that’s still thicker than violin sides usually are. But I’m currently working on binding the instrument. The sides are so thin that my binding channels go all the way through them. I’ve had to adjust several things, and I know that it won’t be as stable as I had hoped, but I still plan to finish that instrument.
Great video, not gonna lie I was caught off guard when you went to a second camera angle and all the sudden I'm like "am I watching UA-cam or cable TV?!", It's amazing how changing cameras like that make the video feel so much different and give it more depth. You guys have given me a hell of an education ahead of trying to do the PA solid body electric version of what you're doing, thanks for all the help!
around 10 years ago, I think, I wanted a headless guitar. Back then Steinberger and Spirit by Steinberger were difficult to find in my country, and I didn't know that someone carries Hofner headless here. Anyway I saw someone posted guitar kits in the classified section of local guitar bulletin board. Basically the seller has a deal with a Chinese factory to sells unassembled guitars. I decided to give it a a try without careful thought, and that bites me in the end. To make it even more disastrous, I add some more extra options which I think it'd be cool.
After a couple of delays, I finally got the kit. Some of the options were not included in the guitar, but I didn't really mind it at that point (as it's been almost a year after the promised delivery date). Anyway I put the kit together (which is basically the whole guitar and hardware not installed) and found that the bridge cavity is too shallow. I had to buy a router and a router bit to cut a deeper cavity. After a few tries I managed to get an ok cavity to install the bridge.
But the disaster didn't end there. Next I found that the finger board was not prepared at that point. The frets are in, but the level is all over the place. Putting the string on would buzz badly. At that time I don't know any fret jobs and don't event know it needs to do leveling and crowning and stuffs. .... that guitar was not playable.
Later I made a trip to Japan and found a couple of Spirits. I bought one of them (the HSH model). That kit guitar became a proof of my incompetence lol. I decided to trash it after a few more try on that guitar....
Thinking back, may be I can fix that guitar if I have the right tool and a good advice. I didn't have any of those back then.
PS. That Spirit guitar also has its own story. That will be the next time :D
Speaking of Spirit guitar, I later put P-Rails in that guitar. I guess that what connects with Chris and Matt's guitar here :D
Love this video. lol “don’t smash the guitar”. Sooo...speaking of not having a vacuum clamp. I am working on the end graft after assembling the body and drop the whole body off the tall table. As it crashes into the hard floor and cracks the back I didn’t even pick it up I just walked into the other room speechless. My wife was like 😮. I was able to fix it but it was devastating. I think I have like 10 more stories from my first guitar. The neck....agh
Online forums and chat groups are the best for beginners. If I'm doing something and I feel I need some expert advice forums are great. You'll get many different answers and opinions and you can weed through and assemble the best advice. Plus remember there is no question too stupid when you're a beginner and people will share stuff like this. There is always going to be some common mistake people make and they'll let you know right off the bat what to avoid, what to buy, how to prepare, what to look out for. Take your time and do a lot of research, don't just dive in with an arrogant "Oh this is easy! I know what i'm doing!" attitude.You will suck and learn from each mistake, but if you do your homework it will be less costly and angering.
Great video! I appreciate the fact that you guys are down to earth and humble enough to share your mistakes and how you overcame them. Learning from your mistakes makes you better and ultimately more successful and efficient at your craft
Biggest fuck-up I made was printing out a template too small and not double checking it’s size before cutting out the shape of the guitar and not leaving a big enough border around the guitar.
Router got away from me when cutting the binding channel
Cut saddle slot too wide
Cut fret slots incorrectly
Sloppy side dots
Dropped an almost finished ukulele and split the top
Many broken sides while bending
Broke head off tuner screws
Dropped and lost tuner bushing
Soundhole cut off center from the rosette - I don’t know how that happened
Neck carving mistakes so bad it went into the burn pile
Glued kerfing below the edge of the side
And I could go on forever
Lets just say I've had a few random chip outs while doing round overs on electric guitar edges. Normally it ends with me texting the client a picture with binding installed with the comment "I just couldn't not upgrade you to binding...it's on me ;)" haha. I've had a quite a few beauty blunders though! Most of them I was able to recover from!
Failure is not the opposite of success it is a fundamental part of it.
We used to have a saying when I worked in a machine shop-the difference between a journeyman and an apprentice is the journeyman knows how to cover up his mistakes. Enjoy your videos.
building a ala carte strat guitar. Used cheap chinese neck screws. Stupidly bought a vintage accurate Fender style neck. So I am at the set up phase and need to tweak the truss rod. Go to take neck off, 3 of the 4 neck screws had broken off in the neck. Had to Incredible Hulk the neck off, then remove screws. Filled all holes and repaint, refinish.. only to learn the spray on Poly I have used now is cracking off the entire body of the guitar. Walked away from it. Repainted it and now am getting it finished at a friends Auto Shop with pro level clear coat. I swear this guitar is cursed!
Thanks for an excellent video.
I really appreciate not only the quality of your work but also the practical helpfulness of your teaching.
You have helped me substantially in my building and for that I am grateful.
Request: I would like to learn to make the molds and templates you're using. A video on mold building would be a big help. The ones I've made have those big awkward latches in the way and are not elegant and sleek like yours. Thank You.
Just starting my journey. Ordering a set of nut and fret files in the next day or so. No doubt I'll have some amazing mistakes in time.
Though I'm mostly working on banjos, so popular opinion might say their destruction would be a public service.
I was doing my first fret level on my own guitar. I was using a radiused sanding block and got the wrong one. I used a 9.5" block on a 12" radius board. I was a mess but I got it sorted out.
Shoot I just cut out a control cavity on the FRONT of an LP jr body. Had to throw the whole thing out. It was a learning and yelling experience for sure. Also neck pockets are a nightmare when doing them without a router.
I'm a mid-level tech at best, and usually, just make some minor adjustments for people, so no real opportunity to screw up royal yet. But I inherited a late-60s Gibson J-45D that someone must have almost literally thrown under a bus. They tried to "fix" the adjustable bridge & saddle it came with by epoxying what looks kinda like a scallop shell into the bridge as a saddle. The upper part of the side looks like it was cracked all the way around and fixed with who-knows-what and the neck "reset" that has 4" of bold protruding past the wood and into the bowl. egad...
It reminds me of the saying, "They know just enough to be dangerous."
My basic philosophy in woodworking/guitar building is that it's not a mistake until it leaves your shop. While it's in your shop it's a design change...
I was swaping pickups in a thin body kiesel. The screw went straight through the body afterwards. I tried to fix my mistake, and made it worse. we had to send that guitar to a shop that had a spray booth. It wasn't my guitar.
Well, here she goes. When I was building my first guitar I put a large padouk bridge plate on the top. But a few days later I really regretted that decision, and decided that I wanted a smaler maple bridge plate. So that day got out a pallet knife and a steaming iron en went to town on the bridge plate, I got some cuts on my fingers and a big part of the underside of the to was covered in blood (no big deal) but then I accidentally Pushed the pallet knife THROUGH the top. Luckily most of the scar got covered by the bridge, but you can still see a 1/4” scar behind the bridge.
Well that is one of my horror stories.
Not my biggest mistake, but the bridge placement on a flat top has given me many challenges. When installing a pre routed saddle bridge, I have to take in consideration the deformation of the top plate in order to get a better intonation margin. This is why having a tail piece like jig isnt the best to achieve the bridge placement. Its going to intonate fine but with the string pull everything will go sharp as soon as the top starts to deflect.
Wanted to say that on your website under the inlay design section when you browse acoustic models there is a typo. It says "Custon" not "Custom"
The only difference between a master and apprentice is the number of mistakes made and learned from. I'm paying my dues right now. Started my first guitar about a month ago.
I built a carved top electric. Put led flames on it, tried to epoxy. Picked wrong epoxy, it ran off all sides, like a stack of pancakes.
It is terrible, but one day,, I will get up epoxy to finish the flash.
Very cute guys 🍟 what a show 😜 So we should pray for the gift of mistakes🙏
Unfortunately you'll not know that til after you've recorded with it. Fortunately for me, most, if not all of my mic work was live, so you can get the read "live" and fix it on the fly...but you scramble your butt off to get it right.
Would drilling right through the back of the body not once, but twice qualify? So now I have an otherwise beautiful ash bass body with two fairly well matched plugs...
I make electric solid-bodies as a career, but i dont know anything about properly making an acoustic, and the biggest mistake I made on the last of 3 hollow bodies i've built, is kinda funny. I assumed that an acoustic guitar topwood needed to be super hard like maple (violin logic) and I thought well what's stronger and harder than any wood...bulletproof glass, hear me out. big chunk of lexan polycarbonate, smoked clear, looked cool as hell, transparent top, felt cool, looked spectacular. glued it up, sanded it. the most dead silent guitar i have ever heard. like you took a shitty pawn shop acoustic and stuffed it with pillows. I was baffled. I mean it;s harder than wood and then it dawned on me that it;s a plastic designed to take an impacting blow and deaden it without breaking. I made a guitar with a top made of high tech material designed to absorb vibration. I made a silent acoustic guitar. I felt very stupid, ended up just throwing it away. looked sleek, but it sounded like playing air guitar. I was so disappointed.
Biggest mistake i made is not starting my first build. Need to get on that 😂
If you want to see what not to do go watch my stew Mac gold top build ! Full of oh crap moments and I’m still not done !
Okay, here's my little story, a costumer who later became a friend of mine brought me an inexpensive Ibanez RG copy for me to customize it for him, the beginning of the process was like izi pizi, I sanded the finish down to the sealer and proceeded to start with the custom finish but the customer wanted to sign the guitar before the clear was applied to seal the finish, this is when disaster stroke, I unintentionally touched the marker and left a nice big dark impression of my thumb on the white lacquer on the top of the guitar, and it gets worse cause I didn't notice the huge thumb on the finish and decided to clear cote the guitar body ._. and yup I noticed it was there just when the finish was already dry, I tried sanding it off but I made it worse ._. god knows I masked off the signing on the top and proceeded to put another Cote of white and then sand and seal now when it was time for the neck oh my got, I forgot to take off the masking tape off of the heel, which I put there to protect it from getting hit and dented or whatever could happen to it, long story short i screwed up big time my first custom finish