Mythbusting

First off, i think there’s a perception issue when it comes to what people think a “handmade” guitar is. (For the sake of this discussion, i’ll limit myself to solid-body electric guitars, which is what i make and is what i’m most familiar with from a historical and production perspective.)

I’m sure many people have romantic ideas of the stringed-instrument artisan sitting in a dimly-lit workshop, carefully and lovingly carving guitars from solid blocks of wood using hand saws, rasps, spoke shaves and chisels. While a lot of these hand tools and traditional woodworking techniques are indeed used in modern guitar construction, i would say a very large proportion of modern guitar construction is done with the assistance of machines of some description or another: The table saw for cutting raw lumber down to size; the bandsaw for re-sawing or cutting out body and neck blanks; the jointer or edge sander for prepping wood for gluing; the surface planer or drum sander for leveling and smoothing out body and neck blanks; routers for cutting cavities and contours; the drill press for accurate hole drilling, and so on.

Guess what? Your “hand made” guitar was touched by a lot of machines in its creation!

Along with these tools come a variety of templates and jigs to ensure accuracy and consistency. Many of these templates or jigs will be hand-made, but sometimes they’re made by machines. The templates i use are laser-cut acrylic, created by a skilled and knowledgeable technician with the tools and knowledge to give me outstanding results. Yes, they’re cut by a machine and i use them to guide another machine over the surface of the wood because human hands cannot cut straight lines or accurate curves with a motorized cutter spinning at 15,000 RPM. And i prefer to cut out the contours of a body in a matter of minutes, rather than the hours – or days – it would take to get the same result using nothing but hand tools.

Let’s just pause here for a moment and consider that: Why do modern artisans use power tools and accurate templates and jigs rather than purely using hand tools? Because they’re faster, they produce cleaner, more consistent cuts, and with good templates and jigs, the work is repeatable from one workpiece to the next… something very valuable when you’re in any production environment.

Heck, some builders even use copy-carvers… sort of a three-dimensional pantograph, allowing them to make one “master” neck or body and carve one or more copies at a time by using a router on a hand-manipulated control arm that’s linked to a probe that traces the original master workpiece.

Yes, there are instrument makers who use more hand processes than others, and more often than not, these are hollowbody acoustic instruments that require human intervention in more aspects of the process because there are so many more parts and variables in an acoustic instrument compared to a solid-body electric. But many acoustic builders also rely on machines these days for the same reasons of accuracy, consistency and speed in their builds.

Closing the perception gap

Yet for some reason, when those three letters – C N C – are uttered in the context of the manufacturing of guitars, some people lose their heads. “A guitar made by a machine can never be as good as a hand-made guitar,” they say, even though most luthiers who are “hand-making” guitars are likely using routers and templates in addition to many hand tools. Some (like me) are using templates that were cut with (*GASP!*) a CNC machine or a laser. If i’m already using a router, why should it matter if i’m using a router that’s attached to the end of a robotic arm or hooked up to a stepper motor that can work more smoothly and accurately than i can with my hands?

Maybe there’s a perception that guitar building is being handed over by the artisans to the technicians, who simply load a slab of wood into the CNC, press “print” and out comes a finished guitar in a few minutes. It’s not quite that simple, as even with guitars manufactured with the assistance of CNC machines there is still a significant amount of hand work to be done. But the advantages offered by computer-controlled machines give the luthier a tremendous advantage in the three areas already mentioned:

Accuracy: Parts are milled to an extremely fine set of tolerances. You want things like your frets, nut and bridge to be as accurate as possible, also any parts that mate up like neck heels and the pockets they go into. CNC excels at cutting things accurately, to within thousandths of an inch.

Consistency: When building guitars in a full production situation or even in small runs or individual instruments built at a slower pace, the builder can be sure that necks and bodies built cut at different times will come out more or less exactly the same, meaning parts and components can be stockpiled, allowing for greater efficiency. Matching spare parts can also be swapped out if there are warranty issues down the road.

Speed: Bodies and necks can be roughed out in much less time, and can be done while the builder works on other things. Less time doing time-consuming and routine work like cutting out necks and bodies and routing cavities in multiple operations, means the luthier can spend more time on the things that are better done by hand, like final neck profiling and fretwork… things that require that human touch. This allows instruments to be turned around with excellent quality in less time.

When people get unsatisfactory instruments made using CNC machines, it’s not because of the machines… they just execute the tasks they were programmed to do by their human operators. It’s because the manufacturer likely cut corners on the human component… the neck carving, the final sanding, the fretwork, the setup, and final quality controls. These are the elements of guitar building that no machine can do well. (Although the Plek machine is a giant leap in the right direction for final fret dressing.) A computer doesn’t know what a “good” neck feels like or how to interpret a player’s preferences into a workable neck profile.

But what does it all mean?

CNC machines do, however present tremendous opportunities for the small builder to increase production speed while not sacrificing quality, and perhaps even improving accuracy and consistency from one instrument to the next.

“So if CNC machines help increase production speed, prices should come down, right?”

I wouldn’t be so quick to jump to that conclusion. As i pointed out in earlier editorials, the time invested in the production of a guitar is quite possibly the largest cost in making each instrument. Reducing that time investment does yield some cost savings per instrument, but those savings are usually offset by the cost of owning and maintaining the CNC mill, or of outsourcing production to a dedicated CNC shop that can absorb that overhead. In order for the CNC to pay for itself (and for the full-time operator/technician to run it and maintain it), it pretty much needs to be kept busy all the time. Not all small shops have the luxury of doing this, so they outsource production of components.

Get used to it

In my view, moving to CNC-assisted production is a critical step in the growth of most luthiers’ business, where time needs to be reduced and volume increased in order to maintain profit margins that will allow their business to continue to grow and sustain itself. Some luthiers building high-end boutique instruments can sidestep this if they have built up enough of a name for themselves that their pricing and production time (and the length of their waiting list) can sustain their business. In the solid-body guitar world, that’s a tougher sell. There’s a certain price threshold that can’t be exceeded in all but the rarest of cases, so something has to give somewhere.

I definitely see CNC in the future of Decibel guitars, because there are definitely advantages in accuracy, consistency and speed to be realized, but also because there are some technical things i think the machines may be able to do better than human hands (multi-scale fretboards, for example) but also because i’d like to have my time freed up from some of the drudgery of the routine cutting and drilling operations to focus more on the high-touch parts of the building process such as the fretwork. It also gives me more time to think, to dream, to design and to write blog entries about all of these things.

Once a design is aesthetically working, i get down to the detailed design work, creating super-accurate routing templates.

In this case, the hollow body requires more templates than i normally would need for a body. The body will be made of two 1″ thick pieces of lumber that will be mated together. Before joining them, they will be hollowed out. The top and back pieces have slightly different routing patterns to account for the arm and rib “comfort carves”. The pickguard and control + soundhole placement also needs to be done very accurately.

Once my initial sketches started to evolve more toward final designs, i started working at full size, so i could lay things out accurately. I don’t have any CAD training, but my background as a graphic designer allowed me to use Adobe Illustrator to create very accurate vector drawings to scale, which i have been able to use to create perfect templates for cutting and routing.

Laser-cut routing templates allow me to lay out and cut all the elements in perfect registration. Because my template supplier knows the exact thickness of the kerf cut by the laser, i can offset the cutting paths by half that thickness in order to get parts that mate up perfectly. This is especially important for the neck heel and pocket. After routing, the joint is usually so tight that the body can be lifted by the neck with a friction-fit joint only.

Just the drilling for my neck bolt system requires seven separate drilling operations for each bolt… three per hole on the body side, four per hole on the neck side. Getting all of those holes bang-on is critical, otherwise the bolts won’t line up with the threaded inserts in the neck. So having accurate templates for the body and neck heel in perfect registration is a very important part of making a quality instrument built to very fine tolerances.

Eventually, i want to be doing moving from Illustrator to a CAD application and executing these operations on a CNC machine, rather than having to take the intermediate step of creating templates and using a table router. In my opinion, stuff that requires dead-on accuracy is best done by machines, so the more of these critical operations that can be done on a computer-controlled carving machine, the better. This is a controversial subject among builders and players, but i’ll write more on that subject later.

So far, the feedback has been tremendous and very supportive, so i just want to thank all of the friends, colleagues, and fellow guitarists who have given feedback and support. I take every bit of feedback seriously, and i do take it all very constructively. As a professional designer, i’ve learned over the years to separate myself from my work, so while i am attached to my design work, it’s just my work, and nothing you say can offend me personally. Everyone sees things differently, and if someone can help me to see my own work in a different light or from a different perspective, it makes the end result better.

I thought i’d share a few brief notes about the genesis of the models you see here. I’ll hopefully delve into these in a bit more detail and try to dredge up some sketches and earlier works in progress. But for now, here’s the brief history of the range as it stands today.

The Javelin is the design i’ve been working on the longest. It is, in many ways, the spiritual successor to my Number One, which i built a little over 20 years ago. I’ve been constantly sketching, refining, tweaking and revising that design since i first built it, knowing one day i’d be building again. It’s undergone countless design revisions over the years, and has been in its current form since late 2008. It has has only received very minor updates since then, so suffice it to say that i’m very pleased with where it has ended up. When Brian offered me the piece of figured walnut (Number One also has a walnut body), i knew that the stars had aligned and it was time to finally bring it to life.

The Cutlass i’ve been working on the next longest, and it was originally the model i was going to call the AMX. Right now, the Cutlass is the one design i’m not entirely happy with, which is how i ended up going back to the drawing board and creating the AMX from the Javelin. The Cutlass started as an extension of an idea i had for a “Parker Fly” style singlecut, and as i tweaked and refined and stretched and tweaked it some more, i started seeing too much Fernandes Ravelle and Ibanez Iceman in it. Not that there’s anything wrong with the design of either of those iconic instruments, but as it is right now, it doesn’t feel as original as i once thought, so i’m taking a bit of a break from it and might approach it with fresh eyes in a couple of months.

The AMX came together really quickly, pretty much over the course of an evening. It’s the result of some feedback i got from various people to whom i showed the initial designs to. I’m quite happy with it, and it seems to be getting a lot of very positive response from people.

The Aviator and Stealth were an interesting exercise. I initially drew a design similar to the Stealth a few years ago. I had always liked KK Downing’s Hamer mini-V, the Carvin V220 and Ultra V and Jackson King Vs, but never felt comfortable playing a V. I never liked the way they hung on a strap or where my picking arm and wrist rested in relation to the strings… they just never worked well for me ergonomically. I thought i’d try offsetting the body to create an upper “horn” extension in order to shift the balance point to where i’m more accustomed to it being. After a lot of experimentation and design work to get the proportions right, i was pretty happy. The Stealth came first, and then i rounded it off and made adjustments to get the Aviator. The Stealth X was added in order to add a leg rest to a V… the upper horn was added to balance it out.

The Prototype 2 Aviator is a true prototype… i’ve made some assumptions based on my experience and designed something which i think will work, but until i get that neck and body bolted together, i won’t know for sure. A friend of mine called it “a V for Strat players,” which i think is probably a fitting description. I’ve always liked the feel and balance of an offset double-cutaway body, but also have had a soft spot for some of the more radical designs. (The first guitar i really lusted for was the Gibson Explorer.) It’s a pretty exciting process, and i can’t wait to see how it turns out!