making your first classical guitar


How to make your first classical guitar or pinus guitar project

When you make your first guitar, the important factors are cheapness and availability of the materials, as well as a clear sequence of actions, or so called “road map” of the process.


Work plan of making classical guitar

Below is the general plan of the work performed in this project. Excluding certain operations, entirely suitable for making any master classical guitar.


Cutting wood for the body

In this article we will try to highlight how to: cut the wood properly, carefully observe it and imagine parts of the guitar, properly orient the work pieces, glue them together and finally get the soundboard and the back ready.


Cutting and gluing the fan struts and braces

It is very important to cut the guitar fan struts and braces for strictly radially, i.e. along the fibers (or grain) of the wood. The direction of wood grain can be clearly seen in two planes. The third plane is not visible, but can be determined by simple splitting.


Making the frame, gluing the back

In this article we will follow: bringing the side blanks to their width, since the width of existing single blank is not enough, step by step forming of the body and gluing the bindings. We will make not quite a classic, but today very popular, fingerboard lifting/supporting block.


Cutting the wood for neck and head

We will cut the pine and oak beams for the neck, the reinforcing insert, the head and the head plate. The heel we will discuss in the next article.


Shaping the neck

We are going to make the neck out of the blanks, cut in a previous article, and prepare it for gluing with the body. It will be installed using the dovetail joint.


Gluing the neck, final operations

We install the neck into the body of the guitar. Bonding will be done with a special neck lifting/supporting block and groove. Many things remain behind the scene, but the goal is just to give a frame of woodworking on the classical guitar.


Armrest

It is quite popular nowadays, to install a special support for the right hand of the player on the lower bout of the side. To add some modernity to our pine guitar, we will make such armrest out of oak, as well as another one, in parallel, out of rosewood with slightly different way of fixing.


Classical guitar from pine: final photo of Pinus project

Gallery of classical guitar made from pine and oak.