Re: Gilchrist Restoring the First Loar
Pondering Dan Voight's Instagram post "#1. The mandolin that started it all" makes one wonder if any of the Luthiers involved in the project with Lloyd had children or grandchildren that might remember details of the collaboration. Roger Siminoff has done a spectacular job of salvaging Lloyd and Bertha's world and sharing it with the rest of us but unfortunately details of the creation of the first F-5 is still obscure. Julius Bellson who wrote a book on Gibson in the 1970's or his descendants might be able to elaborate more on the project. Lewis A. Williams's(Lloyd's friend and original investor in Gibson) family may have stories to tell. Borrowing a few paragraphs from Roger's site the work of Albert Shutt most likely inspired many of the new F-5 design leading particulars.
"Loar was highly motivated by the work of the great violin makers and sought to include their features in the development of his fretted instruments. And, it was these features that made Loar’s fretted instruments outstanding. These included: fully graduated soundboards and backboards, a minimum-thickness area (today referred to as a “recurve”) around the entire soundboard, longitudinal tone bars, tap tuned body, f-holes, longer necks (i.e., access to a greater playable range of the fretboard) that connected to the body at the 15th fret, elevated fretboards (above the soundboard), ebony fretboard extender, increased neck pitch from 4° (of the F4) to 6° to achieve a 16° string break angle (over bridge), resonance tuning (sizing) of air chambers, and a classic “Cremona” finish. While all of these attributes are important, I believe his major contribution was the introduction of tap tuning. This process ensured the correct stiffness of the soundboards, backboards, and tone bars by tuning them to specific notes. Realizing that stiffness and pitch were inextricably related, tap tuning ensured reliable and repeatable construction from instrument to instrument. Further, the size of the f-holes was adjusted to tune the air chamber to a specific note. Here, Loar drew from both the great acoustical engineers of the day as well as from the much heralded violin makers. In his Physics of Music class at Northwestern University (1930-1943) Loar spoke of Stradivari’s tuning process: His greatest improvement, and one which took much research to discover, was attuning the tops and back. He would set the pitch so that the front was a quarter of a tone higher [than the backboard]. This tuning feature, as adapted by Gibson under Loar’s guidance, is what sets these instruments apart today. It is also what made them difficult to produce in a manufacturing environment and ultimately lead to the demise of the tap tuning process at Gibson after Loar’s departure from the company at the end of 1924."
"It is important to note that Loar was not the first to suggest the use of f-holes, elevated fretboard extensions, and arched soundboards and backboards on mandolins. Another instrument designer named Albert Shutt of Topeka, Kansas filed for a patent that claimed these features on December 6, 1909 and was granted U.S. Design Patent 40,564 on March 8, 1910 – a patent that had a life span of seven years. In essence, these features were on the market and accessible to the public long before the development of Gibson’s F5 mandolin, and it meant that Gibson could begin using these features on mandolins, mandolas, and guitars as early as 1917 when Shutt’s seven-year patent expired. While we know nothing of the relationship between Gibson, Loar, and Shutt – if any – it begs the question of just how many of these ideas came directly from Loar and how many were borrowed from Shutt. Regardless, Gibson was a well-established instrument company and had the manufacturing and marketing muscle to include these features in their instruments to expand its mandolin and guitar business."
http://siminoff.net/loar-background/
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Originally Posted by Ken Waltham
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