Bouzouki construction project

[TijnBerends]

I'm going to try and keep track here of the progress on the bouzouki I'm building.

First of all, here's the design I made for the body:


It's based on Graham McDonald's type II bouzouki. The top will have a strong transverse curve, an idea I got from Nigel Forster's guitar bouzouki. That's also why it has the big lattice bracing [NOTE: I just noticed this is a slightly outdated version, I changed the design a bit, bracing pattern will be different from what it shown here] - it needs to be tough The scale length is 65cm, body is 40cm long, 36cm wide, 10cm deep at the tail end and 9cm deep where it meets the neck.

Today I went and bought the materials.

Right in the middle are the two halves of the top, made of 2mm thick cedar. At the top of the picture are the neck (African mahogany) and the fretboard (ebony). The builder who sold me the wood has a very nice jig for making the fret slots, he did that for me. At the top left are the frets (brass, which I think will look fancy), middle left is the bridge (ebony) and bottom left are the nut and saddle (bone).


Shown in the middle here are the two halves of the back, at the top are the two sides, all made out of 2.5mm Indian rosewood. Lying on the sides are a set of bindings, made from mahogany with some fancy purfling.

Tomorrow I'll be making moulds for bending the sides. I hope to be keeping you all informed. Please ask questions if you want to:D

[Leroy]

Great start. You're at the point in a build that excites me the most. Ready to dive in and see what you can make of these beautiful materials. Good luck and I'll be watching.

[TijnBerends]

Today I made the moulds I will be using for bending the sides, and for building the body in. No pictures of that, but it's just two inside and outside moulds made of MDF (or if that's not the English term, the material made from compressed sawdust).

Also, I planed and glued the two halves of the back:

In between is a thin strip of ebony left over from cutting the fretboard to its rough size. The backstrip on the inside is a leftover from the top of an earlier bouzouki.
Sanding the rosewood is a distinctly unpleasant job, firstly it doesn't smell very nice (I was told it was named "rosewood" because of its smell, but well, roses stink too:p) and secondly you get very fine black dust EVERYWHERE. There's sawdust in places where there definitely should NOT be sawdust.

[John Kelly]

Looking good so far! Rosewood is indeed a great creator of aromatic sawdust, as is the ebony, though both are lovely to work with. Getting your fingerboard pre-slotted helps as it is easy to chip the ebony when sawing in the slots by handsaw - I have just finished a mandolin with an ebony fingerboard and had to be very cautious with the slotting; I use a Japanese pull-cut saw with the depth guide taken from an old StewMac fretting saw as the cut is much better with the Japanese saw. I use a very sharp marking knife to mark off the slots and this helps prevent splinters coming off the ebony when slotting it.

Looking forward to your progress. Here is a link to the only bouzouki I have built so far:
http://www.luthierjohn.co.uk/page2a.html

[Tavy]

Looking good so far! Rosewood is indeed a great creator of aromatic sawdust, as is the ebony, though both are lovely to work with. Getting your fingerboard pre-slotted helps as it is easy to chip the ebony when sawing in the slots by handsaw - I have just finished a mandolin with an ebony fingerboard and had to be very cautious with the slotting; I use a Japanese pull-cut saw with the depth guide taken from an old StewMac fretting saw as the cut is much better with the Japanese saw. I use a very sharp marking knife to mark off the slots and this helps prevent splinters coming off the ebony when slotting it.

Interesting... I've done a few ebony boards by hand now and had no problems..... though ebony certainly does split and chip if you're not real careful. On the plus side you can usually join the bits back together without anyone noticing (did I just say that out loud???)

[John Kelly]

The chipping is especially tricky when doing a re-fret, Tavy! Even with the tape to hold the chips it can be a bit of a bind, especially where previous fret job has has glue used on some frets. Yes, I do run the scalpel blade along both sides of each fret first before pulling them, and when I know (or suspect) glue has been used then the soldering iron comes out and the frets get a wee warm-up to loosen the glue. Hot soldering iron? Yes, I said that out loud too!

[Tavy]

The chipping is especially tricky when doing a re-fret, Tavy! Even with the tape to hold the chips it can be a bit of a bind, especially where previous fret job has has glue used on some frets. Yes, I do run the scalpel blade along both sides of each fret first before pulling them, and when I know (or suspect) glue has been used then the soldering iron comes out and the frets get a wee warm-up to loosen the glue. Hot soldering iron? Yes, I said that out loud too!

For sure pulling frets out of ebony is a bind. No need to apologies for using a hot soldering iron - Frank Ford uses that method so it must be all right

[TijnBerends]

Yesterday I bent the sides on a metal pipe, heated with a propane torch. They almost lived up to the design - I couldn't get the bends sharp enough at the top of the body, one of the sides now has a very small crack in it (not all the way through, nothing some good sanding won't hide), so I didn't try to force them further. They only deviate a few millimeters from the design, so I decided they were fine this way.
No pics yet, since I did this in my grandfather's workplace, I will make some when I take the stuff back here.
Tomorrow I hope to plane and glue the two halves of the top. I made a jig for getting the "hump" I described earlier, will show that too.

[TijnBerends]

I planed and glued the two halves of the top, and clamped them in the jig I made to get the "hump" over the length:


Not clearly visible on the photo, but the bottom part of the jig follows the curve of the top parts that are pressed into the soundboard. The total height difference between the center of the "hump" and the edge of the soundboard is about 18mm. This will give the soundboard a lot of strength, so I can keep it thin - it's 2mm cedar, feels almost like cardboard right now. With the braces, it should be strong enough to hold up a floating bridge, and have a lot of volume when it's finished.

Tomorrow I hope to finish the bracing, complete with a bit of reinforcing around the soundhole and beneath the bridge. When I get them back, I can glue the sides to the top while the top is still in this jig, so it will keep its shape even better when I take it out.

[TijnBerends]

Allrighty then. I finished the bracing, carved into some nice curvy shapes, and cut out the soundhole. With the bracing in place, I could take the top out of the clamping jig, it stays in shape perfectly. Making sure the braces fitted snugly into the concave inside of the top was hell, but it worked out not too bad in the end.

The area around the soundboard has a second layer of cedar glued to the inside, to reinforce it a bit. I just noticed I forgot to do the same thing for the area beneath the bridge, will have to do that tomorrow. Even though the top should be well strong enough to withstand the pressure of the floating bridge, I don't want any crack to appear around it.

[TijnBerends]

Yesterday I brought back the sides that I bent into shape last week. Today I trimmed the ends, and have just glued and clamped the tailblock in. Next will be the neckblock, and the kerfed lining. Then I can remove the moulds without the sides springing back too much, and I'll be able to glue on the top.

[TijnBerends]

I shaped the sides to follow the curves of the top and back. In this picture, I'm glueing on the first piece of kerfed lining. The neck end of the side assembly is clamped to a small block, which is pretending to be the neck - to make sure the neck will be perfectly straight when I attach it later on.
Tomorrow I'll be able to glue the back on, if I have time.

[TijnBerends]

On the left the finished side assembly, with kerfed lining glued in. At the top edge near the center I couldn't use that, due to the curve, so I used a lot of small leftover rosewood fragments instead. Middle is what I made today, about 4 hours work at the city's public workshop. I like making a neck, because it doesn't involve much glueing so I can get a move on.
Last picture shows the beck being glued to the side assembly. Only a small step in the process, but what before that is only a pile of seperate parts suddenly starts to look like an instrument, which makes me feel very happy
Tomorrow I'll glue on the top and back - being very careful to keep everything aligned straight. That's also why I did the neck first, instead of the back as I mentioned earlier.

[Barry Wilson]

It's looking great. thanks for showing pics of the whole build

[TijnBerends]

Quality of the pictures isn't very good this time. I glued the top and back to the sides, it's starting to look like an instrument now. Already you can hear, from tapping the top, that it's going to be a loud one. Since I play at sessions a lot, this will come in handy to keep up with the accordeons and uillean pipes and other noisy machines.
Somewhere this week I'll take it to the city public workshop to rout the binding channels - some day, when I'm old and wealthy, I'll get a router myself:p. Also I will finish the edges of the fretboard so I can glue that on. After that, it's gluing in the bindings, sanding till I die, and coating.
I bought a bridge from StewMac, a fishman mandolin bridge with a pickup in it. However, the foot of the bridge is made for an "archtop mandolin", and the radius of the arch is not specified. The arch of this bouzouki is much stronger, so I'll have to do something about that - there's not enough wood left in the center to make it follow this top's curve, so I'll probably have to sand it flat, glue a new (bigger) piece of ebony to it, and shape that to fit.

[ISU Trout Bum]

Looks great so far! Thanks for posting the pix. Best of luck with it!

[TijnBerends]

Thanks for all the encouraging comments

I ran into some trouble now. I wanted to go and make the grooves in the body for the binding. However, since the top has such a strong bump down the center, the router platform sort of hovers over the recurve, so already just with a copying router bit (if that's what it's called in English, you know what I mean) I couldn't reach it.
So, just in general, how do you make a binding channel on an archtop?

[ISU Trout Bum]

Maybe you could fabricate something like this?

http://northwaystringedinstruments.b...ld-part-7.html

[TijnBerends]

Just after posting I looked at your website and saw the pic already, thanks a bundle I used something similar to that on my last instrument, but I didn't have a table router, I just clamped the wooden guider to a handheld one. It was hard to keep it steady, that's why I don't want to use that again. But this looks like a fine way

[nkforster]

Thanks for all the encouraging comments

I ran into some trouble now. I wanted to go and make the grooves in the body for the binding. However, since the top has such a strong bump down the center, the router platform sort of hovers over the recurve, so already just with a copying router bit (if that's what it's called in English, you know what I mean) I couldn't reach it.
So, just in general, how do you make a binding channel on an archtop?

Just came across the thread and am really glad you're experimenting with the "Howe Orme" design, it's a really good one. To cut the channel where the router won't go, the answer is simple enough - good light, a sharp knife and a chisel is the answer.

Just been reading through though and have one little concern - I may have read wrong but are you planning to go for a floating bridge and a tailpiece? How I think Howe Orme made their many floating bridge instruments is they made the top curved in the centre but the ribs were left more or less flat. The top is actually pulled flat at the tail - this is the OPPOSITE of how I normally build, where I never build tension into the top but pulling it to the ribs, but what you might find if the angle over the bridge is too high is that the top will sink - it doesn't have enough strength to resist the downward force. An alternative is if you fit a bridgeplate and a fixed bridge it would work really well.

Hope you don't mind me chipping in but I've made a lot of instruments to this design and this is what I've found.

Good luck with the project though, it looks great!

http://www.nkforsterguitars.com/nkfo.../the_book.html

[TijnBerends]

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Work in progress on the bindings. I spent most of yesterday working with my grandfather in his garage - more space, tools and company We made a jig quite like the one suggested by Eric Northway, only to find out after spending an hour building it, that the router bit was so blunt it made the wood smoke, so we had to go and buy a new one, which was a different size so we had to redo the jig. Ah well.

As shown in the pics, we didn't get all the way to the neck. And indeed, I just did the last bit by hand with a good sharp knife. Must say I'm a bit disappointed in the bindings I bought - I think the guy who made them used some leftover bits of wood for them, the grain is wobbling all over the place, making them very hard to bend in shape properly.

Just been reading through though and have one little concern - I may have read wrong but are you planning to go for a floating bridge and a tailpiece? How I think Howe Orme made their many floating bridge instruments is they made the top curved in the centre but the ribs were left more or less flat. The top is actually pulled flat at the tail - this is the OPPOSITE of how I normally build, where I never build tension into the top but pulling it to the ribs, but what you might find if the angle over the bridge is too high is that the top will sink - it doesn't have enough strength to resist the downward force. An alternative is if you fit a bridgeplate and a fixed bridge it would work really well.

Well, I just hope it won't happen:p I've never tried this before. But the bracing of the top is very strong, I suspect it will hold well enough. But I'll just have to wait and see

[TijnBerends]

Just a funny little picture of me doing some precise work on the bindings. And no, it's not comfortable, but it's still the best spot

[John Kelly]

And that special footwear is great for clamping the instrument without any fear of damage. You make an interesting point though, that we need to find our most comfortable position to carry out many of the tasks involved. You are obviously having a lot of enjoyment out of the project and that is the main thing in a project like this.

[Leroy]

I've been watching your thread with great interest, as I too was very impressed by Nigel Forsters cylinder top bouzouki video. I decided to try a quick and cheap experiment, a few years ago, to see if the reward would merit a project like yours. The "Howe Orme" style top shape worked well, but other aspects of the design were doomed for failure. The old saying that you learn more from your mistakes than your successes is very true.

http://www.leroybeal.net/guitars/aco...zbo/index.html





I picked a box shaped body for it's speed and ease of construction. I used simple ladder braces, again for it's speed and ease of construction, and used western red cedar for the body and top (quarter sawn fence boards from the hardware store). Click the link to my website for more pictures and explanations.

I learned a lot from this instrument. I was able to try out a number of ideas, for cheap, and am a better luthier for it. I'm sure you will be a better luthier after you complete your project.

I was able to recycle everything except the body into other instruments. The neck was reused for my hybrid electric guitar, the bridge for my mandola, and bits and pieces in other projects.

Keep up the good work and buy Nigel's book

[TijnBerends]

Done with the binding. The bit you see in the first picture, where it has to follow the hump of the soundboard, was a hell to make. I think it turned out not too bad, if you know where to look you can find several flaws but nothing that will cause trouble.
Second picture shows the peghead. I like doing that part - it doesn't do anything for the sound or strength of the instrument whatsoever, it's purely aesthetic, so I can experiment without fear of damage.
Last two pictures show the binding around the back. A next time, I'd do the bit around the heel different, this is the first time I make an instrument with this shape - my first two had the onion-on-a-stick model (thanks Graham McDonald for that term) and I think the heel area is a lot easier to do there.

Anyway, now it's down to sanding. And more sanding. And then perhaps some more sanding. And coating.
And ofc making the tailpiece and bridge.