Building a Classical Guitar from Scratch (with a pro luthier)

accidental on a 100k or 200k

guitar

at the end of the fret wire. This is not a perfectly right angle here where the tenon meets the fret head, the end of the fret is like a mushroom shape from the Super Mario Brothers, so what I like to do is break the corners of the slots on the fret. fret so that this edge is flush. against the top of the fretboard, oh, it's okay to round the edges, so it's not okay, I mean, there really are no right angles on the

guitar

, no straight lines, no right angles, or anything, not even on the frets, Not even on the frets, is this so that it enters better now or so that you can work on it more easily later.

It only takes a minute or so to do, but it makes all the difference in the world. I remember that at Ska Taylor Guitars you put the front cable. shot we made and long, yeah, something like this, yeah, it looks good, so you're not going to do that today. No, we're not going to do that today. I like my clientele's hands to be intact in the moment. At the end of the day, we're going to take the fret wire, bend it, and put a bow on it. Put in a bit of a bow for this, so we won't have to pull it. down, we're actually smoothing it into the groove and do you put glue in there too or not?

We put glue on after the fact because we want to make sure everything is facing down, that way if we have a little end of the fret, that's If we get up, we can give it a whack, so you're just getting rid of the extra oils and stuff that the company put in front. You can see how much extra oil, yes, yes, actually you can, yes, yes, we adjusted everything including the front cable let's listen to that note again make sure it stays straight up and down give it a crank and it's already set at the angle like oh and this is going right to my face you should be familiar with the front cable on your face at this point in time and all we have to do is trim it to the exact size we want, slightly long, it looks a little satari decibels, yeah , we need to revise our work a little bit here and then to get some of the extra.

Relief, we're going to dress all of these frets except for the first fret and we're going to leave it relatively bare so that way it helps add a little bit more of that relief and what's ultimately dressing the fraternities. Do we put in the first fret now or do we do it after dressing it, after dressing it, after dressing it, so now we glue, cut the ends, file down the sides and then do the same for the first fret? Yes, as you can see, I'm just Putting a drop of glue in, we use gravity to make it run along the edge.

Now we need to trim off the extra ends and then I'll put a guard, oh yeah, right here before I move the guitar, I like that. I make sure I have them all before I move because the worst thing that can happen to you right now is having one of these little guys on your bench like this and spinning the guitar like crazy. 17 18 19 . Perfect, okay, yeah, we got that one, actually we're going to have to go out and remove the towel just to be safe now we have to file the edges. It would be very easy to get into that head right now.

This is where it becomes difficult to place your thumb right against this, so use your thumb as a spacer. Well, I have a little bit more to remove here, yeah, yeah, how do you round the sides instead of holding the file like this? Hold it like this, the next step is to file the top, so should you file your file a little bit before you file no, but I'm going to file it to do it later, okay, we're just straightening the frets, yeah, even if We've got this all level, all we have to do is play this last fret, this is one of those things that make all the difference in the world in how you play.

I love how special care is given to just the first fret. Oh, it's the most important one. The capo is placed on the first fret, which then sets everything down, so if not. I don't pay attention to the first fret and the position of the nut, then everything else just falls on its face oh, those are the frets, those are the frets, the frets are beautiful, yes, it's still quite sharp. I wouldn't recommend playing this way. We're just taking a little angle off the edge, quite an angle actually and that's why we didn't stand at the top of the fence until after this, yeah well the important thing was placing the points, yeah they look beautiful, I see. a lot of hand made guitars and vintage guitars where those dots aren't perfectly there and I've wondered why it ended up going to one side now I definitely know that the 7th fret is a little to the right and that's because I didn't do a great job with the bit, I stuck it in the hole where it's supposed to go and then it just moved to the side, actually, you know, I've rationalized it to myself with other guitars, where are you?

When playing it it looks like it's in the middle if it's a little bit to the right, oh if you're at this angle it's right in the middle which was intentional clearly of course I was thinking yeah they were thinking about the player. when they sent that exactly, yeah, genius, we'll give the top a light sand, but I wanted to remove a lot of ebony dust, but you can feel that this is all very well cemented, oh yeah, yeah, the sides are nice and rounded. How long did it take you to round the edges here? I usually spend about an hour rounding the edges.

I have done the first pass of sanding on the back. Let's prove it. First we start with sandpaper. Okay, let's use my fancy dancing sandpaper, okay, it works just in line, we can't even cross it slightly, we have to go perfectly in line, now we're getting really really good, yeah, you can hear that versus, oh yeah , I think it should be good. It feels really good, we need to round these corners like this and then repeat the process for all of this. This is a really sharp, sharp edge that we could use as a round, but I never liked that look, so I like it. that sharpness but smoothed out and this is yeah, that's good, basically, any place where you feel like you're going to cut yourself is where you should do this, just get to each corner, after that, all the corners, just like we are. getting ready to finish for every minute you spend on prep work saves you 10 to 15 minutes and I was noticing here a couple of

scratch

es over here it's a little hard to see it's barely but that's the difference between a guitar that looks like If it was well made versus something that's cheap and has to be perfect before you put lacquer on it because then it's right, I'm going to go through the same process for the rest of the instrument, now you feel the difference, yeah, yeah. but for me that's too rough on the surface so I'm just going to look for a 320 pad, uh, because I've worked with 120, 150, 180, I don't actually know what those numbers really mean, the amount of grits by the way size and now we're getting a lot finer, this is going to be the final sand before this is the final sand before we apply our first coat of shellac wash and we're going to do one now, it almost feels like a finished guitar, yeah, it doesn't even feel like wood right now because it's so soft; the finish we're going to put on it is so incredibly thin that it has to feel that way before we can get out.

Of the 100 hours it takes to build a guitar like this, how many of those hours are spent just sanding? Probably about 15 hours. 16 hours maybe more. We're going to apply our first coat of shellac wash on the back, so we need the same thing. shellac that we started making, yes, I'm going to use it because we made it last week. This is all I have left for now and it will sell out. We have been using this bottle since I can't even tell. How many decades does it look like the bridge already has a well that is ready to be polished at this point?

French polishing is nothing more than putting very thin layers. You just take the gauze, put it there and then I'm going to dry it. You can see, yes, look why it looks like the bottle is properly lacquered. I like to start in the corner and seal, this is probably where the most openings are. You can see how much color is collecting on the pad. What's that? The color is the alcohol soluble dyes of the wood naturally, so I don't want to apply them on the lemon wood around the perimeter and then I top it up and this is where it gets pretty, oh, you really put it in there too, careful. that's really starting to take shape, you can start to see the natural beauty of the wood, that's all we need for our first layer of wash, we're going to do it all over the guitar and how many layers are there, thousands and thousands of layers because you're constantly going back and forth, you feel this, you feel what it's like now, yeah, wood putty, you take this and you spread it on, so in the old days they used sawdust and now this is synthetic, oh, okay, okay, and basically it's stuffed. all the pores filling all the cracks in the network, yeah, remember I always say: go this way, this one you really want to go against the grain to get that in there, I'm not going to leave much on the surface, this is one of my Favorite places to send a client a photo of their guitar, I mean it looks like we just made a great piece of art, now we're just rubbing mud all over it, adjusting a little extra moisture, we'll call that good for now.

Do you put this wood filler on everything? I choose the colors so I'm not going to use this on the neck of course so there are different types of wood putty now it's dry to the touch we can sand this back and now when you feel it. If you can also feel how smooth it is, you basically do the same thing on all sides except the front, yes, but without the orbital sander, yes, and I'll have a mountain of dead sandpaper, yes, and I'll be covered in the head. fingers and dust the inside of my car is dirtier than the outside of my car because of the sanding so now we can do another wash, it smells like pretty strong alcohol.

I'm putting on a very, very thick coat for this first time. layer we have it finely sanded shellac wash layer wood putty shellac wash layer and now we are going to put shellac in a different way to make it shiny yes, shellac is this constant

building

process, so we are going to add and remove and add and remove 320. We're just going to sand this so that as you continue with each coat, you're going to be more and more careful until you get to the fine linen and that's where you have the French polish. Yeah, now that we have our Egyptian coating, we're going to go back and forth like this.

We're probably going to do this two or three times, so now it's just a process of repeating this. Yes, if you could handle me. the bottle of olive oil, this is the same olive oil that you would put in a frying pan if you're cooking yeah, I'm going with a medium pressure and you can see it's really starting to rise and pop, it's also very, very thick like it's really it takes a lot of pressure to just move it, you're starting to get a nice shine, even just looking at the back versus the side is crazy, most varnishes you can't touch it that soon, but go ahead, it's okay.

It's dry and soft, well now we can go back and just air it out. We'll move on to 600 grit sandpaper and then 1200, 1500 and 2000 and then work it with just pure everclear to clean it up. Now you can see why. I walk through mountains of sandpaper, yes, yes, totally, I know this is like looking at a forest of grass is a little less exciting. There are actually many steps to finishing wood and it takes a lot of time to figure out as well and learn the process. Yes, it's just pure. this is pure everclear, pure green if you finish it with a high quality whiskey tequila, well I mean, you wouldn't want to, no you wouldn't want to, it's just a waste tequila.

Some guitar builders distill their own alcohol supposedly yes, supposedly this looks amazing and this is just getting started, it won't even be close to being finished, we have many hours of this, leave the comment if you want a 30 hour shellac video, yeah, I can do it in real time, I can do a live stream on this one if you want, now we're going to do all those same things with the top. Yeah, well, you should listen to a lot of podcasts. I make a lot of recorded books. Lots of podcasts. The giraffe femur is what the net is made of. real draft, yes it's the draft, it's okay, I feel much better now, why draft? because that's what was for sale on eBay, so any femur will do.

Yes, yes, can you legally buy a giraffe femur? Yes, it's on eBay. This giraffe lived a full life and then died. right, yeah, he died of natural causes, he was a former zoo born in captivity breeding in captivity, i think he was about 50 when he died, and then the zoo still sells the femur and other bones too, draft economics is totally something new for me when I die you can take my femur and use it in the note of a guitar. In fact, I would love my femur to be on. Do you know what the problem is with the human femur?

I don't want to say I have much experience with the human femur, it's too small and you can't get a good sized nut out, you can't, no, at this point we have the upper part, mostly french polished,That is, do you stretch them? No, no, so you don't want to do that. Everything they told me about permit strings to string on the street is, yes, all wrong. Yes, I love the gold strings too. You can see how we have the fretboard. set to imitate the envelope of movement, yes, of the string, nylon strings vibrate much wider than the steel strings of an electric guitar, I think this is really like that, look how big it is, yes, it's like two centimeters, there we go and that's a complete guitar, thank you.

Thank you very much sir, I hope you enjoy it, we all made progress in everything, yes sir, amazing, so foreign, I think that's it, yes, thank you, yes, okay, thank you very much for joining us on this long journey. Special thanks to Marshall for giving us the opportunity and giving me the opportunity to build my own guitar and make it this beautiful instrument. It took 100 hours to build, we were there for 40 and Marshall took care of all the stuff that didn't end up in the chamber. Like a ton of sanding and varnishing, Marshall wanted to give a discount to anyone who wanted to get a beautiful instrument from them that is in the description.

You can use coupon code Scallon and yes, I am sure this is not the last time. I used this guitar, so if you want to subscribe, do so here. Also, I'm sure we'll have many more musical adventures, so thank you very much for watching, especially something of this length. We appreciate you and we will thank you. see you soon