I ordered a Martin Guitarmaker's Connection kit a month before
my wife and daughter flew from Scotland to Barbados for a two-week
vacation. After years of playing dreadnought-size instruments
- an Ibanez from 1968 to 1986, then a 1981 Martin D-18 - I wanted
an 000 or 0M. I'd been told it would suit my fingerstyle playing
better, and most of our local professionals like John
Renbourn and Tony McManus seemed to prefer the bright treble
and airy bass of the slimmer body.
The new 'Martin' - you aren't allowed to call it that! - Grand
Auditorium kit was described as 0000 size, the same body shape
as a jumbo but without the depth. I paid $370 for a rosewood body,
mahogany neck with rosewood headstock trim, ebony fingerboard
and bridge and an extra $25 for a coast Redwood top in place of
regular spruce. With a luthiery book and air shipping it came
to just under $500.
This was my first attempt at luthiery - well, actually at any kind of woodwork since high school, where I was deemed incapable of handling a saw or a chisel. I have no workshop, so I made the guitar in our games and music room using a Black and Decker Workmate and a full-size pool table. I had to buy some Klempsia clamps, a few drill bits, some sandpaper and wire wool, wood glue, cyanoacrylate glue, finishing polish, and a sheet of thick MDF board to cut a body-shaped template which is used as a base for clamping when glueing. All this cost around $100 more. I borrowed a router, which is needed for the most difficult part of the entire job, cutting the rebate round the body where the binding will fit.
The guitar was easily completed during my family-free fortnight. Apparently difficult parts, like glueing the two halves of the bookmatched rosewood back together with a decorative inlay between them, are easily tackled using the Workmate's screw-operated split top bench `vise' action. Just clamp the sheets down, and bring them together under gentle even pressure. The same vise action was perfect, with padding, for clamping the fingerboard to the neck in a single action - the usual method calls for a dozen or more clamps.
The pool table was also a great surface to work on, with its
perfectly flat slate and soft baize surface! There was no risk
of scratching the delicate redwood top when working on this. Cutting
out the body shape, fine sanding, inlaying the rosette and fine-carving
the neck to its heel and headstock all proved much easier than
I thought. The woods are of such good quality that they work with
precision and you get a fine finish in hours rather than days.
I found my Dyson vacuum cleaner with fine filters useful, both to clean up after working and to remove the ultra-fine sanding dust left by 1000 grade papers from the surface of the wood. As it was summer, I did heavy sanding outdoors. I only worked in the evenings and for three weekends, and spent roughly 40 hours in total building the guitar.
Most of the strut and tone bar shaping is already machined, the
soundhole is precut and the rosette rebated. The side ribs are
pre-bent, so you don't need a steam bending jig.All structural
blocks are precut. You're working just like a real Martin luthier,
starting not with the raw innards of a tree, but with a machine-cut
blank that you finish by hand. You can reshape, carve and adjust
all the parts as you wish. I parabola-sanded and scalloped the
X-braces and tone bars respectively.
The back is given its belly during
final assembly, by sheer force. You mate the assembled front up
against a rigid flat surface (the MDF template) and the back is
clamped down to follow the curve of the sides, as the body gets
slimmer towards the neck. This seemed the least well-engineered
aspect of the guitar, but the wood glue is capable of standing
the considerable tension and nothing went out of shape as a result.
Martin's instruction suggest doing this before fitting the top.
Other books say differently, and I'm very glad I fitted the redwood
top first, preventing any distortion of the ribs under such pressure.
My routing for the plastic binding was not deep enough, and I ended up with some very slim white-black-white purfling in a couple of places. It would always be possible to remove this, front and back, and deepen the routing before re-binding to a more robust thickness, and maybe with better material. If you can afford a laminate edge trimmer instead of a router - they are inappropriately heaby and violent for dealing with a delicate hollow structure - then buy one. A good Hitachi model capable of following the camber and curves properly is around $120.
For
a picture showing a good method for
positiong the bridge - critical - click on the shot of the bridge.
I used two dowel rods and marked them against my Martin which
had an identical scale length.
The ebony fingerboard is supplied fully shaped and slotted for the pre-cut fret wire, and despite some difficulty with `springing' the fretting went OK. A further $40 was needed for a fret file to turn my flat-topped frets into correctly rounded ones, but this wasn't until after the guitar was finished and strung and had been played for a month. I used a cheap plastic saddle and kept the nut slots a little high until I the guitar had been under full medium-string tension for a while. Two ivorine nut and one saddle blank were supplied, entirely unshaped; mother of pearl fingerboard dots are provided pre cut, and merely need inset glueing then filing, sanding and polishing flush.
In contrast to the quality of these and the enclosed machine heads, the end block plastic inset, plastic end pin and self-adhesive tortoiseshell plastic pickguard were plain tacky. So are the off-white plastic bridge pins, and in due course mine will get some rosewood ones with inlays.
The new Martin style neck strengthening rod, with tension adjustment through the soundhole, is not a good design. It demands a thicker neck D-shape if it is to sit well below the soundboard, yet Martin (in these kits as in their current guitars) have felt obliged to reduce their neck thickness compared to older models with the non-adjustable T-section strengthening bar. I had planned to reshape the neck to more of a Gibson V-shape, like my original Ibanez, as this fits my hand better, but seeing just how little wood remained between the big square trough in the neck and the outside world I left well alone.
Unwilling to attempt high gloss French polishing, or use an unsuitable
varnish, I copied Guild's current style of leaving the rosewood
grain open on the back and sides. I used a grain filler on the
neck, for maximum smoothness, and light shellac sanding sealer
on the top. A blend of button polish, teak oil and carbauba wax
finished the job, leaving me with a satin finish hard enough for
my own careful use and easily revived using oil and drying wax.
My personal touches were an initial K cut from blue sodalite gemstone and set in the headstock (very crudely!) and tan salmon-skin pickguard and end block inlay (not at all crude, and very appropriate for a guitar built on the banks of the River Tweed). Finally, after a couple of months of playing, I fitted a Martin Fishman Thinline Gold Plus active bridge pickup and a new bone carved and compensated saddle, lowered the nut action to minimum, stoned and filed the frets and added a Mimesis single coil soundhole pickup with a separate jack through the end block.
The Mimesis pickup is a very slim, graphite black unit costing around $200 (in Scotland - maybe more as an import) and hand made by luthier Mike Vanden in Scotland. You can also get a double-coil humcanceller with two EQ settings, or the Blend System with an AKG condenser mike on a flexible farm and a mix control with stereo output. Mimesis ensorsers include John Renbourn and that's enough for me! I had listened to a demo by Celtic wizard Tony McManus before buying (if you have not yet heard Tony, you will).
The guitar lives in British-made Hiscox Liteflite case, costing me over $100, for three reasons - first, standard dreadnought cases won't fit the 0000 size body and jumbo cases are too deep; second, the case weighs so little that the overall weight is about half that of my D-18 in its Martin case; third, I can stand on one leg in the middle of the flat top of the case with the guitar inside and know it won't be damaged.
Here's a shot of the finished guitar.
Six months on, I preferred playing my hand-made Guitarmaker's Connection kit to my Martin D-18 - it's simply a much more responsive instrument, lighter and with a very sweet tone and layers of resonance. The D-18 sounds robust, bassy and punchy - but the home-made has exactly that aerial quality I was looking for when playing English, Scots and Irish fingerstyle. It's a little quiet for noisy pubs and can't compete with the cauld wind pipes. I use a Spirit Folio Powerpad 30+30W stereo mini powered mixer (easy to carry) into two 200W boom boxes from my local CarParts4U shop ($50 each and easy to convert into superb 4 ohm stacks each with two 8" speakers and two horns!). I often put one pickup through a Korg Pandora effects unit to add a touch of reverb, chorus or flanging while leaving the other pickup clean.
Anyway, I part-exchanged the D-18 for a Lowden S25J and now play the kit guitar all the time.
The guitar now has a signature, perhaps the first of a few - Duck Baker borrowed it to use alongside his gut-string Takamine for all his steel-string numbers when he visited one of our Scottish border folk clubs. It sounded much better in Duck's hands than mine, even though he played it before its final intonation adjustments, and used it miked. I asked Duck to sign it, which he did. Definitely one of the good guys!
For strings, I've been using Dean Markley R20/80 round-cored bronze medium lights, but when photographed the guitar was strung with even more expensive Rotosound Country Gold which are piano-wound, so that the bass strings cross the saddle as a plain inner wire and the outer windings don't start until after this - like the wound strings on a piano. They do seem to give much purer bass note with a longer sustain. (Note: this winding is called Contact Core by GHS).
The only change I may make, after careful measurement, would be to take half a fretwire's width off the fingerboard at the nut end. This would correct a common fault in guitars which don't use zero-fret wires, making them a little harder to tune. I have a very quick tuning tuning and tempering routine which uses a sequence of octaves across all string intervals - one which I am surprised fewer players use - and it this does tend to show up this one fault. Since writing this, I have done the alteration, carefully sawing less than a millimetre off the ebony fingerboard and replacing the but. The improvement was instantly noticeable, especially in the accuracy of octaves played using the second or third fret of any given string against its open counterpart.
Apart from that, the guitar has a slight fall-off after the
fourteenth fret which would not have happened if the instructions
had been a little clearer. The CNC machine cutting of the neck
and block is, I suspect, so accurate now that there is no need
to start shaving and shimming to produce a slight neck angle which
is not necessary and causes problems with the new tension rod.
Had I simply clamped the kit together as provided it would probably
have been a slightly better instrument.
Martin Guitarmaker's Connection is at 510 Sycamore St, PO Box
329, Nazareth, PA 18064 0329, phone (610) 759-2064, or (800) 247-6931
toll free from within the US.
Mimesis pickups are made by M. J. Vanden, The Old School, Strontian,
Acharacle, Argyll, Scotland PH36 4JA, tel/fax (+44) 1967 402114.
Now marketed as Fishman Rare Earth in the States.
Hiscox Liteflite cases are made in Cannock, Staffordshire, England,
call (+44) 1543 571420.
Salmon skins, tanned for use as leather, can be bought in France
and Scotland for around $20 a skin big enough to make 2-3 pickguards
and additional decoration. They're hard to find and mine came
from Ronnie Hek in the craft workshops at The Hirsel, seat of
the Douglas-Home family near Coldstream in Scotland.
- copyright David Kilpatrick (variant of text published in Acoustic Guitar, April 1998)
