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RE: fine tuning a top
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Tom Blackshear
Posts: 2304
Joined: Apr. 15 2008
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 RE: fine tuning a top (in reply to Anders Eliasson)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Anders Eliasson
Its ok TomB. You choose. I was just saying my thoughts out loud. Nothing else.
Very well, the Spanish builder, Arcangel Fernandez, used salt on his wet finger tip to set up top tension. He would loosen the strings and go inside with the salt and rub the brace or braces right in front of the bridge. This wetness loosened up the fan brace and caused the top to microscopically bend forward to increase the top's tension when strung back up to concert pitch.
He would use this technique sparingly and on the brace/s that controlled what string/s needed to have their tension improved. The salt dried out the wetness and set the tension in place.
There is hardly a time when I first string up a guitar and expect the tension to pull up just right. So these are several ways to tweak the top to improve tension.
In Mexico, some builders would hammer, very slightly, the top of the braces in front of the bridge to cause greater top tension. The slight hammering would break up the wood fiber and cause it to give a little.
The third way is to sand the top of the braces right in front of the bridge area and cause the bridge to slightly rock forward.
All of these and more would cause top tension to increase, and there are some downsides to these techniques, which I will explain if anyone is interested. But the Fernandez technique seemed to be the best of the three, imho.
Also, I have found different ways to bring up top tension as I try and improve the voice.
And for those of you who have the Reyes style plan, you will notice that the playing scale is set 1/2 to almost 1 mm longer so that when the bridge rocks forward toward the nut, it will have its perfect scale set up exactly at the 655 mm mark in perfect harmonic sequence. Generally, on the thin top of the Reyes, the bridge will pull forward without any tweaking.
This particular plan requires no compensation. It is split perfectly in half at the 12th fret.
_____________________________
Tom Blackshear Guitar maker
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Date Oct. 26 2012 14:58:48
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BarkellWH
Posts: 3458
Joined: Jul. 12 2009
From: Washington, DC
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RE: fine tuning a top (in reply to estebanana)
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Or my favorite of Yogi's: "When you come to a fork in the road, take it!"
Which reminds me of Charo, who, by the way, was and is a very good guitarist. Charo once equated eating with sex by noting: "Spooning leads to forking!"
Words to live by.
Cheers,
Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white,
With the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here,
Who tried to hustle the East."
--Rudyard Kipling
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Date Oct. 26 2012 17:41:06
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estebanana
Posts: 9352
Joined: Oct. 16 2009
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RE: fine tuning a top (in reply to BarkellWH)
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quote:
Which reminds me of Charo, who, by the way, was and is a very good guitarist. Charo once equated eating with sex by noting: "Spooning leads to forking!"
Yuko pulled that line on me the other night...which was hilarious because I instantly knew it was Charo, who I really like.
I remember seeing Charo on Rowan and Martin's Laugh In when I was in elementary school. I got to stay up late ad watch it and Charo was l always really funny. Ok cheap thrill for a third grader. 
She was interviewed by a local radio personality when she played in San Francisco about five years ago. Her show is admittedly pretty campy, but she's an entertainer not Julian Bream, right. It came out through other people on the show that she treats the support people in the cast a stage really well.
I also like Liberace, and if pushed, I'll excoriate any snob who talks trash about him. He was like the Andy Warhol of the music business, what he did was better than the majority of bad pop music out there today.
The only thing I ever really wanted to see or hear, and it's too late now, was for Liberace to perform one John Cage's prepared piano pieces, and then have his suit of lights clad valet roll in another Steinway and then he would play Chopin.
I guess my fantasies are not important, but if you could see inside my head it would be full of dirty Ukiyo-e erotic prints and Liberace playing Chopin to them, while playing chess with John Cage.
My version of the floating world.
( I know only two of you are laughing at this, don't hurt yourselves. )
What was the topic again?
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https://www.stephenfaulkguitars.com
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Date Oct. 26 2012 19:48:19
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Richard Jernigan
Posts: 3430
Joined: Jan. 20 2004
From: Austin, Texas USA
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RE: fine tuning a top (in reply to estebanana)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: estebanana
I also like Liberace, and if pushed, I'll excoriate any snob who talks trash about him. He was like the Andy Warhol of the music business, what he did was better than the majority of bad pop music out there today.
What was the topic again?
I got to see Liberace live at Yakima, Washington where I was stationed in the Army. Yakima is famous for its apple orchards and other fruit production.
Every year they would have Liberace for the annual Fruit Festival. Reallly.
(Sorry guys, it's an English language joke. In the homophobic 1960s, "fruit" was slang for a gay male. Liberace had a nationally famous TV show playing the piano and camping it up outrageously.)
Yakima was kind of a free wheeling town. Not long after I got there some buddies and I were in town on a weekend afternoon. We were crowded into a booth at the local drugstore. I was sitting at the outside edge of the booth.
The good looking, busty young waitress came over. There was a certain amount of joking around. She stuck one of her boobs in my ear and said, "Can you hear me OK?"
I said, "You sound kind of muffled."
She replied, "You must not be plugged in."
Kind of characterized the town for me.
RNJ
Liberace was the topic, right?
Sorry, Tom...yours is an interesting topic.
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Date Oct. 26 2012 22:43:32
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Richard Jernigan
Posts: 3430
Joined: Jan. 20 2004
From: Austin, Texas USA
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RE: fine tuning a top (in reply to estebanana)
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People's knickers seem to knot up over the salt business. What Tom says is that the water softens the brace. The salt is supposed to draw the water back out of the wood.
Anybody who has moored a boat in the water knows that soaking wood in water softens it. Even if the boat is made out of plastic, it will likely have some wood components. You've got to keep it dry, or everything goes to hell. If wood is in contact with the water, you have to keep it painted or fiberglassed, or do something to keep it from soaking up water. It doesn't have to rot, it just gets soft and fails.
Myself, I don't know about the salt drying the brace back out, or even if enough water gets soaked up to do the deed, but...
Anybody who designs or builds stuff knows you need to test something before you accept it....or before you contradict it, unless you have a perfectly airtight theoretical case against it.
Of course, if you're in charge, you can reject something for practical reasons, or because you have a way of doing something different that you know will do the job.
Speaking of theory, I had something of a reputation for signal processing theory. At work I used to keep three of the four panels of blackboard in my office completely covered in line after line of closely written calculus, analyzing a signal processing procedure.
Young guys would come in for the first time, and trying to butter up the boss, they would say, "Gee, I'd like to learn how to do that."
It was a trap.
I would tell them, "I tried to convince Bill R. and Mark C. they could use that to time align the channels on the modernized receiver of the ALCOR radar."
We spent a quarter of a billion dollars modernizing four radars worth a total of a billion dollars.
"Bill and Mark expressed their doubts, but didn't argue for any length of time. After all, I'm the boss. The next day they brought in test data which definitively refuted all that elegant calculus you see there on the board. If you want to learn how to do that, figure out where I made the mistake. I keep it on the board as a reminder."
RNJ
I was a fairly young guy on the tech team evaluating U.S. and Soviet negotiating positions for the SALT Treaty. I am sorry to say that as far as I know, neither Chopin nor Liberace ever came up for discussion.
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Date Oct. 27 2012 4:40:40
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Ruphus
Posts: 3782
Joined: Nov. 18 2010
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RE: fine tuning a top (in reply to Richard Jernigan)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Richard Jernigan
People's knickers seem to knot up over the salt business. What Tom says is that the water softens the brace. The salt is supposed to draw the water back out of the wood. ...
you need to test something before you accept it....or before you contradict it, unless you have a perfectly airtight theoretical case against it.
Well said!
So much opposing conviction / burning of witches before actual evaluation it seems.
If treating components with peanut butter was part of Tom´s procedure to make guitars like that, I would probably spend a deeper thought on the method before rejecting as a luthier. ( As it obviously won´t hurt at the least.)
Here is what I had in the deleted post above, regarding foregone posts at that time:
Though some points may sound controversial, it appears to me as if each and every bit that´s been said was valuable and only complementary to the intention of this thread.
Clueless about potential criteria; better to say: Even irritated about what subtlety it is that makes a good build, whilst on the other hand proving so stable in the same time ... You know, when guitars will stay performing fine though their top be loaded with a plastic sheet, be cracked, and even bound up with patches after crack repairs ... When corpuses are severally circumsized by cutaways, with some performing stunningly well nonetheles, when necks are mounted loosely ...
There seems to just remain little to no individual specifics that could be nailed down as requierement. ( Quasi confirming the `many ways lead to Rome´premisse.)
Yet, I dare to assume ( deriving from other subjects ) that eventhough many ways may be used to produce a good guitar, them may not all be of same efficiency in efforts and results.
And that making available diverse techniques / preserving them can only be doing good to the vocation of luthiery.
Eventhough it appears to me as if more and more good luthiers were emerging lately, it might just be sorts of a renaissance after decades of lost tradition and vocation.
For, the dull antique specimen you find on the flea market might not inevitably be representative for former luthier standards.
A corresponding quote taken off a link from AG forum:
quote:
In order to change the sound, the design gradually changed over time, and due mostly to the popularity of the players in the late 19th and early 20th century, the Spanish design took over. It is best to refrain from declarations of judgement, to say one is "better" than the other. It is also not fair to compare an antique instrument to a new instrument and conclude the new design is louder, since some differences may be due to age. It is more valid to compare modern replicas, and clearly the romantic guitar design holds up. A Vihuela is not "better than" a Lute, and a Classical guitar is not "better than" a Flamenco guitar, or vice versa. Today's historically informed players realize that the pre-Torres classical-romantic guitar is a different instrument, with different characteristics that should be appreciated on its own terms.
- He interestingly also says that our contemporary basic structure was NOT invented by Torres, besides.
-
Anyway, I think a sharing thread like this to be great and a service to the art and the community. 
Rock on, builders!
Ruphus
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Date Oct. 27 2012 9:32:41
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