Tam DL -> RE: New vs Old (Jan. 26 2011 20:52:42)
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"On the one hand you sarcastically poke bit of well deserved fun about national treasures drawing plans." Well there are some well known people here, and elsewhere, and if the standard or content of plans bothers then, as has been expressed above, they have only to produce their own. " Then on the other you mention Bogdanovich's book, I'm not sure of the direction you are taking your point. Maybe you are working in two directions at once." Just an example of a book, plan, video, template, tools, materials empire in the building, and of the possibility of being more specific, since I think TB at least mentioned the difficulty of 2 dimensions. "To me real guitar makers don't really use plans on a regular basis. Maybe there's plan or two around the shop to take a reference from or you might, but for the most part you work from measurements you keep in a book you compile from studies of guitars you see." Beginners, as mentioned in reference to plans above, they aren't real guitar makers yet, and they need a starting point. But there are lots of real makers that do fairly faithful reproductions of certain instruments or styles. Oddly I see a lot of beginners who go wildly off the reservation, and a lot of expert makers who at some stage draw back more closely to a tradition, and as a result are pretty close to some kind of template. There are also a number of "real" makers who grew up in the business and are continuing a family tradition. That may be more in evidence in the future if some of the great post 1970s revival makers, like Hill, Romanillos, Fischer, etc... hand off to another generation. "You keep plantillas traced from guitars you like and you modify them to suit you and your intentions." To me that is a plan. It may not be on paper, but any half competent builder who has access to instruments doesn't need a plan to get miles ahead of what the plan maker gets from the paper. Any subsequent claims to the wind blowing in their hair as they fulfill their inner vibrations, vs. the plan builder, are laughable. So if you do repairs, or otherwise have access to a lot of instruments, you are many steps ahead as a copyist. It's like murder, kill one person you get life or the noose; kill a million and you get the Nobel prize. Copy one plan you're a hack; copy a hundred and move to the country of origin, and you're inspired by angels. "What happens after you make so many guitars is that the measurements stick in your head. A real guitar maker can wake up in the middle of the night and call out numbers in inches or mm of any part of a the guitar. No plan is needed at that point." So true, I make a number of things other than guitars, and I realized early on you need to know the whole object. I can calculate hydro for boats in my head, or do beam calcs. It's a little daunting when you realize for the first time that you actually have to know where every single mm of the surface needs to be, not just some general impression. "There are a million little things a plan can't flesh out or explain, it's really quite a vague document without the knowledge of a maker to interpret it. A maker knows why the fans splay out at a certain width and why that point to the 10th fret or the 12th - the design is predicated on all the minute details a maker learns to juggle.'" Right you are. Plans are weird. Many people reproduce the Hauser '37. We don't really know what that guitar meant to Hauser, whether if in building 20 version he would have actually stuck to one constant guitar, or varied it to take into account differences in the wood, etc...
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