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estebanana -> RE: "Luthiers share your creations" thread (Jan. 23 2014 0:41:41)
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Anyway I'l get back to business. Here's another picture of this Palo Esctrito guitar being built.
I put the back on as an unbraced panel as Torres or Romanillos would do. This is the guitar ready for the back. It is an interesting process and I have been studying Torres methods and discussing them with others who have seen many Torres guitars. Torres order of assembly was different than that which we commonly use today- he probably glued not only the back as an unbraced panel, but very likely also the top. There is evidence of this- he braced the top with the fans, but not the horizontal braces above a below the sound hole. The horizontal braces were glued to the ribs first, then the top, or so the evidence shows.
When you try to wrap your mind around that order of assembly you run into some interesting problems. It also breaks down what we think of as Spanish style construction into a broader idea. It looks to me that a lot of Torres' methods will never be fully understood because we don't have his tools and fixtures to backwards engineer how he did it, but I surmise and others have confirmed this, it was different than how someone like say Manuel Ramirez thought about order of assembly at the turn of the century 114 years ago.
The reason I'm taking this on is because I want to make a Torres replica to offer as a more genuinely constructed model, but the deeper I got into it the more I realized that it's not as straight forward as simply copying a plan. There's much which defines Torres' guitars that has to do with _how_ he did it as much as with dimension, materials and style/design. It's unfortunate that unlike the great violin maker Stradivari we don't have Torres patterns, notes or tools. From the collection of original Stradivari tools and patterns violin makers have been able to reconstruct the order of assembly of classical Cremonese violins, it has made a difference in both academic violin scholarship and modern violin making.
In the past, after the great Cremona era in violin making, other regions and schools such as the German tradition and French school of building changed the order of assembly that was used in Cremona. It gradually changed the violin in subtle ways, then in the mid 1970's a seminal book was published called Secrets of Stradivari by Simone Sacconi and this changed the game and brought forth a more intense examination of Cremonese working methods. The guitar world hopefully, someday,will find more evidence that will help to re-examine Torres working methods, but at this time some key pivot points of how he assembled the box are up for conjecture. I'm working on a plausible method for putting the top to the ribs and then I'm going to continue to submit my ideas to those who are Torres authorities and see what I come up with.
It came to light when I finally decided it was time to grapple with Torres' work that it was not a simple idea, but I hope it not only renders a good guitar but increases my depth of understanding. My guess is that Torres was more complex than meets the eye and later makers simplified his work to make it easier to build them in series with a shop of workers each making separate sub assemblies. And we today basically were handed down that order of assembly which came after Torres, mainly invented in Madrid; not that it's it's bad or even wrong, but it would be nice to know for certain how it was changed from Torres' original concept. We may never know. And we can't go back in time or back on how far guitar making has come.
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