Purpose

I have built my first acoustic guitar and thought it would be good to share my experiences with others.  My hope is that anyone who enjoys woodworking – or any fine craftsmanship for that matter – will enjoy reading through as I describe the steps it took to build this guitar.   But my greatest wish is that someone who wants to build their first guitar will read this and come away feeling more confident that they’ll be able to make something really nice, probably not a masterpiece, but quite fine nonetheless.  Building this guitar has been one of the most challenging, meticulous, patience increasing, and yet one of the most fun, rewarding and satisfying projects I’ve ever undertaken.  It was worth every minute.

Summary of Contents

I have broken up this site into distinct sections, the main and most important section recording the actual Build Process.  I’ve made an attempt to divide that section into discrete steps to try and mimic chronologically how I built the guitar.  References to books and other websites have also been added, since I relied heavily on the knowledge of others to fill the gaps in mine.  I’ve also made an attempt to have a decent photograph for every step of interest.

The Tools and Workspace section was added to explain what kind of tools I had at my disposal (because that’s something that I always want to know).  For the most part I used hand tools, but that is merely a consequence of availability, not because I chose to use only hand tools, I say use whatever tool produces the best results (or maybe whatever is the most fun).

I’ve also created a Cost section.  At first I didn’t really want to add up all of the expenses that went into making this guitar, but I remembered when I was first thinking about building a guitar cost was a significant factor so I’ve decided to breakdown my complete bill of materials as well as possible.

At any rate please enjoy and thanks for reading.

-Aaron