I recently built a guitar after two and a half years off. A friend gave me a lovely piece of bear-claw spruce, which I took down from the shelf one day in June and joined together just for something to do. Then I planed it down and sanded it to rough thickness. By this time I realized that I was going to build another guitar, but I didn’t know what it would be. So I went around and looked at guitars in the local music store and decided to make something that looked like my previous big body guitars! These were both copies of the Taylor Grand Auditorium model, but when I delved into this a bit more I discovered that those were very close to the little know Martin models known as J40 and M36. The main difference being the body depth. So I settled on something shaped like a Martin M36, which has a 4″ deep body, but with V bracing like Taylor uses, and which I have been using for the last few guitars too.
It took me 2 months to build, working slowly and steadily. I have been experimenting with this V bracing and this time I settled on my own version that omits the waist brace. I had already tried this on a guitar or two that I rebuilt, so I was confident that it would work. Basically I simplified the already simple V brace concept by making the 2 main braces one long piece from end to end. Unlike Taylors, this idea needs no waist brace. Despite how great the guitars I made with the waist brace design were, I still figured that the waist didn’t really need that brace if the main braces didn’t get thinner there. So I left off that waist brace and kept the main braces high at that area.
In the spirit of being different again, I braced the back with an X brace, which is the commonest form of soundboard bracing. But heck, it looks good and works great for backs too!
In conclusion, it’s a fine guitar and it has a great sound. I can’t say it’s better than the ones I built with the waist brace, but time will tell how it sounds in the long run. So far, so good – great response from low to high, and very loud. It was an interesting project to build something out of the ordinary. After all, why be ordinary?
If you are interested in reading the whole process, here is my diary of the build, from original hand written notes.
nathanguitars 