Tips on Using Robert Benedetto's Book:
Making an Archtop Guitar

Here are some tips that folks attempting to use this book to build a first instrument may find useful.

A lot of users get stymied when attempting to implement the arched plates. In my experience first time builders have a lot of problems wrapping their heads around the process of converting a rectangular block of wood into a gracefully arched plate without some intermediate step(s). More experienced builders tend to just do this automatically. Planing the blank into a rough trapezoid shape or routing contour steps seem to work well as intermediate carving steps between the raw blank and the finished plate. For information on the former see the nice article by Graham Caldersmith entitled "Arching and Voicing in Violin Plates" that appeared in American Lutherie #60. For info on the latter see my article "A Method for Specifying Contours of an Arched Plate".

Last updated: September 11, 2018