New Long Scale 12 String

[Dennis Leahy]

Clean and beautiful start, Joe!

About your reinforced/laminated linings: does this mean you plan to do some wide purfling on the top, or is this just to stiffen up the rims?

Dennis

[Joe Sustaire]

Thanks for the encouraging words guys, I sure appreciate learning from you all!!!

Here's a shot of the lining components,


And this is a closer shot of how it looks together, although on a different build,


Dave I just soaked the cap pieces for about 10 min. in water, wiped off the excess water and they bent fine. I went ahead and glued them with yellow glue while the wood was wet and glued them on with yellow glue. Then after drying overnight I found they weren't glued down solid so I had to redo them. So next time I will heat bend them or bend them wet to a form and let them dry out before gluing. Live and learn.

Yeah Dennis stiffening up the rims is my reason for trying these, thought they might help, especially on a long scale 12.

Hugh I'm patterning my bracing similar to what Haans has been doing on his 12's, with two tone bars running from neck to tail and with ladder bracing that bridges over the tone bars. Now with this 26 1/2" scale I run 68 to 13s on my last one, but it's tuned down to C instead of E, so it's got a nice low sound, think Blind Willie McTell and Leadbelly. Mainly I think you need a pretty thick top for this bracing. Haans and I have both had pretty bad telegraphing with a thin top on 6's with this.

Thanks again guys,
Joe

[Haans]

All right Joe!
Joe's right, thin tops and A-frame bracing doesn't work well. I've gone back to X's on 6 strings. Like your double kerfings. Did it stiffen the rim much more? I used HHG on the last 6 and it seemed to stiffen the rim a bit. Can't wait to see more progress!

[Dennis Mitchell]

Cool, Joe's back in the shop! This is gonna be a fun one to watch Joe, so keep up the good work!

[Joe Sustaire]

This kerfing does seem to stiffen the rims quite a bit Haans, of course I don't have a set with standard kerfing on hand to compare it too, so nothing scientific going on here.

Thanks Dennis, life sure seems to get in the way of the important stuff!

Anyway, I managed to get my low tech, (7/16" dowel rod instead of CF) flying buttress bracing installed. These are angled from the top of the neck block down to the bottom of some blocks glued to the sides at the waist, hopefully helping to keep the neck block from folding into the top from the long scale 12 string stresses.

So in backwoods fashion I use a long brad pointed drill and drill the anchor holes into the neck block.


Then cut notches for the waist anchors into the kerfing with a sharp chisel.


Then I held the anchors in their pockets and drilled the holes there the same way, using the long drill bit to line up my angle as best I could. I sanded the ends of the dowel a bit to give me some wiggle room to make up for the less than perfect hole alignment this gives me. Not quite as clean and perfect as Dave Higham's engineering method on his bass, but more of a down and dirty way to get there.

Carefully cut and sand my dowel sticks to length, and glue it up.


And there she is.






It is amazing how much this stiffens up the neck block! Ought to work.

Joe

[Dave Higham]

Hey Joe, your 'down & dirty' method ends up looking pretty clean from here. Bet you got it done a lot quicker that way too. Nice work.

[Eben]

VERY nice, mon ami!

And you keep 'em coming so it'll rub off on the rest of us too!

E

[Haans]

Good clean work Joe!
What kind of top are you going to use?