Here is an old oddball project of mine that I just pulled out of storage. I forgot I still had this. It's an old 1940s-era parlor guitar body made in East Germany just after WWII in USSR-occupied territory (see the label in pics). The guitar has solid maple or beech sides with a laminated top and back.
The top has been extensively modified by me a long time ago. The top was originally three laminations of maple, all laid up perpendicular to each other, and was very stiff and over-braced. I had this idea that I wanted to tinker with at the time and figured this body would be a good candidate to try it on since it wasn't valuable or good-sounding as-is.
The idea was to make a thin and light laminated top in my vacuum press using hide glue and thin quarter-sawn Lutz spruce veneers (I know the species was Lutz spruce because I still have some of the same stuff in my workshop and it is labeled). So what I did was carefully separate the three original layers of the top, leaving only the top layer (to maintain the original aesthetics of the guitar), cleaned up any remaining old glue, then I laid up the original outer top layer with two layers of the Lutz spruce. Each layer of spruce was set at a 10-degree offset from the centerline of the top, so the two spruce layers have their grain orientation creating a narrow X. The idea was that by laminating the wood in this orientation, it would have stiffness properties similar to solid wood, in that the top would be stiffest along the top-to-bottom orientation, in line with the grain direction, and loosest across the width of the guitar. I used hide glue because of its ability to dry to a crystalline structure and vibrate well, not dampening the top.
The lamination job went smoothly. There is, however, a small section of the original top finish, near the tailpiece, that is missing and will need to be touched up. This is because when the guitar was originally made, they sanded too much over the end-block of the guitar, so the first layer of the top was very thin here, nearly non-existent, and it flaked away during separating the original top layers.
I had intended to keep this guitar as a floating bridge and tailpiece type, so the X-bracing was done in a way that I thought at the time would handle the downward force of that setup better than standard Martin scalloped bracing. The braces were made from old spruce and are all interlocked into one another. I glued the braces into each other, then sanded a radius into the bracing assembly in a radiused dish, then glued them to the top in a go-bar deck using the same radiused dish.
This is where I stopped in the build process. As you can see in the pictures, there is still squeeze-out to be cleaned up around the bracing, and the braces have only been roughed out, not finish-sanded. You would think after all that the top would have a nice subtle upward dome built into it; however, it does not. I braced the guitar probably a week after laminating the top (a guess—I really can't remember exactly), but this wasn't long enough of a wait time. The top must have had a decent bit of moisture left in it because it now has a cup to it rather than a dome (look at the pics with the straight-edge).
This cupping looks really bad when you view the top on its own, but if you press the top to the rim of the guitar body, it flattens out and is very close to being completely flat. So considering the top doesn't have any doming to it and is quite flat, it may be better to add a bridge plate to the bracing and then use the guitar with a pin bridge, or re-do all the bracing, or of course you could always add a new solid-wood top.
It's worth mentioning that on the treble side of the body, at the waist, there is some cracking, not in the direction of the grain, but indicating that when the side was bent in the factory it started to crack slightly. Please look at the pictures of this to see for yourself. Not a big deal in my opinion, it just needs some reinforcement added on the inside.
The original tailpiece, tailpiece screws, end-pin, back braces, and label are included in the listing.
Sold as-is, without return. Thanks.
Dimensions:
- Length: 18-3/8"
- Upper bout: 10"
- Waist: 8-3/8"
- Lower bout: 13-3/8"
- Depth at neck-block: 2-3/4"
- Depth at tail-block: 3"
- Top thickness: 0.0867" or 2.2mm