Thread: 7 Course Renaissance Lute Progress Pics

Looking good Martin.
Cheers, Bob

Your the man martin!! The king of the dark side

Good to see you getting some shed time again Martin. I know what its like, Im struggling to get anything going at the moment. I look forward to the rosette adventures,

Great stuff Martin,

How is it possible to joint one of those back sections to the next?
either some super fancy jig or a simple solution? I'm thinking you
have a left and a right and angles same with the
neck but with no curve.

Look farwrd to seeing more.I will have to do a search and see
if I can find pics of your guitars in one of your, is it 3080 something
posts?. Regards Rob

Hi Rob,

The trick with building a lute body is to start with an accurately made mold. Although I had plans to work off they are only used as a guide and once the mold is erected you have to fine tune the ribs of the mold making sure that a flexible ruler laid over the mold touches each rib at the correct point.

The body ribs are rough cut to a pattern and then bent on a hot iron. Once bent the joining edges of each rib are run over a jointer plane sitting in a vise and then fine tuned on a sanding board. The procedure is identical to a cooper making up staves for a barrel. Its all a matter of trial and error to get a good fit along the edges of the ribs....I would have rejected about 5 ribs by the timeI finished. Once shaped and trimmed the ribs are glued to the adjacent ribs with hide glue.

The rib shaping process explained in more detail. Photos as follows:
1. After cutting out rib it gets bent on the hot pipe.
2. Test fitting on the mold.
3. Shaping rib edges on upturned No 8 jointing plane.
4. Checking edge of rib lies on same plane using a plane box.
5. Fine tuning rib edges using sanding board.

Originally Posted by Sebastiaan56

Good to see you getting some shed time again Martin. I know what its like, Im struggling to get anything going at the moment. I look forward to the rosette adventures,

The rosette will be a challenge. The rosette on a lute is carved into the top so there is absolutely no margin for error. For this reason Ill be doing a test run on some scrap spruce before attempting the real thing. I tried making up some carving tools using scalpels but the finished cutting edges werent too my liking. Ive ordered a variety of mini chisels from the US and they should be more suitable for the rosette carving job.

At work at present and then off to NZ as soon as I get home so wont be much progress on the lute over next month or two.

Cheers Martin

The top is about 1.3mm around the rosette isnt it? The rest about 2.0mm, if I remember my Lundberg correctly,

That's about correct Seb. Thickness is just under 2mm but final figure depends on the wood. Test rosette will be on Englemann but the top on the lute will be European Spruce.

Cheers Martin