skitched
Tele-Meister
...that worked well? Just curious if anyone has seen a plywood neck. I’m guessing it would need a few hundred layers of poly to ensure it didn’t embed splinters in your palm thou...
Has anyone ever made a plywood neck..
- Thread starter skitched
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So I am going to attempt this pretty soon. I have done a ton of research on plywood or "laminated" necks as I have a large beam that is 2" thick, 8" wide and about 54" long that I want to make a neck out of.
From what I can tell some of the Martin guitars actually had laminated necks with their stratabond necks.
I know a guy who makes custom basses and he uses a laminated neck as well.
Vinguerra Custom Shop Bass
This Blue one really lights my fire.
These colors are created by gluing a number of pre stained wood pieces together. I won't get that same result as my blank is not pre-stained but it should turn out pretty cool.
The plan is to make a long scale bass, two truss rods, neck through design with two wings of some other wood added to the neck. It is still in its development phase. Which means it is swirling around in my brain.
skitched
Tele-Meister
That’s how skateboards are laid up...
These colors are created by gluing a number of pre stained wood pieces together.
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JuneauMike
Poster Extraordinaire
I bought my wife one of the X-series guitars for Christmas several years ago and I was going to suggest that as an example. I don't know the process, nor do I know when "plywood" crosses over to become a "gluelam" structure like a support beam or a neck. Plywood is strong enough to be mechanical support beams in home construction, but it also fails when the beam is heated enough to break down the glue (these things have killed more than a couple of firefighters responding to basement fires, etc., as an aside).From what I can tell some of the Martin guitars actually had laminated necks with their stratabond necks.
But if he's going to go down the same route that Martin took, I'd imagine he'd need an industrial grade press of some kind to really get the adhesion he's looking for. The type of wood and its grain structure would be important (one thing I notice on the Martin is that every other layer looks fairly uniform in color, which suggests there is a recipe to this glue lam process). And the hardness factor of the adhesive probably comes into play. This could get very "sciency" very fast.
jvin248
Doctor of Teleocity
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Yamaha had a laminated neck electric guitar but I didn't find a picture fast enough to post. It may have been a bamboo laminated neck. Bamboo is a grass with higher strength to weight than oak. But it looked like plywood.
Gibson did the Zoot-Suit series of color laminated SGs a few years ago. They were a little too much for the typical Gibson buyer.
Where does the limit of fewer thicker ply laminations and increasingly thinner laminated boards intersect?
How many laminations does it take to make a multi-lam neck into something called "plywood" ... other than "I know it when I see it"?
I've seen black veneer layers added on both sides of the purple heart strips in this laminated neck too.
I've used common pallet plywood to build some prototypes. It works fine, as long as the interfacing 'tops' and 'bottoms' are wood and not cut so thin there is more resin bleed through when the pallet wood was built so that your wood glue bonds to wood and not primarily non-stick resin. If the glue ups are done right and the carving is well done you'll have a stable neck. If you use baltic birch then you'll not have potential voids to fill, which common plywood will have, "it's a feature" that "proves authenticity".
Regular Plywood is wood fibers at 90 deg angles to each other which can give end-grain in the neck that makes the finished neck either feel rougher or "gives it fast playing dimples like a golf ball feel" that players could like or hate. If you lay down layers with parallel grains then you just have the Martin neck previously posted.
At the end of the day, the reason 'plywood' is such a problem for guitar construction and sales is because in the 60s and 70s all the super cheap and inexpensive guitar brands tried it on guitars they haphazardly slapped frets into and the whole guitar sounded horrible because of the poor fretwork and setups -- but the obvious thing beginning players could blame was the plywood because they could see that differed from their buddy's "real" guitar. It was such a deeply made perception that players are still posting pictures of a new guitar they got and worriedly asking "is this guitar plywood?" Education and time with successfully built 'high end' instruments will be needed to change that image.
If you are building necks certainly try it out. It's worthwhile to experiment with.
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Yamaha had a laminated neck electric guitar but I didn't find a picture fast enough to post. It may have been a bamboo laminated neck. Bamboo is a grass with higher strength to weight than oak. But it looked like plywood.
Gibson did the Zoot-Suit series of color laminated SGs a few years ago. They were a little too much for the typical Gibson buyer.
Where does the limit of fewer thicker ply laminations and increasingly thinner laminated boards intersect?
How many laminations does it take to make a multi-lam neck into something called "plywood" ... other than "I know it when I see it"?
I've seen black veneer layers added on both sides of the purple heart strips in this laminated neck too.
I've used common pallet plywood to build some prototypes. It works fine, as long as the interfacing 'tops' and 'bottoms' are wood and not cut so thin there is more resin bleed through when the pallet wood was built so that your wood glue bonds to wood and not primarily non-stick resin. If the glue ups are done right and the carving is well done you'll have a stable neck. If you use baltic birch then you'll not have potential voids to fill, which common plywood will have, "it's a feature" that "proves authenticity".
Regular Plywood is wood fibers at 90 deg angles to each other which can give end-grain in the neck that makes the finished neck either feel rougher or "gives it fast playing dimples like a golf ball feel" that players could like or hate. If you lay down layers with parallel grains then you just have the Martin neck previously posted.
At the end of the day, the reason 'plywood' is such a problem for guitar construction and sales is because in the 60s and 70s all the super cheap and inexpensive guitar brands tried it on guitars they haphazardly slapped frets into and the whole guitar sounded horrible because of the poor fretwork and setups -- but the obvious thing beginning players could blame was the plywood because they could see that differed from their buddy's "real" guitar. It was such a deeply made perception that players are still posting pictures of a new guitar they got and worriedly asking "is this guitar plywood?" Education and time with successfully built 'high end' instruments will be needed to change that image.
If you are building necks certainly try it out. It's worthwhile to experiment with.
.
Sure, this works great; makes for a super-stable neck. Alembic was one of the first companies to widely use many individual pieces of wood in guitar necks and bodies. Some Alembics have more that 30 plies.
A laminate is a countertop.
Plywood is multiple layers of wood--thick veneers--glued up in (usually) 90-degree grain orientation.
Guitar makers use the word "laminate" to distance their products from the plywood available at Home Depot. And Martin (and others) use terms such as "HPL" (high-pressure laminate) to vaguely disguise the materials and distance their products from kitchen countertops. Goofy!
A laminate is a countertop.
Plywood is multiple layers of wood--thick veneers--glued up in (usually) 90-degree grain orientation.
Guitar makers use the word "laminate" to distance their products from the plywood available at Home Depot. And Martin (and others) use terms such as "HPL" (high-pressure laminate) to vaguely disguise the materials and distance their products from kitchen countertops. Goofy!
R.S.Fraser Sr.
Tele-Meister
Framus Acoustics, like the TEXAN model had laminated necks.
skitched
Tele-Meister
Zoot Suit SG. Neck is also laminated (plywood).
i can’t imagine a guitar more perfect for upsetting certain types of guitar snobs...a recent bad dog thread was asking which guitar did people hate the aesthetic of most and a surprisingly high number of people said the SG...funny cause it’s one of the few Gibson’s I’d actually buy...
JuneauMike
Poster Extraordinaire
I'm very excited about the possibilities of bamboo. It seems like a very stable material.
jhundt
Doctor of Teleocity
here's an old 70's Klira Bluebell 12-string acoustic, made in Germany. The neck is laminated with a thousand pieces. I had never seen anything like it. It seems to be pretty stable.
Personally, I've long admired the Martin Mexi-ply neck and am surprised it hasn't been embraced by players who like a rigid, stable neck.
Isn't there also a Flax build?
(link removed)
Peace - Deeve
jhundt
Doctor of Teleocity
Framus was made by many of the same people who made the Klira, in my post above. If you want to spend a half-hour learning some interesting guitar history, do a Wikipedia search on these brands. The Framus Texan in the Wikipedia photograph is almost identical to my Klira.
Allan Allan
Tele-Afflicted
I think bamboo archtops would be cool. The affordable ones are already laminated.
Hoyer is another German (originally Czech) luthier company who made 12-strings with a laminated neck - at least in the 60's or so; my brother had one, seems like the center of the neck had maybe 6 or 8 laminations.
Apparently one such 12-string appeared with E'vis in a movie - you can see a picture of that at scottymoore.net .
Apparently one such 12-string appeared with E'vis in a movie - you can see a picture of that at scottymoore.net .
draggindakota
Tele-Holic
I have an old Kingston bass sitting in the corner that has a neck exactly like this. I played it for a time with the church band many years ago and it never seemed to have an issue. It's still straight (at least to the naked eye) after sitting in a shed for several years.
jhundt
Doctor of Teleocity
there is the possibility that your bass was made by one of the Czech/German companies, and branded with the name "Kingston" because it was cool. I would love to see a picture of it!
Moonshinegtrs
NEW MEMBER!
Phillip Kubicki used multi laminate neck in his Kubicki Bass builds...
(image removed)
Nashville builder/tech Sean Paden uses "plywood" for the necks in his Green Guitar Project instruments.
https://www.facebook.com/greengtrproject/
Moonshine
(image removed)
Nashville builder/tech Sean Paden uses "plywood" for the necks in his Green Guitar Project instruments.
https://www.facebook.com/greengtrproject/
Moonshine
Just to be sure, as someone else has already mentioned - plywood and laminate are not interchangeable terms. Basic plywood is going to have each individual layer rotated 90 degrees from the previous layer. Laminated wood as illustrated by the SG posted twice in the thread is not plywood. Yes, it is wood, and there are multiple “plys” but no builder or luthier, or even cabinet builder would ever refer to such as plywood. When I worked in the wood shop at Tobias we referred to them as multi-lam. To do a multi-lam, all of the grain is moving in the same direction, except that you’re book matching it in relation to the center point. That’s even what Martin is doing with their multi-lam necks.
No way on earth a piece of true plywood could survive as a neck.
No way on earth a piece of true plywood could survive as a neck.
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