Building the Weissenborn Guitar – Part Four – The Plans

Before I even started to build my first Weissenborn guitar, I had a lot of doubts like “Am I going to screw this up?” Or do I suppose I’m wrong? and similar kinds of horrible thoughts! In fact, I would stay up at night thinking about it, half scared, half excited, to be doing this for the first time.

However, I quickly came to the conclusion that it was just wood, it only cost money and if I screwed up, well I could always buy some more and start over! I realized that I needed to curb my impatience and start being a little more thorough in my approach to this project.

I had scoured the web for all sorts of information on the construction of a Weissenborn and realized there was very little to find. There were no books on how to do it, and I could only find a set of plans available from a company in America. It seemed to me that it must be the best kept secret on the planet.

There were some tough individuals who had bitten the bullet and built a Weissenborn, but it seemed that for the most part it was the secret domain of the Luthiers, the gods of all gods! All this intrigued me more and more and little by little I accumulated an arsenal of facts and fiction about the construction of these Weissenborn guitars. They were definitely popular and there was no question about it. People like Ben Harper, Jeff Lang, and Johnny Depp had taken care of that, for sure. When I finally found the plan for a Weissenborn, I was amazed at how little detail there was in the plan itself! I was hoping there were all kinds of tips, hints, and little secret tricks to help the unsuspecting innocent (me) find his way through the maze.

It seemed to me that what I had to do was buy a conventional guitar building book and take some (if not most!) Of the techniques and use them to build my guitar. In fact, that’s really what I did in the end, more or less. As I gathered more information and asked my friend Kim Hancock, a prominent luthier from Tamborine Mountain in Queensland, for the wood, I made a definite promise to myself that I would, if this project was successful, I would not just write a book on building a Weissenborn. , But I would also map out a plan for my own guitar before I start!

This is also exactly what I did. He had seen Jeff Lang’s beautiful Weissenborn style guitar made for him by South Australian luthier David Churchill and had seen how deep the body and neck were. I wanted something like that! I realized that the beautiful ringtones and sweet sounds came from a combination of the workmanship, the wood, and certainly the depth of this great slide guitar.

I went to the local printing and copy shop and bought about two meters of virgin white paper, the kind of material on which architects draw houses. I burned in midnight oil drawing, redrawing, cursing, muttering, and checking the dimensions of books, drawings, and photos. I was lucky enough to get an old Weissenborn style plan from a friend and compare it to the dimensions of my own. So far so good!

Soon the day came. The plans were born. I was really glad that the Weissenborn style was the one I had chosen for my first build and was secretly pleased that I didn’t have to deal with complicated truss rods and the great fact that I had realized about halfway through the design was that because the strings are never pressed onto the frets, it wouldn’t matter if they were a bit inaccurate. A conventional guitar would be ruined if you mess up!

He was really satisfied with the plan as he studied it. There was a lot of information there, I had taken care of that. Wood type, exact thickness in millimeters and inches, no hideous decimals of inches, what are they? Yuck! Little notes of warning about things that had almost caught me with my pants down. What kind of glue to use and many things like that. It looked good. I also decided that I would eventually convert it to PDF files and TIFF files to put on CD-Rom when it came time to put them on my site. Now all I had to do was build my guitar!

In fact, I live on a forty foot yacht, so the challenge of building this guitar was more than a little interesting, to say the least. It required careful planning and a little foresight. He had thought about the whole project and, since he did not have a workshop as such, he improvised a bit. The engine block casing would be my workplace, four feet by two feet six inches, a lot! I had a solid three-quarter-inch piece of MDF board to work with and had decided to use the ‘mold’ method to build the guitar.

The outer deck would be used for sawing, cutting, and all the messy stuff and it had a wide sheet of cloth to protect that. I started out a little scared. I soon realized that things were going well and really got going. Well folks, the rest is history! In fact, I made myself a slippery Mississippi delta mud, bright, whiny people, and it sure sounds great! Even I say so myself!

It turned out better than I could have dreamed of and I play it every damn day! The good thing is that it gets sweeter over time and I don’t even play it backwards anymore! I feel it on my lap now! I wrote a book on construction and if you want you can visit my site http://www.buildaweissenborn.com which I built in honor of these wonderful instruments and you can see the results of my efforts and even listen to a sound clip of the own guitar if you wish!