One-Piece Guitars

[indysmith]

Why is a guitar always a neck and body made seperately, and then joined together? is it not, in theory possible to make a guitar out of one piece of wood be it mahogany, maple, or whatever? Surely this method would make the finest resonating machine known to man? :twisted:

[Philly Q]

A suppose the major reason is cost - you only need a narrow plank of wood to make a neck, but to make a one-piece guitar you'd have to start with a 3-foot plank the width of a body so there'd be lots of waste around the neck (there must be cost-effective uses for the offcuts though).

And, I guess, it's much more difficult to find flawless guitar-sized pieces of wood than it is to find flawless neck- and body-sized pieces of wood.

[indysmith]

So, in theory it's possible? Just expensive.
Hmmm I'm going to do some research on this - if it's possible it must have been done before...

[Davey]

in theory yes. but finding such a large 2x4 foot piece of flawles wood is near impossible.

[WezV]

its possible and has been done many times, not always that expensive but needlessly difficult for absolutely no tonal advantages!!


The main problem comes from wood selection, you need one very wide flawless plank to do it.  When making guitars sometimes you find flaws hidden inside the woods - with a peice of wood this size thats a lot more likely to happen and if that flaw was in the wrong place the whole thing needs to be scr@pped.   The few example i have seen had problems here

Tonally i can make sure i can get a good peice of resonant wood for the body and neck - but its much harder to judge the tone of a huge plank - especially with all the flaws you might find inside.  The problem being that the structure can vary between different parts off the tree

So you need a very big bit of high quality wood - that needs to come from a very old tree to be the size you want.  .  .  then you are going to cut most of it away!!!!!   Not exactly good practice - those scr@ps will be odd shapes and most will not be usefull for much.  and it needs to have the grain going in the right direction in the neck section so that will be stable enough (quartersawn)


Much better idea is to do a through neck where the neck goes all the way through the body but is a seperate peice(s) of wood

[omikl]

Its easier if you avoid using wood. Steinberger springs to mind. Their original models were one piece neck & body, but it was some sort of resin composite.

There's a make of guitar out there called Switch that uses a one piece resin composite neck & body for their instruments. These are pretty cheap as they are made in China. I have one of their lowest-end models that I picked up used for about 35 quid in my local Cash Converters (Yes. They really are everywhere). It's for my kids to beat up on, but it's also perfectly giggable, and you really could paddle a canoe with it without causing any structural damage :D



There are more out there, a Dutch company who's name I can't recall was making some high-end one piece composite Strat copies a couple of years abck IIRC.