Product Description

Whether you're a musician or a woodworking enthusiast, you'll thoroughly enjoy Roger Siminoff's book, Constructing A Solid Body Guitar. This 64-page manual uses over 150 photos, several illustrations and four life-size blueprints to assist the reader in choosing the proper materials and tools, as well as using the correct skills and techniques to produce a beautiful handmade instrument that doesn't look handmade at all! Plastic-comb bound.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #448836 in Books
• Published on: 1986-05-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Plastic Comb
• 64 pages

Customer Reviews

For The Experienced Woodworker Only
I'm starting my second electric guitar project, and so recently re-read my copy of this book.

Roger Siminoff gives a fine overview of solidbody electric guitar building, but glosses over some of the issues. For example, while much time is spent on showing how to do a handrubbed sunburst finish, the entire wiring and pickup installation steps take up merely a few paragraphs, and little if any space is given to instrument setup or adjustment - Tasks that some of Dan Erlewine's wonderful books take *entire chapters* to describe.

Also, it's clear that Roger's shop contains all of the heavy-duty tools (large drill press, planer-joiner, bench-mounted buffing wheel, etc) that a guitar or woodworking pro might have, but little or no explanation is given on how one without a shop full of industrial-strength woodworking gear might accomplish the same tasks. It's almost as if Siminoff knows how to build instruments so well that much of what a beginning instrument builder might like to know is second nature to him, and so got left out of the work.

Even with those caveats, this is a good overview of "from scratch" guitar construction - Siminoff writes in a simple, clear style, there are plenty of black-and-white photos of the crucial steps, and an added bonus are the full size plans for a Les Paul style guitar - Siminoff says in the book that he deliberately designed the body to be slightly narrower than a Gibson Les Paul so that the plan could be drawn to fit the book.

Okay, but limited
A book which contains nice plans and outline for a single guitar project, but does not explain things well enough to allow the inexperienced reader to design their own guitar, except as a slight variation of the project included. Good to add to a wwodworking/guitar building library, but not the place to start if you are building your first guitar (I strongly recommend Hiscock's book for the neophyte electric lutier.)

My dream Guitar
This book by Roger SIminoff is one of his best. Through reading the book, I was able to build a guitar, something that I had no knowledge of previous to this reading. I would reccomend this to anyone who would like to builod something themselves, as this book brings you from A-Z