nuance97
Silver Supporting Member
- Joined
- Feb 25, 2009
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Disclaimer
**The title of this thread before being made a sticky included a ? and the line (you can decide). The moderators changed the title. This isn’t intended to imply that this is the one and only carve that is vintage accurate. They were hand sanded on a slack-belt sander which would’ve undoubtedly led to variations.**
This is a topic that has been beaten to death I know, but I hope what I have to offer on the subject is still useful to some. I have been encouraged by member @ExNihilo to make this thread.
The topcarve of a 50’s Les Paul is to me the most important characteristic. It is the thing that draws me to those guitars more than anything. Thanks to the Scott Wilkinson/ExNihilo carve templates we have for many years been able to get a nice carve relatively easily and consistently. The topographical method is THE way to go. It just works!
Now, when Scott was creating those he had the limitation of not having on-hand anything “vintage” to reference. He had a precarved top. Now this particular top was a very pleasing design that was inspired by vintage LPs, but was more of an artistic interpretation of what a nice vintage topcarve is. It was only loosely connected to reality with details cherry-picked and others discarded. For example look at the very lower bout of the guitar in the pic below. It takes too much meat there leaving a very over exaggerated wide recurve. The recurve area in the part of the carve is actually quite narrow.
I am fortunate that I have a good friend who owns a 1956 Goldtop that had at some point decades ago had the binding on the treble side of the neck break off. He had it repaired at the time, but the glue from this repair let go a couple years ago. He asked if I could fix it...of course I jumped at the chance for the opportunity it would give me to trace, get contours, and measurement—all the details needed to make myself a working set of templates to make accurate (to my satisfaction) guitars.
This is the guitar I used for this exercise
Couldn’t get more mojo than that!
I took contours of this top at 10 locations:
-The butt end up the center seam
-the widest point of the lower bout
-a 45 degree diagonal between those two
-either side of each pickup (4 locations
-the waist
-and finally the upper side of the switch washer
Then put all of those into 1/16” grid lines to create the final map. It’s exactly what Scott did just with a vintage guitar this time.
This is my final map
Pretty different from what we are used to huh?
I’ll finish this up in the next post
https://www.dropbox.com/s/4sushhsj2gfp8wv/GOLD STANDARD Vintage Les Paul Plans V-2.0.pdf?dl=0
^^^The full plans linked above
**The title of this thread before being made a sticky included a ? and the line (you can decide). The moderators changed the title. This isn’t intended to imply that this is the one and only carve that is vintage accurate. They were hand sanded on a slack-belt sander which would’ve undoubtedly led to variations.**
This is a topic that has been beaten to death I know, but I hope what I have to offer on the subject is still useful to some. I have been encouraged by member @ExNihilo to make this thread.
The topcarve of a 50’s Les Paul is to me the most important characteristic. It is the thing that draws me to those guitars more than anything. Thanks to the Scott Wilkinson/ExNihilo carve templates we have for many years been able to get a nice carve relatively easily and consistently. The topographical method is THE way to go. It just works!
Now, when Scott was creating those he had the limitation of not having on-hand anything “vintage” to reference. He had a precarved top. Now this particular top was a very pleasing design that was inspired by vintage LPs, but was more of an artistic interpretation of what a nice vintage topcarve is. It was only loosely connected to reality with details cherry-picked and others discarded. For example look at the very lower bout of the guitar in the pic below. It takes too much meat there leaving a very over exaggerated wide recurve. The recurve area in the part of the carve is actually quite narrow.
I am fortunate that I have a good friend who owns a 1956 Goldtop that had at some point decades ago had the binding on the treble side of the neck break off. He had it repaired at the time, but the glue from this repair let go a couple years ago. He asked if I could fix it...of course I jumped at the chance for the opportunity it would give me to trace, get contours, and measurement—all the details needed to make myself a working set of templates to make accurate (to my satisfaction) guitars.
This is the guitar I used for this exercise
Couldn’t get more mojo than that!
I took contours of this top at 10 locations:
-The butt end up the center seam
-the widest point of the lower bout
-a 45 degree diagonal between those two
-either side of each pickup (4 locations
-the waist
-and finally the upper side of the switch washer
Then put all of those into 1/16” grid lines to create the final map. It’s exactly what Scott did just with a vintage guitar this time.
This is my final map
Pretty different from what we are used to huh?
I’ll finish this up in the next post
https://www.dropbox.com/s/4sushhsj2gfp8wv/GOLD STANDARD Vintage Les Paul Plans V-2.0.pdf?dl=0
^^^The full plans linked above
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