All Wood Double Top Classical Guitar

 Double top, or composite top, classical guitars are all the rage these days, especially among young guitarists and I decided that I would make a double top guitar. Instead of using Nomex honeycomb material as part of the composite top, I used a router to rout out channels in the top to help reduce the top's weight. I got this idea from the wonderful guitar maker, Steve Ganz, using his technique requires minimal tools and no vacuum platen to hold the top down while routing.

I saw no point in building a completely new guitar, so I took the top off of one of my guitars to conduct this experiment.

I then made the channel top...

...glued redwood veneer over the channels...

...braced the new top with my standard bracing...

and proceeded putting the guitar back together.

I put strings on it two days ago and with the cedar top is definitely louder than it was with the redwood top. Next week a friend of mine is stopping by the shop and I am going to get him to try out this guitar and get his opinion.

The point of making a composite top is to decrease the weight and improve the stiffness of the top. This top finished out around 2.6mm thick, most my normal tops finish out at 2.0mm thick, and was 15% lighter than a 2.0mm top. That means it is considerably lighter than a solid top of the same thickness!

I definitely want to try this technique again, but start from scratch and use East Indian rosewood for the back and sides.