A Better Use for MDF - A Form to Laminate Classical Guitar Sides

January 07, 2025

A Better Use for MDF - A Form to Laminate Classical Guitar Sides

The guitar is a journey, a never-ending quest for perfection.

Andrés Segovia

I have never quite liked Medium Density Fiberboard (MDF); it’s heavy; scratch the surface with some sandpaper and dust from it flies everywhere; and, well, it just isn’t wood. I grew up with the lumber industry and know the history of William Mason’s “Masonite” and am always grateful that he and Thomas Edison worked together to find a use for all the wood chips and saw dust that come from a sawmill. When I was a kid in the late 1960’s a few “teepee” burners were still in use, sawmills would burn the sawdust and all that smoke would linger in the valley for days.

A very long time ago, I made work boards for my guitars out of pine and redwood, but it was hard getting all those laminated strips flats and scooping out the area for the top doming was tricky due to wood grain runout. When I realized I could use MDF for the solera, my life got a lot easier, MDF has no grain, is fairly flat and easy to sand flat if need be.

I first laminated guitar sides in 2014, you can find the post about that else where in the blog, go to the blog’s Search tab and type in “laminate”. I used MDF for an external mold, and I found out I don’t like using an external mold, the sides that came out of it had an incredible amount of “spring in”, not “spring back” which made assembling the guitar a little more difficult. In 2021, I made an interior mold for sides that I used on two guitars. You can see and hear one of the guitars at Savage Classical Guitar. You can search this blog for the post I wrote about the technique I used to make those guitars.

Now I am back to laminating guitar sides, the next two guitars will have double tops and I want to have very rigid sides to help increase the guitars’ volume. And I am using a different technique to laminate the sides, I will talk about that in another post.

To make the new form, I made a template of the guitar outline, drew that on six pieces of MDF, cut out a basic shape with a jig saw and then used the template to rout all the pieces to the final shape.

I cut some holes in the four pieces that went in the middle to help lighten the form. All pieces were aligned to a common edge and tacked into place with screws, screw holes and screws are more accurate than trying to dowel the pieces together. The screws also act as glue clamps!