Bit of a different tenor

Accidentally stumbled across an american luthier called Sage Radachowsky who makes some lovely travel size guitars, such as:

http://selvaguitars.com/

Think they're really pretty, especially with the extended bridge which acts as lever to transfer the vibrational energy from the strings into the centre of the soundboard which according to sage makes them quite a bit louder for their size. Also, the soundboard around the fretboard area means that on my plans, the soundboard is almost 20cm of effective vibrational area.


Tenor plans compare to a normal tenor.


Have an idea how to make it all except for the bracing. Lattice bracing would be perfect but waaayyy out of my league, so after trawling google, I found this:


Not too sure if this project will work at all, but that's half the fun of it )

Guess you're planning on installing steel strings, yes?

That top would be over braced for anything other than steel strings unless the top itself was about 1mm thick. I doubt it is, so you will need to do some more research.

Will be using nylon strings on it. I know selva guitars work with them as the one in the video is strung with them. And Allen, I have a thickness sander so I can easily take a top to 1mm. Reading up on lattice bracing at the moment to see if I could do it. Your method using balsa and carbon fibre looks amazing but I might try copying Luis Feu de Mesquita who does spruce lattice bracing on some of his ukes http://lfdmguitars.ca/choosing-a-custom-guitar/ukulele.

Reading anything I can find about bracing at the moment so how I do it is still up in the air.

Hmm, ladder bracing looks a lot easier to do. Might use that instead.

Don't listen with your eyes...

Uh......yeah. I think that bracing would be fine if you were building a cheese cutting board. Why the need to over complicate things?

Not sure what you're going for, or why you're even going through a though process about bracing?

If you're going with nylon strings, and that bridge setup, I think your bracing pattern needs to put on its birthday suit and present itself to you, without even a thought about it, no?