Johnston Acoustic Guitar Build

Recently a customer asked me to build him a 1-off Johnston acoustic guitar.

And so the Johnston acoustic guitar build began.

Although I have a guitar repair workshop well stocked with tools for such jobs, I don’t have specific jigs nor go-bar decks etc that might be used by someone who regularly makes acoustics.

I made the jig for holding the sides in place using blocks of planed timber glued to a plywood board. The clamps were made from threaded bar and more wooden blocks.

I clamped the tonewood boards together while glueing using a board with nails knocked into it to press the mating faces together while the glue dried.

I weighted the board down using a good old breeze block.

The braces were clamped in place whilst glueing using lenghts of timber and/or steel bars held down with regular clamps.

The neck was a mahogany blank which I shaped using rasps and sandpaper and the headstock was cut out using a jigsaw.

After the usual placing and centring of the fretboard, and after inserting the truss rod, the fretboard was glued and clamped as was the ebony headplate.

Both were trimmed using a router. The fretboard was rubbed to shape, fretmarkers were made by filling the drilled holes with a mix of epoxy & copper dust.

The headstock logo was routered out with a Dremel and filled with a mix of epoxy and aluminium dust.

I fitted the frets before the neck was attached to the guitar.

The neck is a bolt-on one with screw inserts fitted into the neck heal and bolts through the end block of the guitar.I fitted the neck before attaching the back and was then able to remove the neck to complete tasks such as routering out binding channels on the body and attaching binding, fitting walnut and purfling inlay to the guitar heal end, fitting the bridge which was then removed until the body was finished.

Machinehead holes were drilled out before the finishing stage and the machineheads were fitted after the final oil coats had cured.

I then attached the neck to the body and aligned them up before finishing with several coats of guitar finishing oil.

I wasn’t happy with the result because I felt the finishing oil had too much linseed oil in it and it didn’t cure to a hard finish.

So, I took it all off and hand applied 10 coats of Tru Oil using my fingers to rub it on and sanding down between coats.

The final coat was sanded down to 3000 grit and finally polished. The Tru-Oil gave a have gloss finish.

Then the bridge was glued and clamped in place, the pickguard fitted and the machineheads fitted.

Job Done – a 1-off Johnston Acoustic Guitar.

Unfortunately I don’t have a photo of the final guitar but here are a few that were taken at various stages.