The sides come from your luthier supply house in the form of two slats, about 5 inches wide by 32 inches long and around 1/8 inch thick. I sand these down to about 0.085 inches with my drum sander before bending. Before I got that marvelous thing I had to reduce every board to useable thickness with a hand plane. Hand planes are great tools in the hands of great craftsmen. In my experience it's a little different; they do the job fine, right up to the point that I think I'm almost done, and then, yep, the blade slips a half-hair and digs into the board and ruins it. One day I thought, "Life's too Read more [...] Bending the sides
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The sides come from your luthier supply house in the form of two slats, about 5 inches wide by 32 inches long and around 1/8 inch thick. I sand these down to about 0.085 inches with my drum sander before bending. Before I got that marvelous thing I had to reduce every board to useable thickness with a hand plane. Hand planes are great tools in the hands of great craftsmen. In my experience it's a little different; they do the job fine, right up to the point that I think I'm almost done, and then, yep, the blade slips a half-hair and digs into the board and ruins it. One day I thought, "Life's too Read more [...] 
This is a step-by-step building log for the guitar I'm building for my old pal Whit. It'll be in reverse order, since that seems to be the way of WordPress, which I've just installed and am learning to use. I'm taking a lot of photos -- maybe the editors will spare you having to scroll through too many. Probably not. For sure there'll be too many words. Sorry.
Okay, this is a C.F. Martin-inspired Orchestra Model steel-string acoustic guitar. I covered the question "What's an OM?" in a post yesterday. The specs weren't covered, so here goes:
25.5-inch scale length, 15-inch wide lower 
Note: this article is from memory and not from research, so it may not fit the current understanding of the Grand Story of the OM. Also, the image in the header is taken from Christophe Grellier's nicely-drawn Martin OM plan, which is available as a free download from his website. Thanks Christophe!The Orchestra Model (OM) guitar is the result of a collaboration between the C.F. Martin Guitar company and a jazz-era banjo player from Atlanta named Perry Bechtel. In the late 1920s, the days of the banjo as a very popular instrument were coming to a close, and banjo players like Bechtel were migrating