How I Build 'Em

By hand, one at a time, to your specifications.

Running Dog guitars are not built on a production line. There is one luthier building one guitar at a time, for one particular player.

For a virtual tour of the Running Dog Guitars shop, please click here.

After the materials, body style, and options are chosen (See the Options page), I select the particular pieces of wood for your guitar. They are thicknessed, the top and back joined, and sides bent. Braces are cut from the very best straight grain spruce.

The rosette is inlaid in the soundboard and the soundhole cut. The soundhole on all Running Dogs is bound with a contrasting wood, often the same wood as the back and sides. This was a common technique in the late 1800's and is still done on fine archtops. I like it because it covers the end grain of the soundboard and protects this vulnerable area from pick and nail damage.

When a factory prepares a soundboard, they sand it to a standard thickness without regard for the stiffness of the particular piece of wood or for the size of guitar. I choose an appropriate piece of spruce, cedar, or redwood for the individual guitar and player, and then carefully thickness it for that instrument, measuring to the thousandths of an inch. The lighter weight the soundboard, the more responsive the guitar. But too thin and the soundboard is likely to suffer damage from humidity changes and the normal knocks and bangs. Furthermore, if the soundboard is too thin, it will be floppy and the sound muddy and confused. There's a very fine point at which it is responsive, clear, loud, and generally wonderful. Finding that point is time-consuming and requires experience and concentration.

Both soundboard and back are domed to resist cracking from humidity changes, and to provide the best possible sound. Braces are carved (scalloped) to extract the best tone and responsiveness from the instrument. Each soundboard is tap-tuned, carved, tapped, carved ... until it reaches its maximum potential for response, balance, and fullness of tone.

The neck starts as one piece of 4" thick, 3" wide, quartersawn mahogany. This is cut in half lengthwise and a center rib of hardwood is laminated in place. Contrasting veneers may be included in the neck. The fingerboard surface is jointed flat and straight, then routed for the double-acting truss rod. Carbon fiber is laminated on either side of the truss rod to stiffen the neck (not on Sprite: the short scale length doesn't require additional reinforcement). The headstock is prepared and a veneer glued on. This is both cosmetic and structural: it really stiffens this part of the neck. When I use a flexible headstock veneer -- like sycamore, redwood burl, etc. -- I back it with ebony for strength and stiffness.

My ebony fingerboards are CNC routed at a tolerance of 0.0005". That's pretty damn small!

The neck is carved to your preference -- slight Vee, semi-round, etc. Width and taper are cut. It is joined to the body with a tenon and bolts to make disassembly easy and quick. I don't trust the butt joint used by some builders to attach their necks. It's probably fine, but my old-style New England woodworking background won't accept it. The mortise-and-tenon joint is held together by two socket-head bolts accessible from the inside of the guitar, and reinforced by a cross-grain strip epoxied into the tenon. On a bench test, I was able to torque the joint to 90 foot-pounds without failure!

The heel is carved in a traditional shape on non-cutaways, or in a flat jazz guitar style on cutaways. Nothing protrudes to catch your hand as you slide into the cutaway.

The fingerboard is given a comfortable arch, a smooth polish, and Martin-style frets. Hand-cut inlays are the best abalone and gold mother-of-pearl; position dots are pearl (paua, mother of pearl, black pearl, or gemstone).

-- A note about plastic. I don't like plastic on guitars. It's great stuff for computer cases and telephones, it's even good for many things that used to be made of wood like automobile dashboards and fly rods. (I made a walnut burl dashboard for my car and I fish with a cane rod. But if you want a plastic dash or rod, fine.) Plastic really sucks on guitars, except maybe Telecasters and those cool plastic Maccaferris of the Fifties. Ivoroid binding shrinks and pulls away at the waist, plastic yellows with age, it either absorbs energy across the sound spectrum or not much at all, the soundboard wood shrinks leaving plastic rosettes standing proud of the surface ... Anyway, it just doesn't belong there. Kind of like putting a plastic cloth over a butternut Shaker table. So the only plastic on my guitars is that little washer under the tuner buttons -- it works well and I'm damned if I'm going to cut leather washers to replace them!

Meanwhile, the body is assembled and given its first sanding. Wood binding and purfling are installed. Everything is levelled and sanded, and the back and sides filled if necessary. Finally, the instrument is sprayed with a high-gloss nitrocellulose lacquer and buffed to a warm glow.

Final setup includes precise work on the fingerboard and frets. The nut and saddle are bone; the intonation is checked and adjusted. The truss rod, accessible from inside the guitar, is adjusted. The label is glued in, the guitar vacuumed and polished. Into the custom Ameritage case and shipped to you!


Some Notes About Wood:

When I have discussions with players about "their" tone, I focus on the soundboard. With five species of spruce and two of cedar, plus redwood, I can usually meet any reasonable requirements. People like to talk about "maple guitars" or "Brazilian rosewood guitars." But almost all of the tone is developed by the soundboard and the size of the instrument. The wood used for the back and sides is a very small part of the total sound (but it's a big part of the appearance!). The back and sides modify the sound, but they can't change it radically. You can't put a maple back on a cedar or redwood guitar and expect it to have the dry, punchy tone of a Sitka/maple archtop. Similarly, you can't force a stiff piece of spruce to sound like cedar by using a different body material. The top (including braces) has to work as a unit, the back and sides have to complement the top, and the whole instrument has to work together. Using radically different sounding woods on the top and back usually results in a confused, muddy tone.

When you talk to me or other experienced luthiers, try to talk about the result rather than the materials and process. It's our job to listen and understand what sound you want, and then know how to turn that desire into a playable instrument. When I'm told, for example, "I want a spruce-and-maple guitar," I ask, "What will it sound like?" I'm comfortable with the order only after I know what the customer wants those woods to do.

Running Dog is committed to identifying and using alternatives to the (often) irresponsibly harvested tonewoods traditionally found on guitars. North American woods, such as walnut, cherry, and sycamore, make fine guitars without the destructive baggage of Central American rosewoods and mahoganies.

Here are a couple of stories and a theory:
C. F. Martin had been in the US for a only a short time. He was living in lower Manhattan, building guitars and trying to make a living in his new country. It was difficult -- there was a lot of competition and the guitar wasn't yet that popular an instrument. Importing rosewood and European maple for the instruments was very expensive. One night he went down to the docks and sat on a packing crate to think about his business. As he pondered, he idly swung his feet, gently kicking the crate. Suddenly the luthier part of his mind awoke: the crate was resonant and sweet! He looked down -- it was from the Caribbean and made of mahogany! The next day, he started his first mahogany-bodied guitar, perhaps a size 2. It didn't take long for Martin guitars made from the inexpensive and easily available mahogany to catch on, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Meanwhile, young guitar- and mandolin- maker Orville Gibson looked out his window in Churubusco NY, near the Canadian border. It was Autumn and the northern tier was alive with the vivid colors of turning leaves. Orville was thinking about making another guitar and wondering if he could afford the materials. He looked at the maples in his back yard. His mind wandered, thinking about guitars, about the common tonewoods, then about sugaring the maples in Spring, and about how the trees rang as the tap was hammered in. Then he went to the barn and got out his father's big cross-cut saw.

Is that how we ended up with mahogany and maple as accepted tonewoods? More or less, I think, even though I completely imagined the stories. These woods were common in the areas where these soon-to-be-famous luthiers lived and worked, and were easier to obtain than traditional European woods. In Pennsylvania, fiddle makers were using sycamore but these were one-of-a-kind folk instruments, not factory-made like Gibsons and Martins. Out West, people were building guitars with cypress, Port Orford cedar, and other woods now being offered as "alternatives." Again, the instruments were made for the builder's pleasure, not for sale, so the use of these woods didn't become common or accepted. But Martin went through a lot of mahogany and Gibson a lot of maple -- and with these two production giants using these woods, well, of course they have to be the right ones.

But wait! If it was only an accident of location and availability that maple and mahogany were used, doesn't that mean that other woods -- walnut, sycamore, cherry and others -- might be just as good? That it was just luck that they weren't growing in Orville's backyard or available to C.F. Martin in New York? I think so. I think that if C.F. had begun making instruments on Sycamore Street in Nazareth instead of next to New York's docks, he might have marketed sycamore guitars and now mahogany would be the "alternative"! Or if a big cherry tree had happened to blow over near Gibson's place (not that cherries get that big this far north), Lloyd Loar might not have had to sunburst his mandolins to get some color. "Alternative" woods are not inferior to the traditional woods -- they are different to varying degrees, but offer spectacular results. In the hands of a skilled luthier, there are many ways to achieve the tone, power, focus, and projection you want.

Walnut offers a neutral tone -- it lets the soundboard shine through. Cherry is bright and punchy, though more mellow than most maple. Sycamore looks like a psychedelic maple but has the melodic quality of the finest mahogany. All three are beautiful to the eye and the ear.

More traditional materials are available (koa, different maples, plus Indian, Honduran, and Brazilian rosewoods) and I love building with them. But listen to the instruments! My experience with "alternative" woods allows me to create great-sounding instruments that demonstrate respect for the forests from which they come.