The Build - Martin Mahogany Dreadnought Kit - Part 2

In part two of his quest to build a classic Martin acoustic, editor Jamie has a bracing experience – and gets thoroughly trussed up

- Jamie Dickson

As regular readers may know I recently embarked on a mission to build the nearest thing I could get to a Martin D-18, using the company’s official ‘Mahogany Dreadnought’ kit. As this kit is not quite a bolt-together affair but requires some moderately serious luthiery skills to assemble properly, I enlisted the aid of Bristol guitar maker Alex Bishop, whose tools and seasoned judgment would help my greenhorn guitar-making skills meet the mark.

In the first installment of this feature, published a few issues back, Alex and I laid the foundations of the instrument, joining the two halves of the back together after learning how to sharpen our tools properly – an important aspect of building guitars correctly. With the backset aside to dry, we turned our attention to the braces.

As mentioned, Martin supplies the kit with all the braces for the top pre-cut roughly to shape. For the uninitiated, braces are reinforcing struts of spruce that prevent the wood of the guitar top being ripped apart by the tension exerted by the strings when tuned to pitch, which equates to 75kg of pull for a standard set of 0.012s – quite a load for a flimsy sheet of spruce to stand up to for years on end. For reference, a hefty Fender Twin only weighs 29kg. So it’s important for those reinforcing braces to impart sufficient strength to the top to prevent it from warping or breaking apart. However, the devil is in the detail (as always), because the braces must also be slender enough to permit the top to resonate freely. It’s this balance between strength and resonance that defines the voice of the guitar. What’s more, the kind of playing you do will also influence how robust the bracing needs to be. It’s a good job Alex is an old hand at this because his judgment will help me judge how to tailor the bracing for the best balance of sound and strength.