Building a 17" Archtop Acoustic Guitar

These pages are about building a 17" archtop with Frank Finocchio at his shop in Easton, PA. I've been fascinated with the archtop for many years. Probably because jazz guitar is (depending on the artist!) my favorite musical form. Yet Frank's schedule and mine conspired to lead me through the classes in reverse order: steel string (October 2006), classical (February 2007), and finally the archtop. So by the time I got to Easton in October of 2007 I was rarin' to go!

The class was supposed to be 9 days, but, because we asked for a couple special things, we were running out of time. So we asked for an additional day and fortunately Frank was able to accommodate us. From my perspective, I learned more about building guitars during the archtop class than I did in any of the other classes. Nearly everything was on the list to be built except the fingerboard. The next time I build a guitar I will probably tackle the fingerboard. And my next archtop will probably see me learning to press a back (no, not a laminated back but a pressed back... solid wood steamed then bent to shape over a form).

In any case, I broke the archtop class pics & info into 3 pages, not because these are logical break-points, but because I wanted to limit the load on computer RAM needed to view the pages. There are a lot of pics, so if everything is on one page it will take more memory than some computers have. Click Next below to go to the first page, or choose the page you want.