Bending Made Easy The Beginner's Guide to Optimal Guitar Side Thickness

I bend sides on a hot pipe. For guitars I bought a 6" long piece of 3" diameter pipe and put a bolt and two nuts in one side. I mount the bolt ... There are two basic approaches to bending the sides of a guitar. The traditional approach is "hot pipe" bending. In this method, the sides are bent by hand ... You can see a couple of nasty cracks along the shoulder. They begun at the preamp cutout and because of the tension on that area of bent wood, they easily ... I would say that .080" to .085" would be a general average. Some wood may go down to about .065" to .070" again depending. I think thicknessing down to 2 mm as a nominal target thickness has been established primarilly to enable the ribs to be adequately bent, thick ... All of the wood for this guitar will be cut from the same billet, except the soundboard and bridge. ... The thin sides are bent over a home-made bending iron, a ... I have a Martin 2008 golden era D-18 and those sides measure .070". Unless you are doing a cutaway, .080" should be fine for bending. I use a ... This is the beginning step for this build. I've chosen the set of Brazilian Rosewood that everyone seemed to love so its time to bend the sides. Here you can ... Backs between 0.085"-0.120", sides 0.70-0.085". Depends on the type of wood and size of the instrument. Some luthiers do go thinner but they are ... I thin sides to at least 0.085" (well, 2.0 to 2.2mm, really), thinner for tighter bends (down to .070 or so). Thicker also means quite a bit of ...