Martin Lewis Carbon Fiber Archtop Guitars

[DRS]

Thread resurrection

Is Martin Lewis still building CF guitars?
I see his last FB was in 2012.

[Pukka-J]

Very interesting idea. Can't see why they could not play and sound as well as a traditional wooden guitar. Would give them a spin for sure if it were closer.

[Jim Soloway]

Very interesting idea. Can't see why they could not play and sound as well as a traditional wooden guitar. Would give them a spin for sure if it were closer.

I'm sure they could if it was done right. I did some research on using CF for necks and the problem was that doing them right is an expensive proposition. There's a significant up front tooling cost on CF parts that makes prototyping and testing a financial challenge. And once you get past that, it's hard to recoup the costs unless you can build them in significant quantities. That makes it tough for a small builder to get up and running with a quality product so ultimately it may mean that it waits for one of the larger manufacturers to get involved. Peavey now own CA so perhaps they're a candidate. I don't really see them getting into the arch top business but it will be interesting to see what they do with the technology now that they own it.

[Hammertone]

I like Ken Parker's approach to integrating CF into his archtops - he uses it mostly on the necks of his instruments.

[jads57]

It seems a lot of modern luthiers(Bass & Archtop) include CF into their necks these days. Maybe this is so they can offer thinner necks that are stable.

[GuyBoden]

http://www.tdpri.com/forum/tele-home...bon-build.html

I followed this very interesting thread on the Tele forum a number of years back, about building a carbon fiber guitar, I was going to build a CF guitar myself, but that's before I tried one and found they're very neck heavy. Good balance in a guitar is a very important factor to my classical style playing position, I want my left hand as free as possible.