| Plastic
Maccaferri Parts
Q
I have an old Maccaferri archtop guitar made of plastic,
and I'm having a hard time finding a tuning peg to replace one that
broke. Any ideas about where I can get a replacement?
Hal Davis
Smyrna, Georgia
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A
Mario Maccaferri, who teamed briefly with Henri Selmer
in 1932 to build guitars, first obtained a plastic extruding
machine during World War II. (He ran a New York City—based
company that made saxophone and clarinet reeds, and he needed
a material to substitute for cane, which was hard to come
by during the war.) He soon began applying the new technology
to other products. Maccaferri's first major success was the
plastic clothespin, soon followed by fishing lures, wall tiles,
clothes hangers, and, in 1949, the plastic ukulele. A huge
success, thanks to Arthur Godfrey playing it on his popular
TV show, the uke sounded far better than expected, and Maccaferri
began making plastic guitars: the archtop cutaway G-40, the
flattop cutaway G-30 (both inspired in part by the guitar
he designed for Selmer), and a variety of flattops with names
like the Romancer, the Showtime, and the Islander.
Which brings us to your problem. Since Maccaferri had his
own plastics factory, he designed and made tuning machines
specifically for his instruments. When the G-40 and G-30 failed
to sell, he ceased their production in the late 1950s, and
original parts for them are almost impossible to find today.
Your best bet is to look for a broken Showtime or Romancer
(which show up from time to time on auction sites like Ebay),
buy one, and recycle the pegs.
—Michael John Simmons
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A plastic Maccaferri guitar. |
Good
Vibrations
Q
If you were to set up a neutral vibration in an unstrung
guitar—say, by drawing a violin bow across the saddle—would
the guitar produce a particular note? My Epiphone resonator seems
to die away into a low Bb hum when I'm tuning it, even when I mute
the five strings I'm not tuning. If the answer is yes, is this a
tone quality that luthiers purposely build into the guitar, and
how do they control it?
Ron Driedger
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
A
When you play a guitar by plucking or strumming it with your
fingers, you excite the soundbox with energy in the form of intermittent,
quickly fading impulses. The resonances aren't allowed to build
up and really honk, like they do when the energy source is continuous.
Bowing the saddle would drive a guitar to vibrate and slowly build
up a loud, distinctive note—its "combined air/wood
resonance frequency." This also happens sometimes when a guitar
maker blows the guitar off with compressed air before taking it
into the spray booth. When the blast of air hits the soundhole at
a certain angle, the guitar starts to howl a characteristic note
and shake like it's about to explode.
You may have excited the combined air/wood resonator main resonance
frequency on your Epiphone, causing it to hum back at you in Bb.
If the resonator was made a different way, it would likely hum at
some other frequency. Do luthiers try to control that? I don't know
many that do, or many that even know about this particular phenomenon.
But those who do can use it as a benchmark during their building,
not for fine-tuning but as a way to place the soundbox in the ballpark
where most good-sounding guitars can be found.
Most mid-sized steel-string acoustic guitars will chime that air/wood
resonance "peak" (what acoustician Tim White calls the
"rum-jug" resonance of the guitar) at a pitch near G.
Hum a G note loudly across the soundhole, and your good Martin will
most likely hum back in G just perceptibly. If the guitar you're
building hums back at some higher note, like A, the walls are too
stiff for the air volume of the soundbox, and the guitar is going
to sound tight and restricted, rather than open and compliant. Some
top or back scraping (or brace reduction) can loosen the plates
and "realign" them closer to a more favorable relationship
to the guitar's size and closer to that of a "good Martin."
If the rum-jug note of the soundbox is down to, say, F, the walls
may be too thin and flexible and the soundbox too large: a thuddy
guitar with weak trebles is the likely result. Not much can be done
to remedy this second situation, except to take notes and avoid
that fatal combination in the future.
—William Cumpiano
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Silk
Wraps
Q
In the What They Play sidebar to David Hamburger's interview
with Martin Simpson ("Chasing the Serpent's Tail," March),
it says that Simpson uses silk wraps on his first three fingers.
What are silk wraps?
Gary Hoiseth
Wayzata, Minnesota
A
"Silk wraps" is a generic term for fingernails
reinforced with a combination of cloth and glue. Both real silk
and synthetic cloths can be used; the latter tend to be stronger.
The application of the wraps is similar to working with fiberglass
and resin—the cloth is soaked with glue, creating
a matrix that resists breaking or tearing. Most nail salons apply
them, but silk wrap kits are also available in drugstores. In a
pinch, it's also possible to achieve good results by using tissue
or a bit of paper from a tea bag in combination with superglue.
Since everybody's nails are slightly different, you'll probably
need to experiment in order to achieve the best results. There's
also some good advice about nails at www.nail-technician.com.
—Teja Gerken
Excerpted from
Acoustic Guitar magazine,
June
2004, No. 138.
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