Theunis Fick Guitars

Inspired by the work of Michael Greenfield , I've incorporated a support plate based his "Tone Halo."

The plate is made of Paulownia and carbon fibre. It provides greater stiffness across the grain of the back plate than it does along the grain, and its shape keeps it pliable in torsion. The bracing system is designed with a focus on the tuning of the fundamental resonance of the back plate. The stiffness of the plate is adjusted via the planing of the diagonal braces, and the resonance fine-tuned by the addition of small amounts of mass, if necessary.

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Fretboard purfling, tied into the rosette and body purfling.⁣

Logo cutting. A Dremel with an empty dust blower collet does a good job of clearing the dust; respirator required.⁣

Locating the headstock overlay.⁣

Laying out the cut lines for the transitional piece between the rosette and fretboard purfling. Best get this right.⁣

Finally decided to take the plunge into Trevor Gore's bolt-on-bolt-off neck joint. A fairly scary process, but it seems to have gone smoothly.​​​​​​​​​

Establishing the initial neck fit and angle using a sanding block which matches the shoulders of the guitar. This greatly reduces the time spend flossing with sandpaper, although that is still necessary to get things dialled in.​​​​​​​​​

Sometimes life gets in the way, other times you get to stick razor blades into a guitar. Just keep moving.​​​​​​​​​

Model 3 top plate. European Spruce, carbon fibre, Wenge and black veneer.​​​​​​​​​

Wenge Model 3, sealed with Osmo and ready for the top.​​​​​​​​​

Completed Wenge back plate for a Model 3.​​​​​​​​​
The massive transverse brace and the upper bout of the plate form the final component of the neck buttress system. The transverse brace also sets the perimeter of the vibrating area of the plate.

The X-brace in the lower bout is fitted with a threaded insert at its intersection, which allows for mass to be reversibly fixed to the plate in order to modify its resonant frequency. Although I'm not familiar with the details of his system or designs, I know that Bryan Galloup () has patented a similar approach in the USA.

Adding mass is always less desirable than removing stiffness when lowering resonant frequencies, since mobility is negatively impacted by increased mass. The difficulty with relying on the removal of stiffness through brace shaving, however, is that there is no simple way to recover stiffness or raise a resonant frequency once the material has been removed.

The fixing of mass to the plate will serve as a buffer during plate tuning - a few grams of mass will be bolted to the plate during brace shaving and tuning of the coupled top and air resonances. If anything goes wrong and the back resonance drops undesirably low, the mass can be removed for a second opportunity at dialing in the coupled resonances.