Nagoya Suzuki Acoustic Guitars: #7 dobro front2

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

#7 dobro front2

Amazing what a luthier can do with a Suzuki. A Lap Slide!!

1 comment:

David Paul said...: I had to convert this one to a Lap
Slide as the neck has a twist, and 3 of the frets were mashed into
the fingerboard. BUT, everyone that hears it thinks it sound better
than a Dobro?
Go figure?
I own and operate the GUitar Hospital in Melbourne, Australia, and
found you whilst looking for some more information on this little
beauty.; September 22, 2009 at 6:13 PM

Older Nagoya Suzuki acoustics...

Many people have posed this question to me about their older Nagoya Suzuki...Am I supposed to have steel strings or nylon strings on this guitar?

On some of the older models: the #6,7,9,12, and 18, the answer is not immediately obvious, since all these models have slotted headstocks like a classical, and the saddle in the bridge is like a classical...not angled (compensated) like an acoustic steel-string. But they have truss rods like an acoustic.

The answer is: steel!

I have an old Suzuki brochure that describes these guitars and it says they were steel stringed-guitars. Although some people put nylon strings on them, they were made for steel. So don't be afraid to put steel strings on them.

A couple of observations: I took apart a #18 (lost pictures when hard-drive crashed)...removed the top and found out it was ladder-braced, and I assume so are the other older models mentioned. Ladder bracing was an old way of internal bracing steel-string guitars. All these too are laminate tops.
Also, the fret-board on the #18 was flat, not radiused like most other steel strings (same with the other models I'm assuming).
The rosette was faux-MOP or nylon, which also goes with an acoustic model.
The headstock rollers are thinner than classical rollers.

I changed the bracing to a fan-braced top and put in tone bars ala Overholtzer book on classical guitar-making.

I didn't have any purling so I replaced the top binding with pieces of straight inlay pieces and glued them in.

The end result was nice and jangly. I liked it, but being new to the setup work I didn't put in enough relief so the strings buzzed a bit, though the saddle was very high and action was low.