Mine ended up being much more experimental. Almost all the wood came from my town, used White Pine for the top, spalted Beech from the back and sides, Rock Maple for the neck, Beech for the fretboard, Hop Hornbeam for the bindings, and a Norway MNaple veneer on the head.
My daughters has a top of Sitka Spruce and back and sides with Spalted Norway Maple.
Experimented with heating the top wood and the White Pine top was baked for 270 minutes in a convection oven with a large tray of water at 200 degrees. The density didn't change but the longitudinal stiffness increased almost 25%.
I also added a system to add different side mass weights to the White Pine guitar based off work described in Gores book.
More about the guitars here: https://learnmaketeachshare.org/instrum ... itars.html
This process took over four years and after a year I felt a great need to complete an instrument quickly so over two weeks I made up designed and built a hybrid guitar/mandolin/dulcimer that I call a Dinalin. It has a push-down bridge and is tuned to an open D chord ( D A D F# ).
Recent new projects have been repair and improvement on a friends 1985 Martin HD-28 (EVO Gold frets, fixed a crack and large scratches from a dogs claws, re-glued the binding).
There was a strange puzzle, the actual taper in the HD-28 bridge pins holes is very slight -- less than the normal tapers of 5 or 3 degrees. I made some pins with wood from a Rose bush (very hard and dense with super tiny pores) that fit well. These replaced the original pins it came with -- which made no sense for the guitar, their tapers didn't match and they were slotted. The bridge is designed for solid pins.
Here's what the new pins look like. They're actually quite light, only 3.1 grams total. I like how they came out and the tool for removing them works well!
