Viola! Alain Bieber are you lurking?

[Stephen Faulk]

Checking in on old friends, Alain are you present? I would like to talk Bouchet with you.

And hello to other old pals. Yeah....

[Bill Raymond]

Hey Stephen, good to see you back.

[Bryan Bear]

Two names I've not seen in a while in one post. . . Hello Stephen, hope all is well!

[Stephen Faulk]

Hey guys! I sent Alain a PM, he might drop by. I have his private email, but I thought some others might be interested in questions I have for him.

[Mark Swanson]

Hey, thanks for stopping by!

[Jason Rodgers]

Ha! Couldn't stay away!

Haven't seen Alain here for a while; couple years, maybe.

[Stephen Faulk]

The last time he checked in was 2013, but I've been in private contact with him since then. If he does not pop up I'll send him an email.

[Bill Raymond]

Do send Alain an email, Stephen, and ask him to check in. I'd like to see the Bouchet discussion in public.

[Chuck Tweedy]

I'll be watching as well.

[Alain Bieber]

Thanks, specially to Stephen, who make me aware of a kind of "big sleep of mine", at MIMF level, and that was not very kind for the good friends I have in that very helpful and cosy forum.
First I apologize. I should be more in the "digital world" than I am. My defense is my very modest potential in front of any computer. Maybe also a rising level of knowledge of all the pitfalls you should avoid on the net. And my sudden turn to my second hobby, who turned as a "first one" in those last months, not original I fear.. painting... (at its most modest level, needless to say). Also my age but I think I am not yet Alzheimer, and I hope I will stay a little while like that.

And I maintain my interest for guitar related topics and this good atmosphere I felt in the MIMF club.

OK Stephen, what is the question?
Alain

[Stephen Faulk]

Alain,

Very good to hear from you.

I'm going to a guitar or maybe a few guitars with a Bouchet bar. It is the one area of th e20th century classical bracing I have not worked with yet and I thought it might be interesting to see what happens. I remember you talking about the Bouchet notebook in the past and thought you can help with a few questions.

I looked a at plan online and it shows his fan brace with a full triangular section on that plan. Did he mention anything about that in his notebook? ( the notebook is in French and I don't read enough French or have the book to parse through with a dictionary)

Do you think that triangular section is typical of most of his guitars or only a few? Is the triangular section critical to the way the horizontal bar and fans work together?

I also see on this plan that the bar is let over the fans and being triangular in section makes it easier to fit the bar over the fans very tightly. I'm inclined to do the same thing. It seems like this design woks on the principle of gaining cross grain stiffness via a major cross bar, but fans also support other areas of the top.

Any thoughts on this subject?

Stephen

[Bill Raymond]

Stephen, I would defer to Alain on this question, of course, but I took a quick look at Bouchet's cahier and it does clearly show a triangular cross-section; the accompanying text states that the sides are trimmed with a chisel to form a triangular shape. He also has drawn a small block with an one side cut at an angle wrapped with sandpaper used to perfect the triangular shape. The editor's notes clarify Bouchet's notes by noting that the sandpaper is only used against the sides of the braces. Perhaps Alain can further comment on whether or not Bouchet deviated from this triangular cross-section. I'm not sure if it's of any value, but FWIW, Courtnall's book shows the Bouchet fan bracing as having vertical sides with a gently rounded top. Since Bouchet based his bracing on Torres, it seems more likely that the triangular cross-section was typical (but, again, Alain is more expert certainly than I). I'm also convinced by your mention that it would make it easier to fit the cross brace over the fans were they triangular rather than rounded.

[Alain Bieber]

The most interesting document I know about the structural evolution of the set of guitars made by R.B. is the work of Dominique Field. It is a rather short paper but from a very well informed author. Field shared a lot during a large period with R.B. who considered him as his "fils spirituel". The paper has been published in French in the report on the "Journée Robert Bouchet' organized by Joel Dugot in Paris the first of April 2006. It is on the web.

The transverse bar added to his guitars during the year 56 (or 57) was the most important change he brought to his starting designs, a dozen years before. The starting R.B. designs were close to Torres and Ramirez I. It is also well known he was intensely watching Julio Gomez Ramirez in his little shop of Montmartre. Julio had been a worker of Ramirez I until 1912, then he became the only guy of the Madrid school building excellent classical instruments in Paris.
But after several years of work along such lines, R. B. was not entirely pleased by such first designs, because he found their emissions generally "a bit too much explosive". For the highs he thougt he could also improve them by adding some kind of transverse bracing. Maybe he saw in some Hausers the flat reinforcement of this very successfull Master, but he disliked the idea to reduce the thicknesses of the fan braces and did not follow Hauser. All this from the Field sorce. It is also reported he saw a so called "soul bar" under the bridge of a romantic guiar he was admiring and repairing (possibly a Lacote, but I personally think it was an other romantic builder since the famous Lacote additional transverse bar is not located under the bridge).

Once decided on the adoption of the soul bar, he also suppressed the closing bars in all his guitars.

The profile of the soul bar seems to vary from triangular to gabled. Even a few ones look rather rectangular/ rounded on the photos.

He built some guitars, not a lot, with a five bars fan. He returned to his basic seven bars fans soon.

He buit only ONE classical guitar with a top in WRC, saying to Field that this wood was "not for him". NOT happy at all.

[Bill Raymond]

I believe this may be the paper Alain mentioned: http://www.citedelamusique.fr/pdf/insti ... /field.pdf

[Clay Schaeffer]

Stephen, Alain, Chuck, and Bill,
Good to see Y'all posting to the forum again. I always look forward to your informative and knowledgeable posts. It would be nice to see some more of the "regulars" return to the forum again.

[Randy Roberts]

Alain,
Welcome back home!
I too have been missing your presence and insights.
And I too have been painting...unfortunately it has been the kitchen and the bathroom. <g>

[Stephen Faulk]

Alain,

Thank you for the reply. I'll be back soon, but I wanted to let you know how good it is to be in touch! I'll research the Journee Rober Bouchet of Dugot. And post a picture of Bouchet related investigation I'm doing.

~S

As for you Chuck, don't even try to do your 'Worm Trick' this year......April Fools may be around the corner, but we are wise to you.

[Stephen Faulk]

One of the reasons I got interested in Bouchet is that I have a guitar I made 6 or 8 weeks ago that did not have the cross grain stiffness I anticipated. The guitar sounds wonderful, but has a slack feeling ....I think it can give more.

I began to think about doing a Bouchet bar in it for kicks to see what would happen, I had time to take the back off a fit a Bouchet bar. The guitar is a rosewood flamenco guitar with a cedar top. A deep-ish body for a flamenco and the scale os 660. It has nice qualities, good clear trebles ad nice feel under the head, but a more cross grain floppiness than I care for. That makes a flamenco guitar lose something.

It may no longer be flamenco sounding of feeling after tighening the cross grain so much, but I'm not stuck on this for this one. the bar did not add much weight, it dials in at 10 grams, well that is a lot, but it gave a lot of stiffness.

I decided to try it on this guitar and If I sense it might be a way to go I'll build a Bouchet copy with the five fans and cross bar. It seems like an old esoteric idea today but I've noticed some interest in Bouchet's ideas lately by other makers. I'm just looking at it as a learning experience, I've never worked with that idea.

[Stephen Faulk]

Here it is! In all its extemporaneous glory. This guitar was built for myself to play, so rebuilding it until I get a lesson out of it makes sense.

[Jason Rodgers]

Good stuff. We haven't seen this kind of thing around here for a bit.

So, were there any other incremental through-the-soundhole mods you did before yanking the back? Like, were those wee cutoffs between 1-2 and 6-7 added after the box was closed?

In the bigger scheme of adding cross-grain stiffness, what's the big difference between the single, tall Bouchet bar and a flat patch under the bridge? I bet you could even make them the same weight. Now 5 fans plus the Bouchet, on the other hand, would be lighter, for sure.