The process to select, cut, carve, shape, sand and finish a K2 guitar takes 4-6 months. The following pictures and text walk you through an overview of the process to build a K2 guitar. Click on thumbnails for a bigger image.
1. The first step is to select the back, side and top woods for your guitar. The most popular and proven woods for back and sides are: Indian Rosewood and Mahogany. There are many more beautiful woods to choose from, such as Ziricote, Koa, Walnut, and Machiche. These woods are more figured and typically require more time to work with. The tone wood for the guitar top is typically made of spruce, and there are many types to choose from: sitka, engleman, adirondack, and bearclaw. We help guide your choice, based on the type of sound and look that you desire. Once the back, sides and top woods are chosen, the building process begins by thicknessing the wood to size. This is done using a safe-t-planer and a thickness sander.
2. The sides are then placed on a bending form and shaped one side at a time. After bending, the sides are placed in a form to maintain shape and provide support.
3. Next, the end block and heel block are glued in place, which secures the shape. The front and back sides are then radiused to 15 feet on the back and 30 feet on the front side. The pictures to the left show the radius dish and sides being radiused in the dish.
4. Once the sides are radiused, kerfing is installed around the top and back perimeters to provide additional support. We use titebond and good old-fashioned clothes pins to hold the kerfing in place until it dries.
5. The decorative end wedge is then carefully installed at the bottom of the guitar. The end wedge provides a nice transition from the top to the back, with smooth linkage to the side bindings and perfling accents.
6. Once the back is joined and sanded to the proper thickness, it is braced with a back strip and hand-carved mahogany braces. The back is then precisely fit and glued to the sides of the guitar. The pictures show the back before and after gluing to the sides.
7. The top is then joined together but it is not yet thicknessed to final size, as the next step in the process is to inlay the decorative rosette. The rosette is handmade out of the same species of wood as the back and sides. The pictures show routing out the top to inlay the rosette and decorative perfling strips that border the inside and outside of the rosette. The rosette is glued into place with a go-bar deck. The end result is beautiful!!
8. Once the rosette is complete, the top is thicknessed and the sound hole is cut out. Voicing the top is a very involved and critical process, as each brace is sized, carved, and sanded to the individual tonal characteristics of the top. The photo to the right shows the braces being glued into place with the go-bar clamping deck, and photo to the right shows the top after it has been voiced. The top is then carefully fit and glued to the guitar sides in the same manner as the back.
9. The top and back binding channels are then routed out. The binding is placed in the channel and glued, taped, and wrapped with twill-tape (aka hog-tied) into place to ensure that the bindings and perfling have a seamless fit to the back, sides, and top.
10. The neck is then rough cut to size, with a 15- degree headstock angle and a slot routed out for the two-way adjustable truss rod. The neck is then ready to be fit to the body of the guitar. We use a mortis and tenon joint and bolt on the neck. The pictures show the tenon on the end of the neck and the mortis cut into the body of the guitar. Special care is taken to ensure that the neck joint is a tight fit and the neck angle is at the proper angle to ensure optimal string height (also know as the guitars ‘Action’).
11. Once the mortis and tenon are cut, the neck is carved to the desired size and shape. The picture shows a carved 5-piece mahogany neck, with black fiber bordering a strip of beach wood. The 5-piece neck is decorative and provides additional stiffness and strength to help counter-balance the forward pull on the neck under string tension. The ebony fret board is then slotted for future fret wire installation, and glued to the neck. After gluing, the fret board is radiused to improve playability and installation of the fret wire.
12. The K2 mother-of-pearl logo is now inlayed into the ebony headstock. The shape of the headstock can be selected by the customer from a variety of templates.
13. At this point, the fret wire is installed in the fret board. Most K2 guitars have bound fret boards that dress up the guitar and cover the fret ends. The following pictures show a bound fret board just before it was glued to the neck and after it was installed and inlayed with mother of peal fret markers.
14. The final step, and some say the hardest, is sanding and finishing the guitar. Each K2 guitar goes through a process of filling the open pores on the back, sides and neck. Then multiple coats of polyurethane are applied with sanding and leveling in between each coat. After the final coat, the entire guitar is buffed and hand-polished.
