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For All Skill Levels
All Types Of Guitars
New Builds Or Repair
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Learn Guitar Humidity Fundamentals & Advanced Applications
With This Highly Detailed Online Video Course For Guitar Builders
Course Sample Video
Course Outline
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Humidity Fundamentals
Tom helps you establish a solid foundational understanding of the core concepts and essential terminology of humidity, moisture content, wood, and more in this section. It begins with a look at the wood’s cell structure, how it reacts to water, and why it is so vital to luthiers. Then he shares the humidity/moisture content formula he uses and practical steps to help you protect your guitars during construction and long after they have left your workshop.
Humidity Measurement & Tools
This section focuses on the best practices for measuring and correctly managing the environment of your workshop and the wood itself. Tom explains each tool he uses (and which NOT to use) for humidification and de-humidification to achieve a stable environment to build your guitars with peace of mind and great results.
Wood Storage
In this section, Tom shows his methods to help you store and care for your valuable tonewoods to encourage proper and even drying while minimizing potential issues as they move through the different phases of your guitar construction process.
Workshop Layout
Next, Tom demonstrates and explains his strategy for the layout of the workshop from a humidification and dehumidification perspective. He shares what does NOT work well and his best practices and reasoning behind them for minimizing uneven relative humidity in your workspace and maximizing the stability of your woods.
Wood Movement & Cuts
In this section, Tom builds upon previous sections with a closer look at how wood moves and responds to moisture based on how it was cut, grain direction, shape, and other variables. This understanding is a crucial component of the advanced applications he will demonstrate and explain in the next section.
Advanced Applications
In this final section, Tom shares advanced applications and techniques built upon the deeper understanding of how wood responds to water from earlier lessons. These are the same techniques that Tom used to refine and improve his guitars. He demonstrates each one and thoroughly explains the logic and strategy behind each one so you can use them and discover even more of your own to improve your guitars as well.
In this course, you’ll learn the importance of relative humidity and how to control it in your workshop to stabilize and protect your guitars during construction and after they leave your shop. This fundamental level of understanding is vital to all guitar makers. In this course, we go much, much deeper to help you gain a deeper and more intuitive understanding of the wood we use for guitar making, how it reacts to and is affected by water, how we can use that to build better, and more stable guitars. We start with the essential fundamental concepts and even explore the wood cell structure itself, the different kinds of water it contains, and how they change the wood when removed. Then we explore the subtleties of how the wood behaves and moves relative to its cut, shape, grain direction, and more. Next, we continue building upon this understanding and explore more advanced applications of this understanding that have helped me improve my guitars and that I believe will enrich your guitar building process and bring your guitars to a higher level of quality and stability.
13 Videos
Humidity Fundamentals & Advanced Applications
Is Included With A Luthier’s EDGE Membership
I just finished your humidity course. Nice job! It was very informative and I gained some new insights into how to measure, adjust, and control the humidity in my shop and why to adjust my glue joints.
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