Our Process

NCG Guitars starts with an itch and a slab of wood. This maybe sourced from a reputable supplier or scavenged from the street, such as a Sunday morning church pew find. Just happened to be appropriately a Sunday, nobody about. Or maybe a building site or skip.

The reputable suppliers speak for themselves, but salvaged materials need to be carefully assessed for defects and properly seasoned, before any work begins.

The body is planed, sanded and rough-sawn to shape and then trimmed with a router and template to the final footprint. Cavities and pockets are drilled and routed, even down to the removal of the majority of the body wood on a hollow body.

Hollow and semi-hollow guitars then have a top made in the same way. We often use aircraft-grade Finnish birch plywood for tops. This is very light, thin and strong and moulds to shape. We tend to use 2.5mm thick for hollow bodies, with a few braces. Some light aircraft are still made from ply. The specification is, obviously, very high. The plywood is SATco certified and meets the GL1 specification – who cares, it’s only a guitar.

F holes may need to be cut and bound, and braces fitted, before the top is carefully aligned and glued down to the body, making sure all cable runs and cavities are accessible. This is sometimes a mental challenge, as no two guitars are the same. Access ways can necessarily vary, and it’s easy to allow the seemingly familiar to draw you into irreversible wrong decisions. Then the design may need to change!

The neck pocket is routed from a template. Tops are rebated and bound with celluloid binding. Finished colour needs some consideration at the binding stage, if not already decided, as the binding colour should match or complement. Binding is planed and scraped down. Body carves are rasped and sanded to shape.

Then the fun bit of deciding on a bridge, number of pickups, controls and position. Maybe a trapeze, though this really needs deciding at an early stage if the string block is to be omitted. Perhaps a Bigsby or Mastery vibrato? Maybe string block and trapeze?

There is then a whole lot of sanding. All bare wood is sealed with shellac, and then the body and headstock sprayed with nitro-cellulose paint. Maybe two colours. Maybe 4-6 coats per colour and 6 or so coats of clear gloss. The binding needs to be scraped free of paint between coats. Leave it too long and the paint will chip along the binding line. Much drying and hanging around. Wet sanding, buffing and polishing.

Necks are fabricated on a CNC machine, for necessary exact repetition. Headstocks are cut and shaped by hand, and binding added to match the body. Neck profile is carved and sanded by hand. A mahogany neck with a rosewood board is the preferred combination. The mahogany is much lighter than maple and feels better in our opinion. The tone is not affected. See here again https://www.nottinghamcityguitars.com/dont-believe-a-word/ Necks are sealed with shellac, lightly lacquered, then most of the lacquer sanded back, to give a very smooth feel. Headstocks are painted, a decal applied, and then this is slowly encapsulated in layers of lacquer, before polishing.

Fingerboards are fretted by hand. Usually, Jescar nickel silver frets. A medium jumbo is preferred. If available, hard-to-find Evo-Gold may be used. It is very hard wearing and polishes beautifully. An unbleached bone nut is cut, fitted and polished.

Then the assembly of all the carefully chosen bits. Pickups and electrics are fitted. Control cavities are fitted with a belt & braces carbon fibre grounding plate, and the metal cover plate forms part of the whole ground circuit. Metalwork may be aged prior to fitting, depending on the desired aesthetic. This is a process involving hydrochloric acid. Don’t try it at home. Plastic parts can be artificially aged with lacquer, pigments and dyes. Pick guards are hand-cut from celluloid sheet and may be bound. Guard designs vary, depending on the bridge, pickups and set out. Weirdly the body really comes together when the knobs are fitted. We use great looking knobs from Haramis Musical Hardware. Or sometimes vintage Bakelite.

We may decide to fit a neck tilt mechanism. It’s not usually necessary, but it can help with a flat-top trapeze guitar. This is a simple little gizmo unobtrusively fitted in the neck pocket.

Bolt the neck on, some strings, a few tweaks and on to the next one.