Our shop facilities are relatively small, and located entirely in our home. Actually, we've amazed ourselves, from time to time, with the number of guitars we can be building simultaneously in the space we have, but it keeps our overhead low and we believe you'll find this is reflected in our pricing.

While we don't have photos of every stage of the building process, we've tried to capture the salient points, and will be adding photos as time permits them to be taken.

The first, and most important, step in this process, is a thorough discussion with our customer. We need to know exactly what the player wants to achieve with their new instrument, and he or she needs to have a feeling for our capabilities. The archtop guitar, possibly more than any other plectrum instrument, affords the maker wide latitude where sonic properties are concerned, so guidance from our customer becomes indispensable.

The actual construction of the guitar begins with selection of the wood. At Moll Custom Instruments we select from only the finest grades of spruce, maple, and ebony. Spruces and maples are chosen for a good strength to weight ratio, grain texture, and figure. Ebony is chosen on the basis of density, and depth of color. In all cases, the most premium woods available are combined to produce the best possible sound characteristics for the particular instrument ordered. We are fortunate to have as our main supplier, one who has, for many years, primarily supplied the professional instrument making world with some of it's most exquisite maples and spruces.

Once the "sets" of wood are chosen, tops and backs are center joined and marked for size, model, and customer, and the bottom surfaces are milled dead flat. This is a time consuming, but very important, step. It ensures that from the gluing surface up, all cuts are indexed from a straight plane. When the plate is glued in place, it will be under no tension whatsoever.

All rib material is put through the thickness sander and reduced to 2, to 2.5 millimeters, and is then ready to be bent into the appropriate forms. Our neck and tail blocks, stiffeners and kerfing are made from spruce for its combination of strength and lightness.

Final arching of the plates is done individually, and varies according to the customer's order, and the properties of those particular pieces of wood. The same is true of the final graduating and tuning. Though we now use a duplicating carver to rough out the basic shape, no method of template carving or machining can produce the kind of control over the response of a finished plate, like the combination of hand carving and tap tuning.

Our necks begin life as 1" thick, slab cut boards of flamed hard maple. We start with slab cuts, so that when the individual pieces are thicknessed, profiled, turned upright, and glued into "blanks", the grain fiber runs quarter to the plane of the neck. This, along with the two black strips between the segments, ensures a stable platform upon which the rest of the neck is built.

My wife Denise, has been an integral part of this business from it's inception but, several years ago, she decided she actually wanted to build so, with just a bit of trepidation I began to "walk her through it", thinking this too might pass... As time went on, and each part of the process was completed, we both became aware that her "project" guitar was turning out great. (really ticks me off, it took me 23 years to get to this point!) Her first, became the prototype for our "CLASSIC", and when Dr. Tom Van Hoose invited us to join him at the Arlington guitar show, it sold within the first hour we were there. Denise has been very gracious about this, and only reminds me of it about six or eight times a day.

Our scalloped bracing system allows for greater response due to limited, and controlled damping. The top is free to vibrate more, by it's ability to support more weight with less mass, much like the physics at work in a suspension bridge.

The binding we use is a very stable ABS. plastic, that will not shrink, separate, or crack over time, and is custom laminated into sheets for us in increments of ten thousandths of an inch. We cut those sheets into 3/16" and 1/4” strips, and assemble the different combinations that create our variety of binding patterns.

Once the instrument has been carved, bound, and fully assembled, the finishing process gets under way. A great finish depends on surface preparation, so the entire guitar is carefully and meticulously sanded. This part of the process can take two or three days, and culminates with 220 grit sandpaper. Just like plating metal, the new and shiny finish won't cover tiny imperfections... It will only make them even more noticeable, so we make the surface as perfect as we can before the spraying begins.

A finishing note -

Though all of the following application techniques we discusss still apply, we're now using a new acryllic lacquer that out performs Nitrocellulose on several levels. I hope to have a separate finishing discussion page up at some point soon.

Many fine builders such as Kevin Ryan, Jim Olson, and Rick Turner have turned to these more modern finishes for a variety of very valid reasons, and though I used to be somewhat of a "Nitro-nazi", I too have finally come to regard these new products as superior to nitro in many ways. Nitro will still be available however, for those who prefer it.

Our finishing schedule is similar to many that we have discussed with our colleagues... Spray a few coats and sand... spray a few coats and sand... How many coats between sanding, at what stage do you apply the color, number of clear coats, etc., seem to be the few major differences between techniques. We do a few things, however, that we feel make for a superior final product. First, we seal the bare wood thoroughly with two to three coats of nitrocellulose before applying any color. The undulating movement of figure in wood depends upon light passing through the finish, "bouncing" off the wood, and refracting back through the finish again. Whenever a stain is applied directly to the wood, as is sometimes done, it seizes the flame by depositing microscopic particles of coloring matter in the wood fiber, and trapping some of those rays of light. The result is a seized figure, One that shows little or no movement when the piece is rotated back and forth.

After the sealing coats are applied, the entire instrument is sanded smooth once more, and is masked for tinting or bursting. Even if the guitar has been ordered as a blonde, I just can't seem to bring myself to shoot only crystal clear lacquer on a guitar. Even the blondes get, at least, a golden tint, with the binding masked so that with successive clear coats, there will still be a distinct color difference.

After the color, two coats of clear to fuse the color coats, and more sanding. In the case of a burst, these fusing coats are mixed as toners to further blend the layers of the burst, and provide a very smooth transition between the colors. All masking is removed, and the binding is further scraped for razor sharp lines.

Now we begin clear coating, spraying from four to six coats in a 24 hour period. The guitar is hung to dry for two or three days, then sanded to break the surface tension and allow out-gassing. In about a week, three or four more coats... Two days, more sanding, and so on, until we've just about "perfected" the surface. In the final stage, two coats of highly thinned and retarded lacquer are sprayed, and the guitar is hung for a month to fully cure. We help to cure the finish a bit better by gently warming the lacquer room to 80 degrees or so during this phase. The instruments are finally sanded through three grit levels of automotive papers ending with 2000, and polished through three levels of compound ending with a glaze that also contains a UV protectant. The entire finishing process takes about as much time and labor as all of the rest of the building stages put together, but the result is, as we have said, "As beautiful to behold as it is to be played." At least that's what our customers tell us.

Fretting and final setup is done in pretty much the usual manner, except that we feel we pay more than usual attention to the details, like seating the frets firmly and rounding the ends for a more comfortable feel... Leveling and re-crowning the frets, and rounding each fret end, which is something we don't always see on other guitars... Dressing the nut slots to the closest tolerance possible, and adjusting the action to be swift, articulate, and properly intonated.

All these details combine to produce, we're told, one of the best guitars around. Sure, we're proud of them, but we let our customers be the final judge. If anything relating to our workmanship is found to be below our customer's expectations, we'll replace, re-build, or repair the problem until those expectations are met or exceeded. Most of our customers tell us, however, that their new Moll performs well beyond their expectations, and for us, that's what it's all about