players are each discovering their incredible tone and playability.
A big part of the secret to John’s amazing guitars is the top. The story began ten
years ago as John started making classical
guitars with a “sandwich”
top featuring the high-tech
aerospace material, “Nomex,”
originally developed by
German classical guitar
builders Gernot Wagner and
Matthias Dammann. Nomex
is a super-lightweight, flexible
fiber that when sandwiched
between two solid materials
such as wood, results in a
strong and lightweight laminate. Commonly used in the
aircraft industry and applications where its heat resistant
characteristics are valued
– firefighters and racecar drivers in particular – its resonant
properties are only now
beginning to be explored for
use with musical instruments.
Gernot Wagner was struck by
the incredible tone produced
when tapping the skin of a
friend’s homemade aircraft,
and immediately thought of
incorporating this new material into a guitar top.
to maintain a trade secret with this technology, several online communities have
recently discovered and revealed their
processes. Other builders have claimed
A John Dick classical guitar
John’s first exposure to the
sandwich top was in 1997
when a friend purchased the
first of Wagner’s guitars to
come into the United States.
Soon after, John heard classical guitarist David Russell
in concert at the Guitar
Foundations of America (GFA)
conference in St. Louis, playing a Dammann guitar. John
thought the guitar was being
amplified, but it wasn’t – it
was simply the sandwich
top technology in action. He
then decided to incorporate
this technology into his instruments, and has been building
nothing but sandwich tops since 1998.
John spent several years experimenting
and perfecting his particular recipe for
the sandwich top, and although Wagner,
Dammann and Dick tried for many years
to know the secret, and have produced
guitars using sandwich tops with varying
degrees of success. Outlined below is
John’s process, straight from one of the
originators. He has graciously agreed to
share his process exclusively with the readers of Premier Guitar.
Materials
The top is made up of two . 5 to . 55 mil-
limeter thick pieces of tonewood for the
inside and outside
of the sandwich. The
core of the sandwich
is the Nomex sheet,
with a 95 millimeter
wide piece of red-
wood running directly
down the center.
The rosette must be
placed in the outside
skin before thickness-
ing.
The Nomex can be
ordered in several
thicknesses from the
supplier, Texas Almet
( texasalmet.com).
John orders his
Nomex precut to .080
inches or 2 mm thick
– the thinnest it can
be cut. The sheet’s
original size is 4’x8’,
but John asks them
to cut it down 2’x3’
sheets for ease of
shipping and storage. The grade is 1. 8
pounds per cubic
foot with a 1/8” cell;
however, steel string
makers have found
the three pound grade
to work better for
the higher tensions
involved. It is approximately $150 per 4’x8’
sheet and can also
be purchased through
Luthier’s Mercantile if
smaller quantities are
desired.
The redwood core
piece should also
be 2 mm. John prefers the properties of
redwood over a cedar core for a cedar
top, or a spruce core for a spruce top.
However, since that is a matter of preference you may find you like other woods.
Note that the darkness of the redwood will
