Making an archtop for a guitar - or for that matter, any other similar stringed instrument - usually entails a lot of carving and shaping. Wasteful and hard work! In this video, I outline the technique I use to heat bend tops for my guitars from thin (~4mm) thick boards, be that spruce, maple, mahogany or whatever. Making the jig takes a bit of time, but once made, it's relatively much quicker and simpler to produce archtops by this method than carving. I would mention that I based this method on a paper by Helen Michetschläger, a viola maker, that you can find on the web titled "Steam-bending fronts – a practical demonstration".

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