I built the first Dreadnautilus ancestor (a rather homely but charming little guitar affectionately known by its owner as "The Fred"), in the early 1990s, for a friend who was planning several months of traveling. He wanted a guitar that he could easily carry with him, but that had a full guitar sound. It also needed to be cheap. The project turned out to be a great success, and he encouraged me to refine the idea.
I was intrigued by the challenge of coming up with a unique travel guitar that didn't sacrifice sound and play-ability to be more portable. The spiraling shape found in the cross-section of a nautilus shell inspired the Dreadnautilus design (and name!); it provided an ample resonating chamber in a compact body outline. It also provided a natural "cutaway", allowing free access to the 19th fret on the neck. I came up with a way of mounting the tuners on the body of the instrument, below the bridge. This meant no peghead at the top of the neck, so the overall length was short enough to fit in an airline overhead storage compartment. Although "headless" solid-body electric instruments had been around for a while, it hadn't been done much on a completely acoustic guitar.
My intention was to use mostly salvaged and/or local woods in the Dreadnautilus; I mined backyard redwood stumps for top wood, and located beautiful, local California walnut for backs, sides and necks. I made use of black acacia wood from an old Santa Cruz street tree for fingerboards. I kept the details simple; no purfling or binding, no inlay other than simple fretboard position markers.
The sound of the Dreadnautilus guitar is/was unique: the small sound-hole helped tune the resonating chamber to amplify the low notes on the bass "E" string. The low end sound is rich and warm. Conversely, because the instrument has a "floating" bridge, like on a banjo, or arch-top guitar, the treble strings have a bright, slightly "banjo-ey" quality. On the early versions this resulted in the instrument having two rather different voices for the bass and treble ranges. Modifications of the top bracing in subsequent batches unified these sounds, combining pleasing aspects of both.
I made 13 of these over a couple of years; the last one using salvaged Big Leaf maple instead of walnut. I made them in batches of several at a time, which allowed both for more efficient production as well as an opportunity to compare and refine details. For instance, I was able to make significant improvements in the bracing of the sound-board by working on 4 tops at once, adding and removing bracing material and comparing stiffness and tap-tone between tops.
Initially, the early Dreadnautili cost $500., pretty extraordinary for a handmade guitar. I kept trying to cut corners to make them inexpensive, and finally realized that what I really wanted to do was make them better. As I improved the instrument, batch by batch, I saw my income heading toward the low side of 3 bucks an hour. As the Dreadnautilus continued to evolve and improve, I realized I had to increase the price. My original assumption had been that by keeping the design simple and building in batches, I could keep the cost down. I found that while this was true to some extent, I wasn't making anywhere near a living wage, and my impulse was always to try to improve the instrument, instead of streamlining production. Ultimately I realized that producing the same instrument over and over was not what I wanted to do. By the time I built #13, the last one, I was charging $2,000., which might seem like too much for a simple travel guitar, but it was not proving to be enough to make me want to keep producing them. I suspect even if I'd made adequate money at it, I would have moved on anyway. Even very small scale mass production like that just isn't what I'm built to do!
So, there are 13 of these great little guitars out in the world. I learned a lot about building, bracing and production making them, knowledge that I can apply to whatever instruments I choose to build.
The Dreadnautilus
Model DN-A
circa 1995
I built the first Dreadnautilus ancestor (a rather homely but charming little guitar affectionately known by its owner as "The Fred"), in the early 1990s, for a friend who was planning several months of traveling. He wanted a guitar that he could easily carry with him, but that had a full guitar sound. It also needed to be cheap. The project turned out to be a great success, and he encouraged me to refine the idea.
I was intrigued by the challenge of coming up with a unique travel guitar that didn't sacrifice sound and play-ability to be more portable. The spiraling shape found in the cross-section of a nautilus shell inspired the Dreadnautilus design (and name!); it provided an ample resonating chamber in a compact body outline. It also provided a natural "cutaway", allowing free access to the 19th fret on the neck. I came up with a way of mounting the tuners on the body of the instrument, below the bridge. This meant no peghead at the top of the neck, so the overall length was short enough to fit in an airline overhead storage compartment. Although "headless" solid-body electric instruments had been around for a while, it hadn't been done much on a completely acoustic guitar.
My intention was to use mostly salvaged and/or local woods in the Dreadnautilus; I mined backyard redwood stumps for top wood, and located beautiful, local California walnut for backs, sides and necks. I made use of black acacia wood from an old Santa Cruz street tree for fingerboards. I kept the details simple; no purfling or binding, no inlay other than simple fretboard position markers.
The sound of the Dreadnautilus guitar is/was unique: the small sound-hole helped tune the resonating chamber to amplify the low notes on the bass "E" string. The low end sound is rich and warm. Conversely, because the instrument has a "floating" bridge, like on a banjo, or arch-top guitar, the treble strings have a bright, slightly "banjo-ey" quality. On the early versions this resulted in the instrument having two rather different voices for the bass and treble ranges. Modifications of the top bracing in subsequent batches unified these sounds, combining pleasing aspects of both.
I made 13 of these over a couple of years; the last one using salvaged Big Leaf maple instead of walnut. I made them in batches of several at a time, which allowed both for more efficient production as well as an opportunity to compare and refine details. For instance, I was able to make significant improvements in the bracing of the sound-board by working on 4 tops at once, adding and removing bracing material and comparing stiffness and tap-tone between tops.
Initially, the early Dreadnautili cost $500., pretty extraordinary for a handmade guitar. I kept trying to cut corners to make them inexpensive, and finally realized that what I really wanted to do was make them better. As I improved the instrument, batch by batch, I saw my income heading toward the low side of 3 bucks an hour. As the Dreadnautilus continued to evolve and improve, I realized I had to increase the price. My original assumption had been that by keeping the design simple and building in batches, I could keep the cost down. I found that while this was true to some extent, I wasn't making anywhere near a living wage, and my impulse was always to try to improve the instrument, instead of streamlining production. Ultimately I realized that producing the same instrument over and over was not what I wanted to do. By the time I built #13, the last one, I was charging $2,000., which might seem like too much for a simple travel guitar, but it was not proving to be enough to make me want to keep producing them. I suspect even if I'd made adequate money at it, I would have moved on anyway. Even very small scale mass production like that just isn't what I'm built to do!
So, there are 13 of these great little guitars out in the world. I learned a lot about building, bracing and production making them, knowledge that I can apply to whatever instruments I choose to build.