Andrew Lines answers your questions.

How handmade is ‘handmade?’

This is a subject of debate among us guitarmaking types at the moment. Most of us use power tools to some extent and there seems to be no agreed definition of the term. I like to use hand tools whenever possible, however for some applications this is not practical. For example, excavating the inside of a maple archtop back from scratch with a gouge (‘digging out ye plank’ as they used to say of citterns and suchlike) can take the best part of a day; using a hand-held electric rotary chisel for initial roughing out of the first eighty percent or so greatly reduces this time without compromising the hand-carved stages. The handcarving element is important as one can hear and feel the timber as it’s thicknessed. I’m not an advocate of the school of thought that believes that a luthier imparts part of his soul into the instrument as it’s made but having a feel for the top or back plate as you carve it by hand is useful as you can gauge when to stop, easily overdone with power tools! I like to use a combination of hand and power tools; next on my shopping list is a planer thicknesser for taking care of solidbody blanks and initial squaring of archtop wedges etc.