Important notice to customers waiting on my instruments

Alaskan born Daniel Brauchli (brow klee) has been playing, designing and building musical instruments for over thirty years. Now living in Tasmania, Daniel is making musical instruments full time. These guitars, mandolins, violins, etc, combine original acoustic and visual concepts using carbon fiber and beautiful Tasmanian timbers.

	These acoustic lap steel guitars combine the full tone range of a Weissenborn with the volume and power of a resonator guitar by using carbon fiber braces. Top: Blackwood or Western Red Cedar Body: Blackwood Fingerboard: Eucalypt with Blackwood and Rosewood inlay
	My current guitars are based on the concept of a "steel string classical guitar". They play much like a nylon string but with the sustain of a steel string guitar.
	My mandolins use carbon/wood braces with a molded curved top and back. I am making them with Western Red Cedar, Blackwood and King Billy Pine tops. The instruments are sweet and loud. They are good for any style from bluegrass to classical.
	This is a gallery of some of my earlier designs. Of the 80 or so stringed instruments I have designed and built over 30 years before moving to Tasmania, these are the only ones I have photos for.
	All of my instuments are fully hand made using a technique in which the sides are shaped to fit around the the top of the instrument. This results in a perfect profile and removes the need for binding. It also allows more rounding of the edges and gives the whole instrument a sculpted feel.

Using Carbon fiber in wooden instruments

Carbon fiber is a material which is prominent in producing high quality planes, racing cars, sports equipment and just about anything where high strength-low weight composites are needed. There are two ways of using it in making musical instruments. One is to make the instrument completely from synthetics. The other way is to use it invisibly inside a wooden instrument to increase its strength, volume and tone. This latter concept is the one that I have been working with since the mid '80s. This is partly because of my love for wood but also because I see the wood as a vital element of the sound I want to produce.

Most luthiers who use carbon in wooden instruments (including myself) have been inspired by Australian luthiers Greg Smallman and Peter Biffin. Greg Smallman is probably the best known developer of carbon reinforced instruments. His classical guitars are considered by many to be the best ever made, and are used by many top players including John Williams. Here is a video of a Smallman guitar being played by Xuefei Yang. Note the power and sustain of the individual notes which is a hallmark of good carbon reinforced instruments.

Here is more info on instrument design and bracing

Theory and Concepts

German spruce has been the prime sound board wood for violins, lutes, etc. for hundreds of years. It was considered to have the highest strength to weight ratio of any wood. Because carbon/wood constructs have a far superior strength/weight ratio, it would seem an obvious choice for luthiers who want to further the boundaries of acoustic instruments. On the other hand, it takes time to learn how to control the extra power and maintain the sweetness that we associate with classic instruments.

One of the best modern acoustic models is the speakerbox. A sensitive ultralight speaker cone in a box made of heavy non-moving material is capable of producing almost any frequency at high volume. Speakerbox acoustic concepts are very important in any efficient instrument design.

Resonator guitars like Dobros are a great example of speaker box concepts used in a musical instrument. They excel in producing volume, but are limited to the characteristically nasal sound of the moving component, the metal resonator. The guitars that I make have a similar power, but the sound is produced by a carbon fiber and wood soundboard, which creates the full range of tones one would expect from a good guitar.

The Weissenborn Name

The name Weissenborn has been commonly used to describe Weissenborn copies and hollowneck slide guitars in general. This is because many well known players use original Weissenborn guitars or modern Weissenborn copies. (Herman Weissenborn did not actually invent the hollowneck slide guitar. He was preceded by Chris Knutsen and probably others.)

To further complicate things, the legal owner of the Weissenborn name is having cheap Weissenborn copies made overseas. He is forbidding other makers of Weissenborn copies to use the name Weissenborn in relation to their instruments. So in the future, the name Weissenborn will probably be associated with cheap Asian instruments. Phrases like 'acoustic lap steel' or 'hollowneck slide guitar' could easily replace the term Weissenborn.

My own slide guitars are an original design that was inspired by a number of instruments including Weissenborn. They are acoustically more related to Smallman, Klein, Dobro and Maccaferri.

Woods and materials

Blackwood Acacia melanoxylon: Tasmanian Blackwood is a close relative of Hawaiian Koa wood which has long been a favorite guitar timber, especially in Weissenborn and slide guitars. Many makers now prefer the slower growing Tasmanian Blackwood which has been more available. Due to years of bad forest management, this will not last long.

Tasmanian Eucalypts Eucalyptus regnans, E.obliqua, E.delegatensis: These three  Tasmanian eucalypts are marketed as 'Tassie Oak'. The species E. regnans is the tallest flowering tree on the planet. This wood is currently being woodchipped on a massive scale.

King Billy Pine Athrotaxis selaginoides:  This beautiful Tasmanian high altitude pine has become a favorite of some Australian violin and guitar makers for its sweet tone. Like many Tasmanian timbers, it is becoming very hard to obtain.

Western Red Cedar thuja plicata: (USA/Canada) This wood has become popular in the last 30 years for flamenco and classical guitar sound boards. Its most remarkable trait however is its lack of expansion in humidity which makes it an excellent partner for carbon fiber.

Carbon fiber:  Carbon fiber is a product in which pure carbon is formed into fibers that look like black hair. When these hairs are set in hard resin, the resulting structure has virtually no expansion or contraction in the direction of the fiber. Using this in musical instrument bracing involves making beam or truss type structures of carbon, resin and wood which have high strength and little weight.