This article originally appeared in Acoustic Guitar magazine. © String Letter Publishing, all rights reserved.
CFox Guitars
Located in Healdsburg, a mecca of guitar making in northern California, CFox Guitars is one of a handful of companies that successfully combines small-shop attention to detail with production-line consistency. The company was founded a mere three years ago, but every CFox guitar benefits from Charles Fox's 30 years of experience in the field. He has been involved in virtually every aspect of guitar building-from designing custom acoustics and high-end solid-bodies to directing the American School of Lutherie-and Fox felt that it was time to get his ideas for the ideal acoustic guitar into production. "There's a limit to what you can do and the impact you can have doing custom work," he explains. "When you're building two guitars a day-as we will be by the end of the year-you can do a lot of interesting things; it's a great tool. Now I can just describe a guitar, and it gets built exactly to my specs."
The shop itself (449 Allan Ct., Healdsburg, CA 95448; [707] 433-8228; www.cfoxguitars.com) was designed with a nice, roomy layout. The complete absence of clutter seems to reflect the precision of the instruments being built. An upstairs office/showroom is completely sound-proofed from the noises of power tools, creating a comfortable R&D and guitar-testing atmosphere. Downstairs, a shop-made neck-shaping jig, just one example of CFox's many innovative jigs and tools, swivels the neck blank around a giant belt sander. Its simple and flexible design provides a clever alternative to the CNC machine.
CFox guitars differ from most other steel-string acoustics in a number of important ways. "For one thing, they're designed and built by somebody with a classical guitar background," says Fox. Evidence can be found in the headstock, which is glued to the neck (a construction detail that offers more strength, according to Fox, than the standard one-piece design) and the footed neck block, a unique three-piece design Fox came up with to provide extra strength. This kind of neck block allows the guitar's back to absorb a portion of the neck's pull, which enables Fox to use a lighter bracing pattern in the crucial fingerboard area of the top and thus build a more responsive instrument.
Other innovations include carbon-fiber neck reinforcements, a double-X bracing pattern, and wooden linings that cover about two-thirds of the guitars' sides. "The linings form a rim that--without the top and back--is as rigid as a drum rim," Fox explains. "That gives us a stable superstructure, so to speak, that we can hang all the parts from. It's a much stronger guitar. We can build the subassemblies--the top, the back, the neck--more lightly than we could afford to with conventional construction, and of course that impacts the sound of the guitar."
Fox has used the double-X bracing pattern for more than 25 years. "It's centered right under the bridge," he explains, "which gives you a diamond of about four inches per side that extends the effective width of the bridge to about four inches. It completely eliminates the ability of the strings to pull the top up. It's a very stable top, and as a result we can build it much more lightly, too."
Currently, CFox offers four basic models available in a variety of wood combinations and appointments and starting at $2,800. Having caught the fancy of surf-guitar guru Dick Dale, among others, the CFox Small Jumbo has established itself as the company's most popular model. Also in the current lineup are a dreadnought, a 00-size concert model, and the classical-size Hybrid, which is available in 12- or 14-fret versions. Fox describes his guitars as "very pianistic" and says that many players are impressed by their sustain and playability. Later this year the company will introduce a full-sized jumbo, a 12-string, and a nylon-string.
-Teja Gerken