PrintableCharts

ACOUSTIC BODY SHAPES

what each one was made for · from the front room to the stage, at true scale

Built as a memo rather than a table: the thing worth hanging it up for reads across the room, with the full reference in smaller type below it.

Three sizes in one archive — from a sheet on the fridge to a poster on the wall.

Free

Payment and email are handled by Paddle. The download link arrives by email — no account, no password.

Formats
A4 · A3 · A2
What you get
Print-ready PDFs, one per size, with every letterform converted to outlines — nothing to install, nothing to shift.
Subject
music · beginners · comparison · music room

All seven are drawn at one scale from bout measurements in published luthier plans, checked 2026-07-30. Volume is outline area times mean depth. Dates and purposes are what the maker designed the shape for, not a rule for the player.

THE BODY CLASS IS NAMED AFTER THE WRONG NUMBER

The class is named after the lower bout — and that figure is all but identical on a twelve-fret and a fourteen-fret auditorium: 382.6 against 381.1 mm.

Yet the twelve-fret body is 30 mm longer and 14 mm deeper at the heel, holding roughly 12 % more air.

So in a shop the first thing worth checking is the fret at which the neck meets the body, and only then the price: two instruments with the same label are two different boxes.

On the sheet

  • All seven are drawn at one scale from bout measurements in published luthier plans, checked 2026-07-30. Volume is outline area times mean depth. Dates and purposes are what the maker designed the shape for, not a rule for the player.
  • Colour carries meaning, but meaning never rests on colour alone — the sheet reads in black and white.
  • Nothing about how it was made: the sheet carries only what the reader needs.

Printing

  • Three sizes in the archive: A4 — 210×297 mm, A3 — 297×420 mm, A2 — 420×594 mm.
  • All text is converted to outlines. No fonts to install, and nothing shifts on another machine.
  • White background and sparing fills — it prints on a home printer without draining the cartridge.
  • Margins of at least 10 mm: a home printer cannot print to the edge.
  • No stroke thinner than 0.3 mm, so nothing disappears in print.

Why the numbers can be trusted. Every countable number here is computed from data rather than typed in, and the sheet must pass 10 independent checks before it is allowed to build — how many items there are, the order they come in, and the claim in the highlighted box itself. If one fails, there is no file.

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