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Rating: 
Summary: If you buy only one book, make sure that it's this one!!!
Review: (At the time of writing) I have yet to even finish reading this excellent book and I'm totally convinced that this is the one book that will guide me through the entire process of guitar building. I have read both editions of Melvyn Hiscock's "Make your own electric guitar" (and would also recomend them), however, I feel that this book ought to be the bench mark. The author goes into every detail of guitar construction (three guitars are detailed) in a manner that is easy to follow and understand. My only complaint (sorry Martin!!) is that the detail contained in some of the accompanying photo's is a little hard to pick up (although not impossible!!). Congratulations on producing an excellent and most informative book! My thanks also to the translater of the original work.
Rating:
Summary: Whole lotta info...
Review: Although I haven't really got to build my guitar I feel confident in recomending this book. After been playing for many years and doing things for myself (setup, maintenance and repair) I can assure that this book will provide the beginner with more than enough background information for the lutherie business or hobby. A big plus to this book is the frequent presentation of low-cost solutions to build a number of aparatus that would help in the absence of expensive and/or hard to find tools.
The author is clearly into the pleasure of the craft and concerned with the reader achieving the final goal: build an instrument.
I'd also like to recommend the author's new book on building lap steels. I haven't read it all the way, but it does contain lots of useful information. Pictures in the book can be downloaded bigger, in color and with better resolution from the web, and the shy beginner will found confort in building a very simple lap steel project and progressively go into building more sophisticated instruments.
5 stars surely isn't fair enough to the AUTHOR's commitment to the craft and to teaching it.
Rating: 
Summary: Very Good for starters
Review: Im 15 and built a guitar from the help of this book i would reccomend this to anyone with the interest of building guitars
Rating:
Summary: Good book, bad publisher
Review: Martin Koch has compiled a lot of good information in this book. I haven't seen this much information about electric guitars in any one book. If you are only going to buy one book on electric guitars (why would you, really) this is a good one. He goes into winding pickups, various wiring ideas, and several building techniques. The problem (really the only one) is that the illustrations, while numerous, are quite small and poorly reproduced. You can see what each one is but there were obvious registration and focus problems. It looks like they used digital images of low resolution. The publisher should have taken more care. That said it's not enough to make me regret the purchase. This is a valuable addition to my library.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent content - please improve the photos
Review: This book consists of 2 sections. The first section describes guitar components and guitar making tools. The second section describes various steps used in building a variety of different guitars. The book also lists vendors of guitar parts.This book is very detailed and comprehensive. There are many practical suggestions and the writing is clear. There are no actual detailed plans. You are required to develop your own design. There are many guitar plans available from the internet so this is no problem. You must have some minimum wood working skills. I give the book a 4 star rating because the small black and white photos are difficult to see. For any future edition, please use better quality photos to illustrate the work done. Also for any future edition, it would be interesting to include design ideas for pickup coil auto-winding devices, custom bridges, custom tailpieces and custom designed headless tuning systems.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent content - please improve the photos
Review: This is a great book about guitar building. It covers a lot of areas on the subject, from the basics of woodworking (how to season your wood, some router jigs etc.) to more advanced features such a winding your own pickups. If you are interested in the subject this is a great starting point. All subjects are very well covered but not necessarily always in depth; they are focused towards guitar building. Also the author is european and it shows through the book; you get to have a slightly different point-of-view on woodworking compared to most american books. The thing that is pretty bad about the book is the editing. It doesn't really have a well defined organization and its difficult to browse; it lacks structure. I think the book is self published and in that case its very good work, but a real editor would have helped a lot. All in all, I think this book is one of at least a few that are musts if you are serious about guitar building. What's the cost of a book compared to a guitar anyway?
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