Snow day lutherie.

So I just found out about an hour and a half ago that all classes today were canceled starting at 1. I stayed until 12:45, trying to get my back joined, but the jointer plane and I were just not getting along. So here I am, with nothing better to do than write a blog, but that's not such a bad thing.

This week has been going fairly well so far. I got my bridge plate and x-brace cap glued in yesterday and while I was waiting for those to dry, I got one side bent, but didn't have time to bend the second. I was planning on bending the second today, but my plans were hindered by the cancellation of class. I got a start on the final brace shaping yesterday, and spent a good portion of time today doing the final pre-voicing shaping and I am now pretty happy with how they look. But considering archtop is canceled tonight, I don't have much else for you, except for some photos.

Here is the top with the braces final shaped pre-voicing. The scallops in the lower bout halves of the x-braces and the lower transverse braces will probably be taken down a bit during voicing tomorrow.

And here is the one bent side clamped in to the mold. The other should be bent tomorrow.
And this is what I'm doing with my day since I can't work on guitars:
I'm pretty excited to get my top voiced tomorrow...

Finger planes don't like my fingers very much.

So i've been doing quite a bit of work with finger planes since Tuesday and I've determined that they don't design them to be very finger-friendly. Tuesday night in archtop, I started the second to the last step in the arching process. This involves using finger planes to fine shape the arch. This is all fine and dandy for the folks making mandolins or violins, but it's kind of rough on us guitar makers. Perhaps I was a little too vigorous in my planing due to the fact that I was pretty tired and maybe feeling a little bit behind, but I have a few nice nicks in my hand and a nice big blister on my thumb that looks like a tumor. Ugh. I now associate finger planes with pain. I'm sure I'll get over it eventually. I think I am going to bring some gloves to archtop tonight, because it will definitely be more of the same. Fun stuff. On the brighter side of things, the back is starting to look like an archtop should. Still quite a bit of work to do, but tonight should be fruitful.

Acoustic construction is moving right along, with a few hiccups here and there... Tuesday morning, I finally got the abalone in the rosette sanded flush and it looks really nice. After that was done, I cut the soundhole out and sanded out the inside of the top to prepare for bracing. Then, the outline was re-drawn on the inside of the top and the bracing locations were marked out and drawn on using a bracing template. I had already cut and thicknessed my brace stock before the weekend, so I just had to radius the brace pieces on a handy jig using the edge sander and cut them to length and plane to height. Yesterday, I got my x-brace notched and glued that up with the upper transverse brace in the go-bar deck, waited for the glue to dry, and got the x-braces shaped before class was over. Today, I got all of my other brace stock ready to be glued and will be doing that in about an hour or so. The only thing left after that will be final shaping of all braces, gluing the bridge plate in, and voicing the top. I also hope to get my sides thicknessed and tapered so they are ready for bending on Monday. Good stuff.

Here's a pretty low quality cell phone picture of the rosette after scraping, but before sanding to level the abalone. It looks a lot nicer than the picture does justice...

And a shot of the x-brace shaping in progress:

Well, I've only got 8 and a half hours of class left today and electric construction tomorrow. Hopefully I'll get all the templates done tomorrow and begin working some wood. I'm pretty excited to see how the electric is going to turn out. It should be pretty awesome.

Top joining, rosettes, molds, and other fun stuff

Well this has been a good week so far, and I've gotten quite a bit done so far in acoustic construction. To sum things up so far, I've gotten the mold and workboard done, made clamping cauls, joined and thicknessed the top, and made some good progress on the rosette.

Last week, I got all my pieces of plywood glued together using dowels to line them up and they were ready for routing on Monday. Routing is a fairly mindless task because there is a bearing on the bit that glides over the template, or in this case the plywood sandwich that has already been routed, and everything gets nice and even and pretty close to perfect. Once routed, I traced outside the routed outline an inch and a half and cut off the excess with the bandsaw, leaving a flat section at the waist for future clamping. Then, I screwed a piece of plywood on at the top where the bandsaw cuts on the individual pieces were made and the mold is done!

This is what it looks like:

With the workboard pieces glued together, all that was left was to smooth out the edges a bit with various sanders and run it through the drum sander to flatten it.

On Monday, I also got my top joined. This was exciting because it was the first thing that will actually become part of the guitar that we've worked on. Top joining is a fairly straight-forward process. First, you set up a shooting board with a jointer plane(a really long flat plane) on it's side. Then you run the guitar top wood across the top of the board/along the bottom of the plane. This gets the edge nice and straight. You do this for both boards, and put the edges together with a lightbox underneath them and when no light can be seen, the joint is good and ready to be glued. Fire up the hot hide glue, clamp it up and glue it in the gluing deck and you now have a guitar top.

Yesterday, I spent a good portion of the day listening to lectures, getting my top to thickness, and making some clamping cauls, which will hold the ribs into the mold. The cauls are shaped to the body outline, but the curves of the cauls actually have a 3/32" smaller radius than the mold to take into account rib thickness. To make a long story short, it takes a good deal of touch up sanding to get them shaped just right.

Here is a picture of the cauls in the mold, but they still need a bit of work:

Today was a fun day. First off, we had a nice 2 hour lecture about rosettes, including various types of rosettes, how to make them, and how to inlay them in a guitar top. I made a rosette bending mold out of plywood because I thought I was going to have to soak and bend my purfling strips, but they came kind of bent already, so I at least got some good practice routing. Now on to the second waste of time today, which was a little mishap with the top. Everything was all set to go, including having the outline traced on the top, the soundhole distance from the edge marked and drawn, and having the rosette drawn. The last thing to do before actually routing the rosette is to drill out a hole for a pin to guide the router for routing the rosette and cutting the soundhole. I took my time making sure the hole would be nice and centered, used an awl and the drill bit with my hand first, but somehow I still managed to drill the hole 1/16" off of center. Grrrr.... That means it was time to cut an 1/8" long sliver of 3/16" dowel and plug the hole to re-drill a new one. I made a bracewood cut list while waiting for the glue in the plug to set up and the day was over. Tomorrow should be a better day.

Here's a picture of the top with the abalone that is going to be inlaid in it and you can also see the plugged hole:

The rosette is also going to have a total of 6 strips of black/white/black purfling with 2 strips in the innermost ring, 1 strip on each side of the abalone in the center ring, and 2 strips in the outermost ring. This will be one classy looking rosette! I'll hopefully have pictures of it inlaid tomorrow.

We're not messin' around.

Well, two days into acoustic construction class and I'm loving it. So much to do, so little time, and it couldn't be any better. Yesterday consisted of making some plexiglass templates for the neck and half body. It's surprisingly easy to work with plexiglass, much more than I imagined it would be. It cuts super easy with the bandsaw and takes to a rasp and files just as easy as wood and easier than aluminum. You do want to make sure to bandsaw them as close as possible to the outline to eliminate as much work as possible, but it still takes a while to get them perfect.

Today was even more interesting because we started making our molds and workboards. The workboards are pretty simple because it's essentially two pieces of 3/4" plywood glued on top of each other and cut to shape with a bunch of screws in the side, but we'll get to the why on that one later. The molds are not quite as simple as the workboards, but still not too bad. Essentially, you glue pieces of plywood together 2*2, bandsaw the excess of the guitar shape out of the middle, clamp a routing template for the guitar outline on top of the stack and route the outline in the mold pieces using a flush cutting bit with the bearing riding on the template. Then you glue the stacks together, screw a piece of wood in to hold the mold together at the top where you entered with the bandsaw, and then cut off the excess from the outside part of the mold. I think the most difficult part is finding something to do while the glue dries... On to top joining on Monday!

Tonight in archtop, I spot-glued my plates to the rib structure, which is super cool because it almost looks like a guitar for a brief moment. Unfortunately, this step is only temporary to drill holes for the locating pins which will be used when finally gluing on the top and back. It does look cool though, but there's still lots of arching to be done...

So I have a pageview tracker thingy on here and I am proud to say that people other than my friends and family are reading this blog. Cool, huh? I've had views from Australia, Hong Kong, Michigan, California, and of course MN. Even cooler is that the referring site is from google! I wonder how that happened...

Electric construction starts tomorrow! I think I've decided I want to do a CBS era headstock. It's different than the modern strat headstock and it looks pretty cool. This is what they kinda look like:

I know, I know, it's not a CBS but I couldn't find a good picture of just the headstock anywhere else on the web so this will have to do. I think the CBS's had a slightly more dramatic swoop down at the lower point closest to the nut, but I'm not sure. Now i just have to figure out nut width, taper, scale length, etc... Fun stuff.


That's all I got. Until next time I remain the Not So Lugubrious Luthier...

It's time to hit the ground running...

Yep, tomorrow at 8 AM it begins. Second semester will start and it's time for a full force guitarmaking frenzy. I'm excited again. Break was a rather sedentary experience for me, but I did get some things figured out and had a good time with many friends. I will say that I didn't accomplish nearly as much as I would have liked to over the past 2 weeks, but it really seemed to fly by at the same time. It was a good recharging time, so I feel ready to get working again.

I bought my mold and template wood yesterday, so I should be ready to roll. I just need to find some cork and bungee cord for the workboard and I should be pretty much set. I have quite a few boxes of guitar parts/lumber to bring to Red Wing, so I'm not really looking forward to unloading them at school tomorrow morning. It should be interesting, to say the least.

Well, it's nearly time for me to hit the road... Expect more posts soon on the construction of the 3 guitars.