Holy expletive deleted it's starting to look like a guitar!

It has been a great week. I've made a lot of progress on the acoustic, I'm finally starting to get a sense that the archtop may get completed, I didn't injure myself, and I'm keeping my fingers crossed that we will have electricity for electric construction tomorrow.

After gluing the blocks on, I glued in the side braces and then the kerfing. The side braces are just thin strips of mahogany that run from top to back inside the sides to prevent and stop cracks from happening in the sides. There was a small amount of math involved in figuring out the spacing, but it really wasn't difficult. The only tricky part is keeping them from slipping and sliding while gluing because tight bond isn't immediately tacky and has to set up a bit before the wood actually sticks. After the side braces were on, I had to dry clamp the kerfing over them to determine where to notch the kerfing so it could go over them. A little sandpaper on a ruler did the trick to notch out the kerfing and it was ready to glue to the ribs. This is fairly simple to do, but not necessarily easy to get the kerfing to glue to the sides gap free. All the process involves is tight bond on the kerfing and about a hundred clothes pins to clamp it to the sides.

Here is the kerfing clamped up with around 100 clothespins clamping it in place:

Once the kerfing was glued in, the ribs and kerfing had to be sanded down to fit the radius of the top and back. The top stays fairly flat, so it was sanded with a radiused sanding block, but the back has a greater radius and was sanded in a radius dish with a big piece of adhesive sandpaper. It took a while to sand the back because I left my blocks a little too tall, but it got done.

Here is the whole rib structure with kerfing, side braces, and sanded:

After sanding, the sides and kerfing had to be notched for the top braces because they are left long to go through the sides and kerfing and flush-trimmed later and covered up with binding. The notching was a little nerve-wracking. The sides were placed over the top with the braces up and the locations of the braces were then marked on the sides. After that, the depth of the notches was cut with a sunchild saw and the wood was removed with chisels. It is crucial that the slots are not too deep, so care must be taken to get each notch to a perfect depth. Width is not quite as important, but as always, accuracy is key.

After ensuring each brace fit well in the notches, as well as making sure the top was still lined up on the center line of the mold, blocks, and ribs, it was time to dry clamp the top. The top and back gluing/clamping method we use is pretty cool. It involves a bunch of screws sticking out of the workboard and 45 feet or so of bungee cord being wrapped around the screws and over the top or back. This gets pretty even clamping pressure to the top and kerfing glue joint and seems to work pretty well. After examining the dry clamping and making sure it is gap-free, glue is applied and the bungee is wrapped up again and left for about two hours.

Here is the top being glued and clamped in place with bungee cord:
And here is Chris's back being glued:
Chris is also using the Tazmanian Blackwood back and sides, but making an OM body, which is smaller than a dreadnought, so it should be interesting to compare how his guitar and mine sound side by side. The very thought excites me quite a bit.

While my top was clamped up, I took some time to voice my back and final shape and smooth the back braces. Here is the back after that was done:
After a few hours, the bungee cord was removed and I did some cleaning up inside the box to make everything look pretty, even though the majority of people who see this guitar will not bother to look, nor will they care. Guitar makers are perfectionists. Glue squeeze out must be eradicated. I tried my darndest, and I think it looks pretty nice.

Here is the inside of the box with the top glued on:
After the clean-up, I routed the notches for the back braces needed to glue the back on. This was very easy to do and took far less time then the hand cutting of the top braces because I used a pre-made template and the back just snaps into place. It's pretty slick. Then, the dovetail was routed in and the back is ready for gluing first thing on Monday. Isn't it exciting?

Here are a couple of pictures of the top flush trimmed to the sides and the dovetail routed:

In archtop news, I'm finally starting to feel like I'm making progress. I finally got my back arch carved and it is ready for scraping. The top final arching should take considerably less time, and then I can scrape both plates and start rough graduations, which is the arching of the inside of the plates that brings the arches to desired thicknesses. I will post more on this soon.

Possible blog on the electric progress this weekend...