A different method of neck shaping

Friday was a fairly productive day of work on the electric. My instructor and I had decided that it would be a better idea to shape the neck before fretting, due to the fact that no amount of force on the truss rod would straighten the neck. Perhaps if the neck was carved and excess material removed, the neck would be more flexible and able to get out of the back bow. Why is this a big deal? In order to level the frets, the fingerboard needs to be straightened. It is possible to sand the fingerboard straight with the backbow, but it is a lot of work.

Before starting to carve the neck, I laid out the tuner hole spacing, drilled, then reamed the holes to fit the tuners. This went very well (much better than the fingerboard dots) and the tuners look awesome on the headstock. Here is what the look like:
Once I was satisfied with how the tuners fit, I started shaping the neck. In the electric class, we were taught a different method of neck shaping than we were taught in acoustic construction, so I decided to give this a shot. This involved rasping down to within 1/32" of the thickness of the neck at two points, in my case the 1st and 12th frets, establishing the round of the neck at these points, and rasping out everything else on the neck to blend everything all together nice and straight. Simple enough, but still time consuming. I even picked up a horse hoof rasp to make quick work of the rough shaping, but the refining took a lot longer.

Here are a couple shots of the neck nearly finished being shaped:


That's all I have for now. Maybe I'll start putting some pictures of my classmates instruments in progress up here as well. Here is a picture of the bass that my buddy Gomer is building. It is a set neck, with a massive chambered body. It should be pretty sweet.

Rough Graduations Progress

Well, tonight was another fairly productive session of archtop carving. I got the bulk of the inner arch carved in the top and then switched to the flap sander to smooth things out. I then set up the back in the cradle and sanded it as well to lessen the amount of hand tool work that would be needed.

Here are a few pictures with me actually in them, carving the top with the angle grinder:

Thanks to Gomer for being the guest photographer tonight.

After I had gone as far as I dare with the grinder, I clamped the cradle to my bench and started fingerplaning away. The idea is to fingerplane and scrape until all the holes that were drilled previously are gone and you then end up at the desired thickness, in this case 6 mm for the rough graduations. I got a good deal of this done on the back and hope to have the rough graduations on both the top and the back done on tuesday.

Below is a photo of the back rough graduations and you can see how some the holes that were previously drilled are now gone. I was surprised at how accurate I was able to get this, as the areas where the holes are gone are now at 6.2 mm, so only 2 tenths of a millimeter away from the 6 that I was shooting for.
There is definitely still some work to be done here, but it is coming along nicely. I might even be able to rough cut the f-holes on Tuesday! Well tomorrow is electric, so I'll probably post another blog shortly after, but that's all I have for now.

Bathing in Woodchips

I did a little shopping over the weekend and found something that I thought to be rather odd. The Home Depot had buy one get one free angle grinders. I'm not even kidding, they seriously had packages of two angle grinders for the price of one. The only difference is that they didn't include any sort of case, but I don't really care about that. So I picked up a package of two 7.5 amp Makita angle grinders and kept one and sold the other one to my archtop instructor since his angle grinder had a bad switch and is very unsafe to use in the manner we use them. To top it all off, woodcraft had the Lancelot Woodcarving blades on sale for $10 off the regular price. After a drive down to bloomington on Monday night, I was set to go.

Below is a picture of the angle grinder with the Lancelot blade installed (looks nasty, doesn't it...):


Last night was a good night in archtop. I constructed a cradle for angle grinding graduations based on a design Bob came up with and I was ready to rock. It took me a couple hours to get everything prepped and fine tuned, but once I did, the graduations on my back got well on their way. The key to using an angle grinder to making archtop guitars is finesse. The closer the angle grinder is to being parallel to the plate, the less wood it takes off. I started working out the middle, since this is where the most wood is to be removed, and soon got a feel for working with the angle grinder. I went quite a ways with this until the holes that I had previously drilled are no more than small indentations.

Here is my setup for doing graduations:
This setup is essentially an easel clamped to a bench, with the arching cradle clamped to the easel and the guitar plate clamped to the arching cradle. There are a total of 9 clamps holding the rig together. Using this method is loud, messy, and slightly painful. Depending on the direction I was working the angle grinder, different parts of my body would get sprayed with woodchips, which can sting quite a bit in certain places. My ears were also ringing after class last night, so I made sure to run to menards and get a solid pair of earmuffs to be prepared for round two of this madness tomorrow night. I do like this method, perhaps due to my affinity for power tools, and I am confident that the angle grinder will come in handy and save a lot of time for future archtop endeavors.

Here is a picture of the mess I made, and there is still more to be done:

Graduation time!

No, I'm not graduating from school yet, but I have finally gotten started on my archtop graduations, which are referring to the inside arch of the plates. Essentially, this is the process of hollowing and thinning out the top and back plates so they are able to resonate and vibrate freely and are crucial to the guitar's sound. The first step in this process is, of course, the rough graduations, which involves drilling a bunch of holes using a jig on a drill press so that when you remove wood down to where you can't see the holes, the plates will be at the desired thickness. Guitars usually get taken down to a thickness of between 4 and 5 millimeters for both plates. One of my classmates gave me a brief lesson in using an angle grinder to speed wood removal for this step, so I plan on picking one up this weekend so I can hopefully get caught up and possibly be able to finish it. It seems like a 50/50 chance that it will get done, but I am not going to give up hope. I'm still waiting for the weather to stabilize a bit so I can start bringing guitars home to work on. I still have about another month and a half or so to have things ready, so I'm not panicking just yet, but also not taking this matter lightly. I have a feeling that there are going to be some late nights working at Gomer's to get things done.

The electric is coming along. Today, I drilled holes for the fingerboard dots, but somehow managed to screw up the last 4 or so on the upper frets (large inlay there perhaps?). For some reason, no matter how hard I try, I always screw things up on the drill press. I even used a punch to mark the center of the holes for the forstner bit, but they still got off. Grr. I then cut out the headstock on the bandsaw and flush routed it to my template with a laminate trimmer. I then sanded the ramp into the headstock behind the nutshelf at the same time as thicknessing the headstock on the spindle sander. After lunch I rough cut out the neck taper, flush routed it to the fingerboard on the router table, and then started to shape the transition from the neck to the headstock on the spindle sander as well. I couldn't find a spindle small enough to finish it, so I ended the day making a neck pocket routing template. One of the next steps in the process will be to route the neck pocket and test fit the neck to the body in order to lay out the bridge and pickup routes.

Here is a shot of today's progress on the neck:
I'm still loving that flame.