Not quite living up to the title of the blog.

It's been a rough couple of days, and I have a feeling it's going to get worse. I have more sanding to do in the next couple of days than I've ever done in my entire life. It's pretty ridiculous.

Friday was a fairly good day in electric construction, and a lot of last minute pre-finishing stuff got done or started. I routed my battery box hole, the tremolo spring cavity cover recess route, and spent a good deal of time the wood control mounting plate. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out and I was able to get the grain lines and figure to line up fairly nice. I also rasped out a little arm contour and started sanding the body out before doing the round-over on the body edges. I just have some fretwork, sanding, and round-over routing to do and the electric will be ready to get a finish at the end of May. I'm pretty excited.

The acoustic and archtop are not coming along as well. We had open lab time on Saturday and being that punctuality was not mandatory, I decided to go in to school an hour late to recover some sleep from being up fairly late on Friday. Needless to say, this set the lazy tone for the day and I didn't get a whole lot done. One of the problems the acoustic had before receiving frets is that the fingerboard was not securely glued in first position area and so I set about fixing this on Saturday by using a feeler gauge to work some thinned out hide glue into the loose area and clamp it down. This went pretty smoothly, except for the fact that there was a little rust on my feeler gauge which contaminated the hide glue. To make a long story short, my fingerboard came almost completely unglued when I was hammering frets in yesterday and I became a bit lugubrious at this point. I did, however spend some time on inlay on saturday also and inlaid an awesome little anchor into my headstock. I've gotten quite a few compliments on it from my classmates and I'm really happy with how it turned out. The guitar is, after all, a dreadnought body style, which is also the name of a British gunship from the early 1900s so I felt an anchor was rather fitting.

This is the gold mother-of-pearl anchor:

Today, my first and only order of business was to re-glue the fingerboard on to the dreadnought. This may sound like a simple operation, but I assure you it was anything but. First of all, I had to heat up the other half of the fingerboard that did not pop off yesterday and use a fingerboard removal knife to pry it off. This was a fairly easy job, since I used hide glue to glue the fingerboard on the first time. I decided that this time around I would put the frets in before gluing the fingerboard so I could use the arbor fret press. I had some chip-out from pulling the frets that I had originally pounded in that I had to fix , and touched up the radius of the fingerboard a little as well. Next, I had to rig up some clamping cauls. Since the neck had already been shaped, I no longer had a flat surface to clamp to and figured out a way to make a neck cradle work as a clamping caul with a little help from some cork. Also, since the frets were in I had to make notched cauls to spread the clamping pressure directly on to the fingerboard instead of the frets. Once these were made, I did some dry clamping and discovered that my fingerboard had somehow developed a round on the bottom surface that gets glued to the neck. It is crucial that the bottom of the fingerboard is flat for a good glue joint to the neck. Perhaps this is one of the reasons it failed in the first place. After a decent amount of time spent re-flattening the bottom of the fingerboard, it was finally ready to go after a dry clamping showed very minimal gapping. From what glue squeeze-out I have cleaned up so far, it looks like the fingerboard is on much better this time. I also used tite-bond because I feel more confident with it and it's longer working time, but that's an issue that many luthiers will have something to say about...

Here's a shot of the guitar with the fingerboard back on and all the frets except for the 1st and 14th in:

Another week, another blog, and they're getting closer.

I've been pretty busy lately and it's getting to the point where I sometimes have difficulty hearing myself think. Today was another productive friday. I laid out my pickup locations first thing this morning and got routing. Everything went smoothly there and I was done in little over an hour. The more efficient I get at routing, the more I really enjoy it. After the pickup routes were done, I did some planning of how the control cavity and control cavity cover is going to work out. I had already drawn things out on my blueprint, but there were just a couple of minor details that I wanted to work out.

I decided that I should make the cover before routing the ledge in the control cavity that the cover will attach to. As I am making the cover out of wood to match the grain and figure of the top, I had to laminate 3 pieces of very thin wood together, with the center piece having the grain 90 degrees to the grain of the other two pieces to add stability. I got this glued up and will unclamp it after the weekend. I hope it turns out well!

I also routed the control cavity and output jack location. After this was done, I realized that there were just a few more things left to route, 2 of which I never made templates for. I thought I was done making templates for this guitar! I guess not. I spent an hour or two making a template for the battery box and the spring cavity cover recess route. The spring cavity recess route will make the spring cavity cover flush with the body and I won't have it degrading the guitar by sticking out and making it uncomfortable to play. The battery box will stick out a tiny bit, but will not be uncomfortable because it will be close to the tail edge of the back of the guitar.

Here is a shot of today's progress routing the body:

And the control cavity cover wood being laminated. I used lots of clamps on this one, so let's hope that I got them on and cranked down in time... You can also see the template for the spring cavity cover recess route clamped up int the background.

I have been diligently chopping away at the archtop, but the process seems to be going even more slowly as I find myself working on it nearly every night. I got my f-holes cut last thursday and finally finished the graduations last night. The project for this weekend is to get the f-holes cleaned up so I can start fitting the braces on Tuesday and hopefully get them done quickly using Benedetto's carbon paper fitting method.

Here's the top with the f-holes rough cut by hand with a coping saw:

I'm really excited to see the archtop start taking shape, but I'm also starting to get worried that it may not get done by mid-may in order to get a finish on it, but I'm going to keep moving forward. I do have a week break after graduation before the advanced finishing class starts, so who knows, I could get it done...

Routing fun.

I realize that I haven't blogged in a couple weeks, but that's because I haven't been doing a whole lot in the area of guitar building. I've been working diligently in archtop to try and get things done, and I'll be done with graduations soon. I'm still not sure if it's going to get finished by the end of the school year, but I sure as heck am going to try.

I made some great progress on the electric today, so I'm in a pretty good mood about that. I also spent most of the day on Wednesday working on the archtop and electric because we didn't have class due to a faculty in-service day, whatever that is. Remember how I was irritated that I drilled my fretboard position dots crooked and they looked really horrible? I did some brainstorming and decided that I was going to inlay diamonds over, so on Wednesday I cut some diamonds out of gold mother of pearl and just have to route the inlays into the fingerboard and epoxy them in.

First item of business this morning was to do a neck pocket test route. I had already made a neck pocket template, so it was now a matter of making sure it would work on the real thing. I did my test route as quickly as possible and it went nearly perfect, so I decided to do the real thing and had no problems.

Next Item of business was to drill the neck mounting holes through the body and into the neck. The holes through the body are bigger than the screws so they can slip right through. This allows you to pull the neck snugly into the neck pocket without the screws getting caught up in the holes in the body.

After measuring things a couple of times, I marked out the bridge location and drilled the holes for the bushing posts that the floating bridge sits up against. I then located where the tremolo block cavity would go and routed that, flipped the guitar around, and routed the spring cavity and remainder of the block cavity.

Here's the guitar body with the neck pocket routed, and bridge post holes drilled and tremelo block cavity routed:

And a shot with the neck and bridge in place also showing the diamonds that I cut out to cover up my drilling mistake. All thats left is frets, electronic routing, a little body carving and rounding, and a finish, which will be done the last 2 weeks in May:
This shows the rear spring cavity and block cavity routes with some wire channels showing through: