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: