The Not So Lugubrious Luthier

A repair job finished!

2009-02-09T14:26:00.008-06:00

I know I mentioned a repair I was working on back in October, but I've been kind of busy and haven't had time to blog about it. Considering I have a week of free time before I start my new job, now is a good time to write a blog. As mentioned before, the job was a cheaply made Japanese dreadnought from the 1970s, a Terada T-100. I searched the web for information about the guitar, but I wasn't able to find any information on them, other than that some people really seemed to like them, despite how cheaply made they were.

Here is the guitar when I took it in:

This guitar was in pretty rough shape when I got it on my bench and the action made it pretty much un-playable. The average saddle height for a measurement taken at the 12th fret on the low E string should be .09" and as you can see in the photo below, this one is over .140", way too high for anybody to play. I realize the picture shows the height at the 11th fret, but the photo was taken for illustration purposes.

The photo below shows the neck extension height. The straightedge should be even with the top of the bridge, but was about 1/16" low, a problem which will be corrected with new frets and planing down the bridge.

The first order of business was a re-fret and fingerboard repairs. The old frets had some serious divots in them at the first position, as did the fingerboard itself. Using my trusty soldering iron and fret pullers, I carefully removed the frets so i could work on the fingerboard. I used some rosewood dust and super glue to fil the fretboard divots and re-sanded the radius into the fingerboard as well as straightening it lengthwise. When it was ready for new frets, I radiused and rough cut the frets to length. Because the fingerboard was bound, the tangs needed to be cut off the ends of the frets so they would fit in the slots. Then the fret slots were cleaned and the edges of the slots were filed to allow the frets to seat properly. Despite my efforts, I didn't have a lot of luck with the frets seating properly and had a lot of fret end gluing to do. This was quite frustrating and makes me really think it is worth investing in a fretwire bender and a set of fret presses. It's too bad they are so ridiculously expensive, so maybe if I get ambitious one of these days I'll work on making my own. Re-frets are a tedious job, so I'll fast forward a bit so as not to bore you... The frets were then beveled, leveled, crowned, sanded, and polished to make the guitar play great and ensure that the frets don't buzz, a process that takes at least another 2 hours or so. I know that the guitar will now play much better than it ever did.

The frets, fingerboard and nut before starting work:

In the above picture, you can see how deep the divots in the frets and fingerboard were. They are now non-existant:

After the fret job was done, I could now tell how far the bridge needed to be taken down. The fret job took care of about 1/32", so the bridge needed to be planed down about another 1/32". The existing saddle was a steel drop-in adjustable piece with only 2 small points of actual down pressure on the bridge, definitely not an efficient way to transfer energy from the string vibrations to the top.

The customer told me to do whatever it needed, so I made the decision to plug the existing saddle slot with rosewood and re-route a new slot for a new bone saddle. The plug was fairly easy to fit, and once it was glued in, I planed the bridge down to a good neck extension height. After this was done, I measured and marked the saddle location and set up the saddle routing jig.

Here is the jig setup:

The saddle routing jig worked pretty well, aside from a minor technical difficulty with the router base. Before I started routing, I made sure that the height adjustment screws were tightened, but one screw started coming unscrewed after I started routing. I had to hold the screw to keep it from turning any further as I routed. Needless to say, the saddle slot wasn't as clean as I would have liked but I was still able to get a saddle to fit tightly in the slot.

Here is the finished product, with a stubborn pin that wouldn'tstay down on the low e string. The pins were in pretty rough shape and I recommended that the customer buy a new set for the guitar.

The last step was making a new nut, as the previous nut was a joke. It was held in with rubber cement and had a plexiglass riser underneath because the nut slots were too deep. It felt really good to be finished with this job.

Here is the finished guitar:

Well, maybe not. Bubba thinks he's a guitar sometimes and loves to lay inside cases. I forgot to take any pictures of the actual finished product, but there are a couple of pictures of the finished work above. Hopefully I'll get some more repair jobs to blog about as it is still going to be a while until I'm able to build any more guitars.

Commissions???

2008-10-17T14:50:00.003-05:00

I know it's been a while since my last post, but I've been a busy guy, looking for jobs and working and living and stuff. It also doesn't help that I have no internet at home and have to go to the library to get online. That will soon change, as I am starting a job at Qwest on Monday and will have a nice discount on some DSL service, not to mention a decent paycheck finally... I worked at guitar center for about a month from august-september, but it was a pretty horrible job and I basically got paid slightly more than minimum wage to unpack and set up merchandise on their sales floor. I got a job valeting at the country club that my girlfriend works at and I really enjoy doing that, but I don't have enough hours there. Life is good otherwise.

I've gotten one guitar repair job so far, making a saddle for a classical guitar and doing some more extensive work on a 1970s japanese made dreadnought that was in rough shape. The fingerboard was in horrible shape, so I did some repairs to that, including a refret. Being bound, it was a bit difficult, but the frets are now in and it's ready for leveling and dressing. It also really needed a neck reset, but it wasn't worth the effort so I decided to plug the drop in saddle slot, shave the bridge, and re-route and make a new saddle. I'm in the process of finishing that and I will also be making a new nut once the frets are dressed and the work on the bridge is done. I really should stop dragging my feet on this one, but this guitar has been giving me nothing but problems which are to be expected on a guitar of such low quality. Has anyone ever heard of Terada guitars? I really only agreed to do the work because the guitar has sentimental value to the owner and I can imagine it might actually sound pretty decent if I can get it playing decent. I'll post some before and after photos when it's done.

I've also been approached with a couple of possible commissions. The first is for a banjo for my good friend Steve, which would be some pretty straight forward lutherie, except for figuring out how to turn the rim. Most resources I've consulted highly recommend using a metalworking lathe, but those run around $2000 at least, money I don't really have for a one time project. I'm sure I'll figure something out. The second commission is for an OM style acoustic guitar for my friend Adam's wife. I'm really excited about getting this going and getting back into guitarmaking. It will give me motivation to move all my power tools out of my parents basement and start using them to make some guitars. Good things are on the horizon!

I hope to continue posting more here soon, as I am now up to over 2000 visitors to this blog and it is very cool to receive comments from interested readers from all over.

They're done!! (Well 2 of them anyways...)

2008-07-23T16:09:00.010-05:00

I can't believe it's been almost three months since my last post! Things have been interesting since I finished school. I got a job assisting a mason that I worked through the month of June, but I wasn't quite built for the job and the guy I was working for was kind of a jerk so he let me go and didn't even pay me what he owed me. A lot has happened since then and I've been focusing on my job search lately, which I'm hoping will end soon. If anybody knows of any lutherie or woodworking jobs available around the Minneapolis/St Paul area, let me know. I've got one interview tomorrow and it is the first in my three weeks of job searching, but I do what I can... Enough about my life, and on to the guitars!!!

The Southeast Tech guitar show was on May 8th, and it was a great but stressful day. I had a couple of hours after gluing the bridge the day before to get the nut and saddle made, tuners installed, and bridge pin holes drilled, reamed, and slotted. To make a long story short, I got my guitar strung up about a half hour before the show and life was good. My parents also came down for the show, and I felt bad because I was too busy finishing the setup that I couldn't really show them around. The show went disaster free for everybody, and despite the fact that a couple of my fellow students had some bridges that were starting to come unglued, no bridges popped off of guitars. Although dreadnoughts are usually flatpicked, I decided to have Phil Heywood fingerpick my guitar in the show and it sounded great!

This is me describing my guitar:

And Phil Heywood playing it:
My dad holding my guitar with me in the background:I was exhausted...

My guitar in it's case on display at the show:
During the last two weeks in may, I took an advanced finishing course and put a lovely dyed red finish on my electric guitar. This course was pretty cool, and we learned about some other types of finishes commonly used in the industry like CAB Urethane and Polyester, as well as doing some really cool metal flake project boards, which I think I may end up making guitar shaped clocks out of... I'm fairly happy with how the finish turned out on the electric, but I'm wishing i would have paid more attention when sanding it because you can definitely see some sanding scratches under the lacquer. They aren't noticeable from more than a foot or so away and even so you have to look pretty carefully to notice. The thing is that I know that they're there and so I always see them. Grrr... I was also able to get my dreadnought buffed out and set up properly, and it now looks and plays beautiful in addition to sounding beautiful.

A nice shot of the body showing off the bearclaw in the top:
The end graft:

Back and sides:
And my bridge design:
It took me a couple of weeks to even start mounting hardware and a few more weeks to start wiring. I accidentally broke the plunger switch on the preamp when i was test fitting it before finishing the guitar, but LR Baggs sent me a new one free of charge and very promptly, so kudos to their customer service. It was kind of tough to get the old switch off of it, but once I finally did, it only took about 30 seconds to solder the new one in. A couple of Saturdays ago, I spent a solid 2 hours or so wiring the whole thing up and mounting the spring claw for the tremolo. Last weekend, I finally did a fret job, made a nut, installed the spring trees and tuner screws, installed the straplocks, and did a fairly thorough set up.

I must say that I am quite happy with how everything came together with the gold hardware, cocobolo fingerboard, red finish, and the flame on the neck. It all looks classy, even the diamonds on the fingerboard, which were a cover-up for a mistake. I also love how it sounds. I didn't have any radioshack .022 mfd capacitors, so I ordered a few of the Sprague Orange Drops off of ebay and installed one in the tone circuit. I'm not sure how much of an audible difference it makes, but it sure beats the .047 mfd that I had installed in the tone circuit temporarily. I love this guitar and have been playing it quite a bit more than the SG since I finished it. I was going for a tone similar to The Black Keys, and the hot golds paired with my Hot Rod Deluxe comes pretty close. Enough rambling about it, you wanna see pictures!

A couple of shots of the front and back of the headstock and neck:
And a couple of the body with all the lovely gold hardware:

And the front and back of the guitar as a whole:Oops, the holes in the tremolo cavity cover don't quite line up with the string holes in the tremolo block, so I guess I'll have to take it off to re-string. Grrr... I guess it's something to make sure I get right the next time.

Fraternal twins!

Part of the reason it took me so long to get assembled and set up is that I didn't have a good place to work, and I was just getting frustrated with working on the kitchen table, having to clear it off for dinner, and not being able to have my tools organized in any way. It turns out that my new house in Golden Valley just so happened to have a bench in the basement that just had a bunch of junk that nobody ever used on it. A few hours cleaning and organizing, and I now have a great place to work on guitars, complete with magnetic racks for chisels! It even came with a bench dog!

Here's a photo of my new workspace:
Bubba likes to lay on the cool basement floor underneath the bench while I work:
There's an empty room next to this bench and I'm hoping I may be able to fill it with power tools soon and start making some more guitars and finish the archtop eventually as well. I'll keep you posted...

Until next time.

It's shiny!

2008-05-03T19:43:00.009-05:00

This last week has been one of the most stressful of the year, and I'm quite relieved that it's over, although next week will be no cakewalk either. Here's a brief rundown of what I've been up to:

Tuesday and Wednesday were spent sanding the acoustic and preparing for finishing, Thursday I sprayed a sealer coat, did some touchup, and applied grain filler.

Yesterday I put a couple final touches on the electric so it is now ready to be sanded for finishing. These include rounding over the body, sanding epoxy off the fretboard inlays, fine tuning the radius of the fingerboard, and installing frets.

Last night, I was up until about 2 am sanding the grain filler off of the acoustic so I could start spraying lacquer on today. I didn't quite finishing the grain fill sanding last night, so I spent a couple of hours this morning finishing that chore. Once that was done, I had to record some top thicknesses and sprayed a sealer coat before lunch. After lunch, I got 4 coats of lacquer sprayed and even got in some good work on my archtop neck as well as gluing the archtop back to the ribs. I may have it done for the advanced finishing class that I'm taking in the last 2 weeks of May so I can put a pretty sunburst on it! I'm stoked about everything.

Below are some photos of how the acoustic is sprayed.

First, I spray the front, back and edges of the headstock:
...then I spray the sides:...then the back and top:
...and then another coat on the sides since they are harder to spray and the finish doesn't seem to build up on them as easily:...and lastly I hang up the guitar and spray the neck:

Oops, I sprayed a little too heavily on the headcap and developed some runs. It's alright though because this will be leveled out later:

And a few shots of the nice, wet, shiny guitar hanging in the booth to dry:
This is the current progress on the archtop:
I just need to get those blasted braces fit to the inside of the top, and the box will be together and ready for routing the binding channel.

Here are a couple of shots of the electric progress:I think the diamonds turned out quite nicely and look awesome with the gold fretwire. Unfortunately I'm not sure where my camera battery charger is, so I used Alex's camera to take these, so I apologize for them being out of focus.
This guitar looks better in person. I just have a couple of burn marks from routing the roundover in the body that need to be sanded out, as well as finishing the roundover taper on the back and arm contour transitions. This thing will be done soon!

Umm... diamonds and sanity.

2008-05-01T00:55:00.003-05:00

Tell me people am I going insane???

Well I guess I'm not, but I sure as heck am stressed out. After a couple of days of sanding, the acoustic is finally ready to start being sprayed! I was hoping to get the sealer coat on today so I could grain fill the first thing tomorrow morning, but that didn't happen. The good news is that there's no more sanding! This leaves me with the following needing to get done at the specified times: Spray sealer and apply grain filler tomorrow, sand grain filler friday night and maybe saturday morning, spray another sealer coat and 4 gloss lacquer coats on Saturday, Spray 4 more lacquer coats on Monday, level sand lacquer and spray 4 more coats on Tuesday, spray 4 more coats Wednesday and glue bridge on near the end of the day, and lastly make nut and saddle on Thursday by 3. I can do it. Fun stuff. Lots of stress.

Considering there was nothing to do on the acoustic tonight, I decided to get some work done on the notacaster. After much deliberation, I decided that I was going to do diamonds on the entire fretboard so things would look uniform and not as if I screwed up, so tonights order of business was to cut out more gold mother-of-pearl diamonds and inlay them into the fingerboard. I used a jeweler's saw and a handy dandy inlay cutting jig I made to cut out the pearl. Then I located on the fingerboard where they would be placed and traced the outline of each diamond. With the outlines drawn, I used the dremel tool with a precision router base to route out the fingerboard. Then, it was just a matter of mixing up some dark mission brown with epoxy, and epoxying the diamonds in place. I'll have to sand all the excess epoxy off on Friday to see how everything turned out, but I'm pretty sure that the diamonds will look awesome!

Here is the fingerboard after having the cavities for the diamonds routed out. You can also see all the diamonds that I cut out behind it, as well as the precision router base with the dremel in the upper left hand corner:

And after epoxying the diamonds in:The fingerboard looks really messy now, but it's a good idea to really pack the epoxy in so there will be no gaps.

And here is a shot of the body with the control cavity cover that I made by laminating 3 thin pieces of the top wood:It's not a perfect grain match because that would be impossible considering the pieces were cut from a different plane of the wood, but it's pretty close and I think it turned out really well.

That's all I have for tonight, but I'll try to post pictures of the acoustic finishing process and archtop tomorrow or Friday.

Not quite living up to the title of the blog.

2008-04-29T00:01:00.003-05:00

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.

2008-04-18T17:25:00.003-05:00

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.

2008-04-11T16:35:00.003-05:00

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:

A different method of neck shaping

2008-03-28T18:26:00.004-05:00

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

2008-03-27T21:44:00.003-05:00

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

2008-03-26T22:19:00.004-05:00

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!

2008-03-21T16:33:00.003-05:00

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.

The shredding machine.

2008-02-29T17:18:00.003-06:00

I think that I enjoy electric construction more every single friday. I guess I'm just excited that I'm able to do stuff that makes it look more and more like an electric guitar every week. Today was no exception.

Last week, I was about to start preparing my neck and realized I had a little problem. I was planning on cutting part of my archtop neck blank off and making the electric neck out of that, but I didn't actually check to see if it was even wide enough until last friday. It wasn't. If I wanted to use it, I would have to add wings to the headstock, something that really just doesn't work out with flamed maple unless you are adding a headstock laminate or putting an opaque finish on it. Being that neither of these options were acceptable to me, I decided to rush order a strat sized neck blank from LMI, and was extremely happy that I did. The flame on this neck blank is some of the sweetest I have seen. I know it sounds silly, but that was just the thing I needed to put me in the mood to work hard today and I got quite a bit done.

First of all, I had to square up the blank and thickness plane it down to the finished thickness of 3/4". Once this was done, I laid the headstock template on the blank and drew a centerline on the neck according to the center line of the headstock template. Then, the neck was cut down to length where it meets the body and the trussrod slot was routed.

Here is a shot of the truss rod slot with the trussrod in place:

After the trussrod was in, I cut off and shaped the end of the fingerboard and cut the back slot for the nut shelf, being that it is a fender style nut where the nut actually sits in a slot in the fingerboard as opposed to the nut shelf being on the neck behind the fingerboard. After installing some side dots in the fingerboard, I located and pinned the fingerboard before gluing it on.

Here is the neck blank with the fingerboard glued on:

While the fingerboard was clamped, I flush routed the top to the body and did a little spindle sanding around the curves to get everything nice and smooth. I still had some time before un-clamping so I got some more work in on shaping the acoustic neck and it is really close to being ready to be sanded for finishing.

I still haven't decided how I am going to finish the electric, but it will have something to do with reds and oranges. I really like the figure in the top, so it will most likely be only lightly toned so as not to detract from it's natural beauty, but there are definitely a lot of options with the neck and the back/side area of the body.

Here's a photo of the under construction neck with the body to get an idea of how they will look toghether:
Subtract all the wood that isn't part of the guitar, add some gold fretwire, gold tuners, gold bridge, black pickups, some pots, spray a finish, and it's a guitar! Easy enough, right? Well, it is getting closer to being a shredding machine...

Looks like a guitar, don't it?

2008-02-28T16:13:00.004-06:00

It's been a rather busy day and a half. I worked my but off yesterday and am glad to have done so. The day started off with some preparation of the neck for gluing on to the body. This involved rough thicknessing the neck to within 1/32" of the finished thickness taper using the safety planer, transferring the width taper to the back of the neck and rough cutting off the excess width, and then cutting off the excess length from the heel. After a final check of the dovetail fit, heel fit, centerline, and neck angle I heated up some hide glue and got the neck on.

Here is a shot of the neck being glued:

While waiting for the neck joint to dry, I installed the fingerboard side dots. This was an easy task, which I just so happened to slightly screw up, but you have to look pretty close to notice that the 12th fret dots are not parallel to the fingerboard.

Here's the dots glued in:

After lunch and when the neck had sufficient clamp time, I made a spline for the trussrod and installed it. The purpose of this spline is to hold the trussrod securely into the neck since the trussrod slot is deeper at the body end than it is at the headstock. Without it, there would be a big gap between the trussrod and the fingerboard and render the trussrod useless. The reason for the slot being deeper at the body is that the trussrod will be adjustable through the soundhole, making it quite difficult for me to adjust but I really like the clean look of no trussrod cover on the headstock.

Here is what it looks like with the trussrod installed and neck leveled ready for a fingerboard:

I also cut off the excess from the fingerboard and rounded the end to match the curvature of the soundhole. The end is also beveled and hangs over the soundhole just a bit and I think it looks pretty cool. I just barely had time to get the fingerboard glued between dry clamping and waiting for the hide glue to be ready, but I got it on and used about 21 clamps total to glue it up. I somehow still had a slight gap on the bass side from the 7th-12th frets, but I have some various ideas about how that will be fixed. I really have no idea how the gap happened though....

Here's the fingerboard being glued:

I started shaping my neck at about 8:15 this morning after finding a neck shaping jig and a decent spokeshave and got pretty close to finishing it by lunch time. Unfortunately, it still has some work to do, but I now have until may to have the guitar ready for finishing so I will get it fine tuned over the next month or so.

Here's some shots of the neck shaping in progress and the method of holding the guitar in place to do the shaping:

Well whaddya know, the guitar is almost done. I just have a lot of sanding and scraping to do, some fret work, some lacquer spraying, finish shaping the neck, and make a bridge/saddle and nut. I'm starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel...

Here's a couple shots of the guitar:
Yes, there is a lot of glue squeeze out all over the place, but it will be scraped and sanded off so it really will look pretty I promise.
Well, that's it for today. I'm off to archtop to do some scraping!

1.5 days left to finish the neck...

2008-02-26T21:45:00.003-06:00

Am I nervous? A bit. I will get it done! I'm determined to.

Today felt like progress and that's always a good feeling. After an hour long lecture, I pinned and glued my headcap laminate to my headstock and had to wait for it to dry, but conveniently had another lecture on inlay work in the time it needed to dry. After unclamping, i rough thicknessed the headstock with the safety planer to give the back of the headstock a flat enough surface to stick a block to for supporting the headstock and keeping it square while cutting out the shape on the bandsaw and smoothing it out on the spindle sander. I then did a little hand touch up involving some rather complex sanding tools including a couple of flexible rulers and a sandpaper roll. Once I was satisfied with the headstock shaping and symmetry, I laid out the tuner locations and drilled the tuner holes. My 3/8" drill bit wasn't quite big enough for the tuners, so I had to do a little reaming by hand and the tuners fit like a glove.

Here's a photo of the tuners in the headstock. I only put one bushing/washer in to see how they worked(lower left tuner), but all the tuners will have them on the assembled guitar.

You can use your imagination here to get an idea of what the finished guitar will look like. It's getting close!Here's a shot of the end graft as mentioned in previous blogs. I should have made sure the camera was in focus when I took this. I'll post another pic of this later after it's been cleaned up a bit.

In archtop news, I'm finally done carving the outside arch on both the top and back. I starting scraping tonight and it will probably take me all of the class period on thursday to finish the scraping, but it really feels good to be moving on and know that I will be starting graduations(inside arching) very soon.

Here's a couple shots of the back in the scraping process:

Tomorrow will be a busy day. I have to get my neck taper rough thicknessed, glue on the neck, install fingerboard side dots, and glue the fingerboard on so I can shape the neck on Thursday. I'm sweating a little bit, but if I focus it can be done...

A triad of photographic updates.

2008-02-25T17:41:00.004-06:00

I cannot say that I've had a single day in the last month without something to do. The acoustic is nearing completion, I'm finally starting to feel like I'm making some progress in archtop, and the electric is starting to take shape as well. I have been a little bit stressed out over whether or not I am going to finish these guitars, but I am determined and I know I will find a way to make it happen.

I finished up my end graft on Tuesday and have since forgotten to take a photo of it. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, but there is just one miter that will need a bit of "touch up" before the finish is sprayed. I also got my heel carved sometime between Tuesday and Wednesday, but I don't exactly remember what day I did that. Other than that, Wednesday and Thursday were spent fitting the dovetail. Even with a fancy dovetail routing jig, there is still a good deal of dovetail fitting necessary to get a good joint and a good looking heel. I did really well in neck reset class and so I thought I would be able to fly through this on the real guitar, but this sadly did not happen. I am happy to say however, that I am one of the few people in the class not needing to shim the dovetail. That is one task that I am feeling really good about being done so I can move on to more exciting things. I think the next flat top steel string guitar I build is going to have a bolt on neck.

Here is a shot of the carved heel and fit dovetail. Yes, there is a gap showing because the dovetail would not stay all the way in for the picture due to the heel not being cut down to length.

Today, I routed the truss rod slot in the neck. Because it is going to be adjusted through the soundhole, I had to make the truss rod slot a little deeper at the neck/body joint to allow access to the truss rod underneath the top. This was done by shimming the neck at the nut end on the router table so the depth of the slot actually tapers from deeper at the body to about 1/64" over the thickness of the truss rod at the nut. Before gluing the fingerboard on, there will be a spline glued on over the truss rod so it won't be loose in the slot, preventing it from functioning properly.

Here is the neck with the truss rod slot routed. There is an area marked on the top which will be routed out to allow the truss rod to enter the body and make neck removal much easier when a neck reset is needed in the future.

After routing the truss rod slot, I glued some wings onto the headstock, as the neck blank was not quite wide enough to accommodate my headstock design and really didn't want to alter it. The funny thing is that only a really small 1/2" x 1/8" section of the wings are actually needed for the headstock, so most of the "wings" will get cut off anyways. That will be happening tomorrow.

Here's a photo of the headstock wings glued on:
I also did some work on the fingerboard today, getting it radiused and tapered. It's the little things like this that get me excited and make me think it's actually going to be a guitar eventually.

Here is the fingerboard laid on the neck to show what it is going to look like:

Archtop is moving along, slowly but surely... Top final arching is nearly done and back final arching is nearly done. I should be scraping by tomorrow night and moving on to graduations by next tuesday. Hopefully the box will be together by the end of march, leaving the month of april to get necks done. I may actually finish this thing...

Here's the top arch almost done with the carving and just about ready for scraping:

I made a good deal of progress in electric on Friday. I finished routing the chambers and got the wire channel locations laid out and routed. I did forget to route the channel for the bridge ground, but it's just one wire and the channel doesn't need to be very big and can be drilled. The body looks pretty holy right now, but there is still a lot of wood to be routed, including the tremolo/spring cavity, control cavity, neck pocket, and pickup cavities which will all be done at a later time.

Here is a shot of the body with chambers and channels routed:

As I had written in the previous post, I was kind of worried at how my top join would come out. It didn't help that it was 1/2" thick in the first place and I was using the same method I'd use to join an acoustic guitar top, so needless to say I was crossing my fingers. Thankfully, crossing your fingers is a good tactic and one side of the joint looked good. The other side, however, looked like somebody was trying to glue a plate and a bowl together or something. Because the top on an electric guitar is more aesthetic than structural as opposed to an acoustic or archtop, the one good side of the joint was enough to suffice. After thicknessing, I was happy to find out that it was still 7/16" thick, 1/16" under my desired dimension, but I can still make it work out with the depth of my preamp electronics.

I then cut out the top wood to the outline of the guitar body and drilled some locating pin holes in the location of the neck pocket and bridge pickup for gluing, cut some dowels to length and glued the top to the body using some veneer presses.

Here is a shot of the body with the top cap glued on and ready for flush routing:
And another shot of the body with some different camera settings. This cap wood is so cool because it looks a lot like Koa:

And that's it for this post. More neck progress later this week...

Electric ups and downs.

2008-02-15T17:47:00.003-06:00

Well, electric construction had it's ups and downs today. I spent the first half of the day trying to join my top cap. This may seem to be a simple task, but today it was anything but. I made the mistake of resawing my cap wood last week after I had flattened it on the jointer so at the end of class last week it would have been good to be joined. Fast forward a week and the things I learned the first few weeks of class about wood movement came back to haunt me. It was now cupped quite severely and I didn't want to run it through the jointer again because it was too close to the finished thickness I wanted, which is crucial for me to be able to fit my preamp in the body. I decided to try to get this cupped piece of kindling joined by hand with a jointer plane and block plane, but it still was not going well at all. I decided to glue it and hope for the best. I took it out of the gluing deck after a few hours and I must say that it is the worst join I have ever done. I have fortunately seen worse, but when it comes to joinery I'm pretty picky. I think I will thickness sand it down and see where I stand. Maybe when it's sanded down, there will be one side of the joint that actually looks good that I will decide to use. If not, I can always inlay a strip of cocobolo with some purfling over the joint and solve the problem that way. It'll work out, but I'm just a bit irritated because I am a perfectionist and when things don't turn out as close to perfect as I like them, it really bugs me.

On a more positive note, I did get my electric body cut out, flush routed to the template, and 3 of the chambers routed. The purpose of these chambers is mainly to remove some weight from the body since the cap is going to be 1/2", but some people say that they affect the sound of the guitar. I think it will still sound like a regular solid body. Here is a photo:
That's the primavera. It's from Mexico and stinks like a barn. I just have one more chamber to route and some wire channel routes to do before it's ready for the top cap. It's exciting to finally be doing some woodworking in electric instead of drawing blueprints and making templates.

Success!

2008-02-14T21:42:00.004-06:00

When I got into class this morning, it was just like Christmas unwrapping the tape from the binding to see how it turned out, and I was very happy. There are virtually no gaps in the top binding, which my instructor said doesn't happen very often with wood binding. With some confidence in what I was doing, I got the back binding installed before lunch. The back binding is a little more difficult, due to the curvature or the back and the fact that you have 2 butt joints which are both visible that have to line up with the center line perfectly. The top is much easier in that respect as it only has one butt joint at the tailblock and the binding is covered up by the neck/body joint at the dovetail and does not come together because of the dovetail mortise. Around 2:00 this afternoon, I removed the tape from the back and was pleasantly surprised to see that the back binding turned out even better than the top, and I have been in a good mood all day since. Starting to scrape the binding flush is very rewarding because everything looks so dirty when you take the tape off, but scraping really cleans it up and makes it look nice.

Here is a shot of the bound box:
There is still plenty of scraping to do.

I also started on the end graft today and should finish it on tuesday. I got the 4 miters cut in the side purfling(next to the binding) and got one of the end graft pieces of purfling mitered and cut. I'll just have to fit the 2nd piece of purfling and the cocobolo piece that is going in the middle on tuesday and it is going to look awesome.

Here's what the end graft looks like so far:

I did get my neck rough cut on Tuesday and the fretboard slotted yesterday, so next week will be all sorts of fun stuff like cutting the neck angle, routing the dovetail tenon, carving the heel, fitting the neck, radiusing the fretboard, cutting the taper, gluing the fretboard, and maybe some work on the headstock and neck shaping...

I should be doing some actual cool stuff in electric tomorrow, so I will try to take some pictures and blog again this weekend.

Even more on binding.

2008-02-13T18:37:00.003-06:00

We didn't have a lecture this morning, so I was able to get right to it with the binding first thing in the morning. The first order of business was to select the proper router bearings for the size of binding and purfling that I'm using and make some test cuts. After everything was set up for my purfling to fit correctly, I had to set up my guitar in the binding cradle and make sure that the top edge was even with the table to ensure accurate cuts.

One of the dilemmas that luthiers had previously come across when routing binding is that when you use a regular router with a bearing, the binding channels are not straight up and down due to the slight curvature in the top and back. To correct this, Tom Ribbecke, a well known guitar maker, designed the Universal binding machine. This device holds the router upright and the guitar is passed underneath it to get a straight binding channel route. Using this machine, the binding routing went smoothly, quickly, and easily. It was a lot less stressful than I thought it would be.

Here is what the binding machine looks like. I've decided that I must get one of these when I'm building on my own:

The only actually time consuming part in routing for the binding is that you have to readjust the cradle for routing the back and once the purfling channel is cut, the bearing needs to be changed and the depth adjusted, again making test cuts to ensure a good fit for the binding. After the routing was done, I marked out my end graft location and routed out a slot for that.

After routing the end graft, I took my bent pieces of binding out of the mold and discovered that the side purfling had come off of most of them. This was kind of a bummer, but doesn't really matter because the purfling pieces still bent the way I wanted them too and that is the important part. It was just a little difficult when installing the binding and purfling because they are all glued in together, so I had 3 pieces to contend with instead of 1 or 2 which most people had. Why does Cocobolo have to be so oily? After a session of chisel sharpening and a little trimming, I got the top binding and purfling completely in. It'll be on to the back binding/purfling and and graft installation tomorrow, which I'm a bit nervous about as I plan on mitering the purfling that runs up and down the end graft to meet the side purfling at about a 45 degree angle. If done right, it is going to look awesome!

Here is the binding clamped in place with one of the most high tech tools I used today, tape:
And the binding and purfling out of the mold and ready to be installed in the back:
I can't wait to take the tape off of the top tomorrow and see how it turned out!

A bit on binding.

2008-02-11T23:16:00.000-06:00

Well, it didn't seem like I got as much done as I wanted to today, but what can I say it was a monday... We had a fairly long lecture today on binding, as binding is one of the things that really differentiates a fine guitar from a mediocre guitar. I'm not going to go into all the specifics of it right now, but needless to say there is a lot more to just routing the channel and gluing it in.

I did get my back glued on and flush routed today, as well as getting my binding prepared. The binding that I'm using is cocobolo with b/w/b side purfling and b/w/b top and back purfling as well. When doing side purfling, it needs to be glued to the binding, so it can be bent with the binding and because of the structure of it, the side purfling would not bend by itself. To attach the side purfling to the binding, the two pieces are wrapped together with thread, and then thin super glue is wicked into the joint between the two. Then, they are thickness sanded to a consistent thickness and ready to be bent. I had to do some cleanup work of the binding/purfling pieces before bending, so they did not get bent today, but will be first thing tomorrow. I will also start the neck construction tomorrow, and will probably post another update on wednesday. In the meantime, here are some photos for you all.

Gluing the back on using the same method used for the top:

Here is a shot of the box all together and ready for the binding routes:I'm really excited to see how this is going to look finished. You can't see the mottled flame in it all that well right now, but it will really pop on the back and sides with some finish.

Here is a shot of the binding pieces all ready to be bent:
Yes, there are 5 pieces there. I made one extra just in case there are any bending issues.

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

2008-02-07T21:37:00.000-06:00

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...

Lots of holdups this week, but moving forward none the less.

2008-02-02T14:43:00.000-06:00

What an interesting week it has been for me. Pretty much every week has been interesting since I moved to Red Wing, but this week was particularly bizarre. Weeks like this make me really feel like this winter is out to get me, but I won't let it get me down for too long. I've got 3 guitars to finish before the school year is over, and the only thing that will make that happen is persistence.

Wednesday was an ok day in acoustic construction, but there are things I would have liked to have gone better. I did get my top voiced first thing in the morning, and I was surprised at how easy it was to do. Hopefully, the voicing process will lead to a well balanced dreadnought with not too much bass. It should be really interesting to hear how it sounds with the black acacia back and sides, because I've never heard a black acacia dreadnought before, let alone a koa dreadnought. The second half of the day, I got my second side bent and clamped in the mold over night, and I also made a feeble attempt at back joining. The flame in the back was giving me some difficulties, and I tried a couple of different jointer planes, different places on the blade, and I even freshly honed a plane blade, all with no luck. It was around 4:00 when I started to get quite frustrated and jammed my right hand pointer finger into the plane blade. Enter gushing blood. Grrr. I went back to the sink, rinsed it off, and applied some pressure trying to get the bleeding to stop. It seemed like it wasn't going to stop, but it did eventually. My instructor wanted me to go into urgent care as a precaution because the cut went through my fingernail about an eighth of an inch, but the doctor told me I didn't really need to come in and that my finger would heal just fine on it's own. I also kind of figured as much, but I guess better safe than sorry.

Thursday was a relatively productive day in both acoustic and archtop. I finally got my back joined, thicknessed, and the outline cut out. I also trimmed off the excess from the sides, prepped the blocks, and glued the blocks to the ribs. Near the end of the class, I got my back braces prepared for gluing and glued the back center support strip in the go-bar deck so the back will be ready for bracing on monday. Hopefully on to box assembly and neck construction next week!

Archtop is coming along. I'm still working on the final arch shaping of my back, and every class period brings it closer to done. Hopefully, I'll be scraping the back and working on the final arching of the top next week. Once the final arching and scraping is done, it will be on to graduations! Apparently the graduations are pretty simple on guitars, and all the process involves is drilling a bunch of holes of different depths in different areas on the back of the plates and gouging/planing down to the depths of the holes until they are gone, then checking and fine tuning with a dial caliper. The arching, however, is much more in the dark since I have never done this before and am not exactly sure what the final product is supposed to look like. It's starting to make more sense to me, and the arching templates really help, but it also seems like what my instructors tell me to do is contrary to what the arching templates are telling me. There's also the whole issue of the recurve throwing things off a bit with the templates as well. I'm sure it will start to make sense soon.

Electric construction yesterday was kind of sad. I made some good progress on finishing up my templates in the 2 hours of the day after a 2 hour lecture from 8-10. I would have probably finished my templates yesterday, but the power went out in my apartment over lunch and what do you know, it was also out at school. Apparently, Excel was saying it could be up to 4 hours, so my instructor decided to cancel class. Boo. More lost lab time. More hindered progress. Time to kick things into overdrive...

More photos coming next week!

Snow day lutherie.

2008-01-29T13:02:00.000-06:00

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.

2008-01-23T18:21:00.000-06:00

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

2008-01-16T17:08:00.000-06:00

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.

2008-01-10T22:37:00.000-06:00

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...

2008-01-08T14:45:00.000-06:00

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.

Another post about the electric plans...

2007-12-31T16:30:00.000-06:00

Well, I now have all my electric wood ordered, so I'm really starting to get excited about it. I ordered a cool spalted curly maple drop top and a one piece primavera body blank, which will have a bunch of little chambers routed out of it before attaching the drop top. This will make the axe a little lighter and I've read that if you use multiple smaller chambers instead of semi-hollow, the guitar will have less feedback problems.

It will also have no f-holes, because the top looks too cool to cut anything out of it. For the same reason, I'm also planning on doing a rear route with no pickguard, and I've read that the pickups sound better mounted directly to the body instead of the pickguard anyways.

Here's a photo of the drop top:
So add in a curly maple neck taken from my archtop neck blank, a cocobolo fingerboard, and this guitar will be visually similar to my inspiration guitar with a few little touches of my own here and there to make things even sweeter.

My bridge and pre-amp came today, and they seem to be pretty high quality. The only thing I'm concerned about are the saddles, which are unchangeable on this bridge. If they don't work out, I can always install a new bridge later and add some graph tech piezo saddles. And that is all I have for you today...

The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

2007-12-31T14:32:00.000-06:00

Yesterday was a good day. I came home from Sunderland's woke up, ate some lunch, watched a little Flight of the Conchords, and decided to get out of the house.

Steve, Cheryl, and I went to see the film adaptation of Sweeney Todd and I have to say it wasn't bad. As with most movie musical adaptations, certain liberties were taken, certain things cut out, and changes made. A couple items that stand out are the omission of the Ballad of Sweeney Todd and just the overall darkening of the mood. Much of the humor from the musical was pretty much cut out and the movie just had a darker, more ominous tone than the original stage production.

A good portion of the music was intact and surprisingly well done. I had originally heard that Stephen Sondheim didn't want Johnny Depp to play the role of Todd because he couldn't sing, but that was somehow changed through the magic of Hollywood vocal coaches and Depp and Burton's persistence to make the role happen. Helena Bonham Carter pulled of Mrs Lovett quite well, and for once I believe that Depp did not steal the show.

One thing to keep in mind about the film is that it is indeed a Tim Burton film and it is soaking with an ever-so-recognizable Burton-esque vibe. This could not be more obvious in the picnic scene where Mrs. Lovett is confiding to Todd her dreams for the future with him and the flash-to realizations of these. Whether it be the costumes, the sets, or the makeup, it's all there and over the top.

Another word of warning, is that the gore factor in this movie is also over the top. The deaths aren't always swift and there are many of them. From the razor slit throats to bodies dropping down the chute to the bakehouse, this movie will make any normal person cringe. This is definitely not a children's movie and also not recommended for those with a weak stomach for blood. It was the bloodiest Broadway musical ever, and I'm pretty sure it's the bloodiest movie musical to date. I won't go so far as to say that the gore is out of place or uncalled for, because it definitely does add to the film in it's own vengeful way, but it is definitely intense.

So for anybody that can appreciate a stage to film adaptation of a classic broadway musical with a blackened feel and has a strong stomach, I highly recommend Sweeney Todd. Perhaps it could be my enchantment with the whole Burton/Depp matchup, but I really enjoyed it. If I were some bigshot newspaper movie critic, I would give it an 8.5 out of 10, a 4 out of 5, or 3.5 out of 4 stars or what have you... Go see it.

Thinking about pickups on Christmas Eve...

2007-12-24T18:11:00.000-06:00

Well, it's Christmas eve and the electric plans are finally starting to come into fruition. I've decided on a piezo pseudo-strat, which I think is going to be pretty sweet. I went ahead and ordered my LR Baggs X-bridge, along with an active pre-amp for the piezo pickup in the bridge. The pre-amp saves a lot of wiring hassle by having built in blend pot and stereo/mono output jack switching which allows mono output with the piezo and magnetic pickups blended or stereo output with the piezo and the magnetic pickups in their own channel to allow a y cable to output to two separate amps, one acoustic amp and a regular electric amp. The preamp also has a built in gain pot to level the output with the mag pickups and a phase switch to allow the piezo to be in phase with the magnetic pickups.

Here's the bridge (will be gold, not chrome as pictured) and pre-amp:
I did quite a bit of research on pickups, mainly reading discussions at fenderforum.com and reviews in various places and decided that I wanted to do some single coils instead of humbuckers, which is what I've always had on any electric guitars up to this point. I stumbled upon Lace Sensor noiseless single coil pickups and decided to give them a shot. I ordered up a set of Hot Golds with black covers and the higher output 13.2k bridge pickup, and I'm pretty excited to hear how they sound with the Hot Rod Deluxe. Here's some info on them from the lace website:

It's not just a dual coil trying to emulate a single coil.

This is a true Single coil and it's our quiet noise reduced Sensor design! We added to a classic design. This revised and enhanced new lace sensor Hot Gold has slightly stronger output. They retain all the definition of the regular Gold Lace Sensors but add a firm bottom and singing mid range. Excellent from clean to vintage growl. Our new most popular pickup.

These Lace Sensor Hot Gold's have a fat, full bottom end, a singing midrange and all the high end sparkle and class you would expect from a killer Strat everything is there like never before.

Three-notes into these pickups and you too will hear the greatness we have all been waiting for.

"The Tech Talk"
Upgraded hotter Barium Ferrite magnets, Patented Lace Micro Matrix Combs for killer Vintage tone, available with an optional Hot Bridge 13.2k for more power and cut for harder rockin' and searing solos. Or the Standard Set all 6.0k's for neck, middle and bridge for that traditional Stratocaster vibe.

Neck 6.0k "Hot magnets"
Middle 6.0k "Hot magnets"
Bridge 6.0k "Hot magnets"

Hot Gold
Position: neck, mid
Resistance: 6.0k
Peak frequency: 3600
Inductance: 2.2

Hot Bridge

Position: bridge
Resistance: 13.2k
Peak frequency: 2510
Inductance: 6.1

So add an Alder chambered body with a maple drop top, maple neck, cocobolo fingerboard (maybe...), some schaller gold tuners, with all other gold hardware and this guitar is going to be pretty sweet...

Fretwork

2007-12-17T22:12:00.000-06:00

Well here's the deal folks. I've decided that I kinda like doing fretwork. The only problem is that I'm still kind of slow at it. I got my third fret job done today and got another A, so that's pretty sweet. I still need to get a 4th and 5th fretjob done by wednesday before 2 pm to get an A in the class, so I'm not sure if that's gonna happen but the good news is that as long as I get the 4th one done, I'll pass the class and everything will be gravy for next semester. I'd really like to get the 5th done, but I just don't know if it's going to be a possibility. I guess we'll see how hard I decide to work over the next 2 days of class, but it's not looking hopeful for the 5th.

Still trying to decide what to do for the electric, nothin' new there...

Hopefully finishing rough arching and spot gluing in archtop tomorrow, but we'll see how it goes.

That's it, that's all I got for this time... Peace.

A singin' and a dancin'

2007-12-16T01:11:00.000-06:00

I'm going to just throw something out here and perhaps spur some people to comment and get some discussion going, maybe see what kind of open minds are out there... To get on with it, I want to say that I love old musicals, especially anything by Irving Berlin, Rogers & Hammerstein, or Cole Porter.

My family has a tradition of watching White Christmas and Holiday Inn every year around Christmas time and I don't know if I've really realized how great they truly are. Perhaps it's just the unadulterated singing and dancing, but they have an air about them that you just don't see in movies made these days. Every now and then, a certain film like Moulin Rouge can come close to capturing a similar spirit, but it still just isn't the same.

So I guess this is a sigh to the way things once were, which at times almost makes me wish I was born in a different era while at the same time I am very content with the state of the arts today. And that is all I have to say about that.

And time flys by...

2007-12-13T21:24:00.000-06:00

It's hard to believe that in one week from today, the semester will be over. So far things have gone as good as I had expected and the momentum keeps picking up. I just have 2 or 3 fret jobs to finish and a couple of finals before Christmas break can begin. I'm kind of looking forward to break, not only because it will be a good time relaxing and spending some time with the family and friends, but I know it will go by rather quickly and second semester will begin. Second semester is going to be so incredibly sweet it's ridiculous. I'll be building the dreadnought, the electric, and finishing the archtop, learning finishing, doing some repairs, and having a blast.

So I made a new gouge handle tonight out of a chair leg that I got from Brian that he got from Dylan. Why a chair leg you ask? Because it works. Using the short handle that came on the gouge was a recipe for bloody knuckles, and I definitely cooked some of those up last week. The longer handle keeps some distance between your knuckles and the bench or piece that you're arching and makes the work easier and more enjoyable. Not to mention, a chair leg definitely adds some character to my tool collection. Brian took a picture or two of the attachment of the chair leg to the gouge, so hopefully I'll be able to get it/them posted, but I think you can use your imagination in the meantime.

I smoothed out the screw ups from the routing misadventure on Tuesday with some files, and the back looks just fine. Thankfully, its only really off in a couple of places, so it shouldn't affect the structural integrity of the guitar. I then started the second rough arching, which is really making it start to look like an archtop. After that's done, it'll be on to spot gluing the plates and drilling the locating pin holes. I'll make sure post some photos once this is done, because it really starts looking like a guitar during the spot gluing.

I talked to my instructor on Tuesday about binding the f-holes. He said it was a big pain and wouldn't recommend it, but it's something I'd really like to do and I could get it done if I took my plates home and did most of the work outside of class. Maybe I'll order up some f-hole binding and make a decision when it comes time. Bob Benedetto does make it look easy... Anyone else have any input on the situation?

And that's all I got for ya'll tonight.

Tools!

2007-12-11T21:50:00.000-06:00

I was rather relieved yesterday because we got our tool lists for next semester and thankfully it's nowhere near as extensive as tool lists A, B, or C. The most expensive tools are optional, like the jointer plane and spokeshave, but I think I'm going to pick them up. Not to mention, I have over half of the stuff on the list like the Jewelers saw, Protractor, Center Finding Ruler, 100 clothespins and rubber bands, and finger planes. All that's left is some cam clamps, bungee cords, a respirator, and a couple of other odds and ends. Sweet!

Fret job # 2 is nearly done and ready for a grade. All that's left to do is polish the frets and dress the ends. Yay!

Archtop last night was kind of disappointing because I had finished the first rough arching and was ready to rout the edges of the plates to thickness. The key to doing this successfully and getting a consistent thickness within a tenth of a millimeter or two is that the plates are flat. Mine weren't any more, so to make a long story short, my back is about a half millimeter thin in a couple of places. It's not a huge deal, but to an instrument maker, it's a lot. Oh well, at least the top went well because it is more flexible and could be held down flat on the table while routing.

Here is a picture of the top edge routing:

And the back, which got a little messed up:Time for second rough arching on Thursday!

Mason Jennings

2007-12-11T00:31:00.000-06:00

I've come to the realization that as much as I am absorbed with music throughout a good portion of my life, I really don't get to enough live shows. So, I think I am going to go to the Mason Jennings Show at First Ave on Dec. 27. Anyone else want to go?

Something a bit lighter...

2007-12-10T17:51:00.000-06:00

I know, I know, 3 posts in one day... This will be the last, I promise. The archtop blog doesn't count though, because I took it from my other more general blog, and I figured I should move it here so this would be more complete and have a good start so I'd have some momentum to keep this thing going and not only that, but keep it interesting as well. What can I say, I'm in a writing mood today...

So last night was a long night... I finally finished planning everything out for the acoustic guitar I am going to build next semester. It is going to be sweet. The basic specs are Bearclaw Sitka Top, Australian Blackwood aka Black Acacia (same family and similar characteristics to Koa) back and sides, Cocobolo fingerboard, bridge, headplate and bindings, Sapele Mahogany neck, Gotoh tuners, Green Abalone rosette with some purfling around it, and it's going to be a slope shoulder dreadnought with a 25.4" scale length, Martin X-bracing, and a neck width of 1.75" at the nut and 2.25" at the 12th fret. I'm excited. It definitely took me a while to get the bridge and headstock design to actually look good, but I'm pretty happy with them although they may need just a bit more tweaking. I'll make scans of them and post them once I get them back from my instructor.

This is the Australian Blackwood that I go from the Australian Tonewoods store on ebay:

It was a lot cheaper than LMI and it looks really nice. My only complaint is a small pin knot that is on both ribs, but fortunately will likely be cut off when making the taper, but if not the binding channel routing will get rid of it.

It is going to be sweeeet.

And a shot of how the figure on the back will look when finished:

And the bearclaw Sitka top:

Yes, I am getting quite excited to build this dreadnought next semester...

Classes are going well, except for the fact that we only have a week and a half of class to get 4.5 more fret jobs done. I like fretwork, well most of it anyways. It's kind of a pain in the ass when you pull the frets out to do another fret job and a good portion of the fret slot comes with it. If bigs chips come out, you have to save em and put em back in. If you loose the chips, then you have to put super glue in the holes and pack rosewood dust in to fill it. It's fun stuff. Takes some time to fix a fingerboard. Once that's done, it's on to radiusing, cutting the frets, installing the frets, trimming the frets, beveling the frets, leveling, crowning, sanding, polishing, and dressing the ends. Those steps actually go fairly quickly, so I'm hopeful that I can get stuff done. I'm pretty much done with electric setup except for the mockup neck pocket routing, but I don't expect that to be too bad.

Speaking of electrics, I need to figure out what to do for the electric I'm building next semester. I want ideas for body designs, pickup configuration, headstocks, woods, finishes, etc... I've decided that I am going to do a strat style tremolo bridge with piezo saddles but that's about all I can make up my mind about. I do want to have at least one single coil on the guitar too, but everything else is up in the air. Let me know what you think! Comment! NOW!!

Archtop Progress, With Photos!

2007-12-10T17:33:00.000-06:00

Well, some people have been asking for some pictures of what I've been doing in school lately, and the only thing that would probably be of interest to them is the archtop construction. Here's a brief rundown of the process and what I've done so far:

The first thing we did in the class for a week or two was make templates to assist us in arching and prepare the molds. We are the first year class where we didn't have to make our own molds, which is kind of nice, but I also kind of wish that I would have so that I would have the mold to use in the future. The interesting thing about the molds that we are using is the fact that they are inside molds that break away from the body when the time comes. The pieces near the blocks come out and then the 2 main body mold pieces slide in and out. Here is a picture with some arrows to show how this works:

So once the molds and templates were ready, we started working on the blocks. The blocks are squared, planed to height, then glued into the mold using spacer sticks planed to a thickness of 13 milimeters accurate to within 1/10 of a milimeter. When gluing the blocks to the mold, a small spot of hot hide glue was used, as it is brittle and will break away from the mold easily when needed. Once in the mold, the blocks were carved, filed, and sanded to match the curves of the body outline and are flush with the mold.

The next step was to thickness the ribs(sides) and cut them to a couple milimeters over the final height. Then, I bent the ribs(sides) usinga handy dandy setup consisting of a basswood mold, some clamps, some cauls, some wooden sticks, some tinfoil, paper towels, a little water, some sheets of spring steel, and a silicone heating blanket. It was a pretty easy process with that setup, and I highly recommend it to anyone wanting to build a guitar. You can, however always bend the sides the old fashioned way by hand with a bending iron, but the heating blanket is sooo much easier. Before gluing the ribs, they were dry clamped into the mold overnight to settle and then trimmed up to form the butt joint and so they can be attached to the blocks. After gluing the ribs to the blocks, reversed kerfed lining was attached and then the whole thing was sanded flat and to final height using a big sheet of sandpaper on a granite flat plate. I now had the completed rib structure as seen below:

Well, I'm getting long-winded, but that's ok, you don't have to read this if you don't want to.

After the rib structure was completed, we started working on the plates. The plates are pieces of wood around 30 milimeters thick that are joined together to become the top and the back of the guitar. Considering the disastrous climate conditions in our labs for the first couple months of class, a lot of work was needed to flatten the plates for joining. Most of the flattening is done by putting the plates on a flat plate with chalk and planing off the areas where chalk is left on the wood. This can get kind of tedious, so at the pre-joining phase there is a certain level of flat enough. Then the edges to be joined were sent through the jointer a couple of times and then hand planed to perfect the joint, with gaps no more than a thousandth of an inch or so. The first time around, this took a while, but I got better at it after joining both my top and back. Once the seams were perfect, the plates were joined with some really big clamps and hot hide glue. Woohoo! My plates now have a perfect joint and the only way you can really tell there is a seam is from the varying grain direction in the wood.

After joining, the plates were then flattened with a big jointer plane and fine tuned to fit perfectly with the rib structure using the block plane. Once they were flat, I traced the outline of the body from the mold on the back of each with a scribe. They were then sent through the thickness sander and sanded down to a final arch height of 25 milimeters and cut to shape on the bandsaw. Here is the top at this point:

I was pretty excited at this point because I finally got to start the rough arching of the plates. Woohoo! Now it was time to remove a crapload of wood. Most plates for archtops come in wedges, so as to not have to remove so much wood. Mine were slabs, so I had a lot to take off. You can see in the picture above at the bottom of the picture my new favorite tool, the scrub plane. This thing has a blade that is rounded like a gouge to hog out wood like no other. It still took me two class periods to get my rough arching done, but it would have taken much longer if I were just using a gouge. There is another method to rough arching which involves an angle grinder with a round chainsaw blade. This method is not the safest one, but if one is careful it can really speed up the process. I think I may try it for my next archtop guitar. The gouge also came in handy for some of the areas I couldn't quite get right in with the scrub plane, and can be seen at the top right of the photo below. Here are a couple pictures of the back rough arching:

(Note: the outside has been taken down to just over 6 mm and the egg shape in the middle is still 25 mm thick.)

And here is a picture of the top in the process of rough arching (the mess in the picture is only about a third of the woodchips and shavings created throughout the rough arching):

And tomorrow night, it's on to refining the arching and getting the plates closer to their final shape. This is exciting stuff!

Where to begin...

2007-12-10T17:14:00.001-06:00

Well, I'm not gonna beat around the bush here. This blog is going to be about guitars I am making, other guitar related things, and my opinions about music and musical instruments of other varieties. There might be some other stuff here and there, but that's the bulk of it. As many of you may know, I am currently enrolled in the guitar repair and construction program at MN State Southeast Technical in Red Wing and I am loving it. I have great instructors, tons of awesome classmates, and I am learning to do something that's been a dream of mine for a while now, and that's building musical instruments, primarily guitars, even more so archtop guitars. Acoustics are cool too. So are electrics.

The idea for this blog came from Brian at http://nanophone.blogspot.com, a classmate of mine and a cool guy. His blog's pretty cool, except he hasn't updated it for a while. Brian, if you are reading this you should update your blog. That's about all I got for this little intro thingy, so it's time to get rockin'.