Snow day lutherie.

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.

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

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.

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...

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...

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

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...

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

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'

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.