It's shiny!

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.

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.

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

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

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

This is the gold mother-of-pearl anchor:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Routing fun.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A different method of neck shaping

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

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

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


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

Rough Graduations Progress

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

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

Thanks to Gomer for being the guest photographer tonight.

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

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

Bathing in Woodchips

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

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


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

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

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

Graduation time!

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

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

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

The shredding machine.

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...