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.