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.
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