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...