Lots of holdups this week, but moving forward none the less.

What an interesting week it has been for me. Pretty much every week has been interesting since I moved to Red Wing, but this week was particularly bizarre. Weeks like this make me really feel like this winter is out to get me, but I won't let it get me down for too long. I've got 3 guitars to finish before the school year is over, and the only thing that will make that happen is persistence.

Wednesday was an ok day in acoustic construction, but there are things I would have liked to have gone better. I did get my top voiced first thing in the morning, and I was surprised at how easy it was to do. Hopefully, the voicing process will lead to a well balanced dreadnought with not too much bass. It should be really interesting to hear how it sounds with the black acacia back and sides, because I've never heard a black acacia dreadnought before, let alone a koa dreadnought. The second half of the day, I got my second side bent and clamped in the mold over night, and I also made a feeble attempt at back joining. The flame in the back was giving me some difficulties, and I tried a couple of different jointer planes, different places on the blade, and I even freshly honed a plane blade, all with no luck. It was around 4:00 when I started to get quite frustrated and jammed my right hand pointer finger into the plane blade. Enter gushing blood. Grrr. I went back to the sink, rinsed it off, and applied some pressure trying to get the bleeding to stop. It seemed like it wasn't going to stop, but it did eventually. My instructor wanted me to go into urgent care as a precaution because the cut went through my fingernail about an eighth of an inch, but the doctor told me I didn't really need to come in and that my finger would heal just fine on it's own. I also kind of figured as much, but I guess better safe than sorry.

Thursday was a relatively productive day in both acoustic and archtop. I finally got my back joined, thicknessed, and the outline cut out. I also trimmed off the excess from the sides, prepped the blocks, and glued the blocks to the ribs. Near the end of the class, I got my back braces prepared for gluing and glued the back center support strip in the go-bar deck so the back will be ready for bracing on monday. Hopefully on to box assembly and neck construction next week!

Archtop is coming along. I'm still working on the final arch shaping of my back, and every class period brings it closer to done. Hopefully, I'll be scraping the back and working on the final arching of the top next week. Once the final arching and scraping is done, it will be on to graduations! Apparently the graduations are pretty simple on guitars, and all the process involves is drilling a bunch of holes of different depths in different areas on the back of the plates and gouging/planing down to the depths of the holes until they are gone, then checking and fine tuning with a dial caliper. The arching, however, is much more in the dark since I have never done this before and am not exactly sure what the final product is supposed to look like. It's starting to make more sense to me, and the arching templates really help, but it also seems like what my instructors tell me to do is contrary to what the arching templates are telling me. There's also the whole issue of the recurve throwing things off a bit with the templates as well. I'm sure it will start to make sense soon.

Electric construction yesterday was kind of sad. I made some good progress on finishing up my templates in the 2 hours of the day after a 2 hour lecture from 8-10. I would have probably finished my templates yesterday, but the power went out in my apartment over lunch and what do you know, it was also out at school. Apparently, Excel was saying it could be up to 4 hours, so my instructor decided to cancel class. Boo. More lost lab time. More hindered progress. Time to kick things into overdrive...

More photos coming next week!