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: