Graduation time!

No, I'm not graduating from school yet, but I have finally gotten started on my archtop graduations, which are referring to the inside arch of the plates. Essentially, this is the process of hollowing and thinning out the top and back plates so they are able to resonate and vibrate freely and are crucial to the guitar's sound. The first step in this process is, of course, the rough graduations, which involves drilling a bunch of holes using a jig on a drill press so that when you remove wood down to where you can't see the holes, the plates will be at the desired thickness. Guitars usually get taken down to a thickness of between 4 and 5 millimeters for both plates. One of my classmates gave me a brief lesson in using an angle grinder to speed wood removal for this step, so I plan on picking one up this weekend so I can hopefully get caught up and possibly be able to finish it. It seems like a 50/50 chance that it will get done, but I am not going to give up hope. I'm still waiting for the weather to stabilize a bit so I can start bringing guitars home to work on. I still have about another month and a half or so to have things ready, so I'm not panicking just yet, but also not taking this matter lightly. I have a feeling that there are going to be some late nights working at Gomer's to get things done.

The electric is coming along. Today, I drilled holes for the fingerboard dots, but somehow managed to screw up the last 4 or so on the upper frets (large inlay there perhaps?). For some reason, no matter how hard I try, I always screw things up on the drill press. I even used a punch to mark the center of the holes for the forstner bit, but they still got off. Grr. I then cut out the headstock on the bandsaw and flush routed it to my template with a laminate trimmer. I then sanded the ramp into the headstock behind the nutshelf at the same time as thicknessing the headstock on the spindle sander. After lunch I rough cut out the neck taper, flush routed it to the fingerboard on the router table, and then started to shape the transition from the neck to the headstock on the spindle sander as well. I couldn't find a spindle small enough to finish it, so I ended the day making a neck pocket routing template. One of the next steps in the process will be to route the neck pocket and test fit the neck to the body in order to lay out the bridge and pickup routes.

Here is a shot of today's progress on the neck:
I'm still loving that flame.