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:

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.

The shredding machine.

I think that I enjoy electric construction more every single friday. I guess I'm just excited that I'm able to do stuff that makes it look more and more like an electric guitar every week. Today was no exception.

Last week, I was about to start preparing my neck and realized I had a little problem. I was planning on cutting part of my archtop neck blank off and making the electric neck out of that, but I didn't actually check to see if it was even wide enough until last friday. It wasn't. If I wanted to use it, I would have to add wings to the headstock, something that really just doesn't work out with flamed maple unless you are adding a headstock laminate or putting an opaque finish on it. Being that neither of these options were acceptable to me, I decided to rush order a strat sized neck blank from LMI, and was extremely happy that I did. The flame on this neck blank is some of the sweetest I have seen. I know it sounds silly, but that was just the thing I needed to put me in the mood to work hard today and I got quite a bit done.

First of all, I had to square up the blank and thickness plane it down to the finished thickness of 3/4". Once this was done, I laid the headstock template on the blank and drew a centerline on the neck according to the center line of the headstock template. Then, the neck was cut down to length where it meets the body and the trussrod slot was routed.

Here is a shot of the truss rod slot with the trussrod in place:

After the trussrod was in, I cut off and shaped the end of the fingerboard and cut the back slot for the nut shelf, being that it is a fender style nut where the nut actually sits in a slot in the fingerboard as opposed to the nut shelf being on the neck behind the fingerboard. After installing some side dots in the fingerboard, I located and pinned the fingerboard before gluing it on.

Here is the neck blank with the fingerboard glued on:

While the fingerboard was clamped, I flush routed the top to the body and did a little spindle sanding around the curves to get everything nice and smooth. I still had some time before un-clamping so I got some more work in on shaping the acoustic neck and it is really close to being ready to be sanded for finishing.

I still haven't decided how I am going to finish the electric, but it will have something to do with reds and oranges. I really like the figure in the top, so it will most likely be only lightly toned so as not to detract from it's natural beauty, but there are definitely a lot of options with the neck and the back/side area of the body.

Here's a photo of the under construction neck with the body to get an idea of how they will look toghether:
Subtract all the wood that isn't part of the guitar, add some gold fretwire, gold tuners, gold bridge, black pickups, some pots, spray a finish, and it's a guitar! Easy enough, right? Well, it is getting closer to being a shredding machine...

Looks like a guitar, don't it?

It's been a rather busy day and a half. I worked my but off yesterday and am glad to have done so. The day started off with some preparation of the neck for gluing on to the body. This involved rough thicknessing the neck to within 1/32" of the finished thickness taper using the safety planer, transferring the width taper to the back of the neck and rough cutting off the excess width, and then cutting off the excess length from the heel. After a final check of the dovetail fit, heel fit, centerline, and neck angle I heated up some hide glue and got the neck on.

Here is a shot of the neck being glued:

While waiting for the neck joint to dry, I installed the fingerboard side dots. This was an easy task, which I just so happened to slightly screw up, but you have to look pretty close to notice that the 12th fret dots are not parallel to the fingerboard.

Here's the dots glued in:

After lunch and when the neck had sufficient clamp time, I made a spline for the trussrod and installed it. The purpose of this spline is to hold the trussrod securely into the neck since the trussrod slot is deeper at the body end than it is at the headstock. Without it, there would be a big gap between the trussrod and the fingerboard and render the trussrod useless. The reason for the slot being deeper at the body is that the trussrod will be adjustable through the soundhole, making it quite difficult for me to adjust but I really like the clean look of no trussrod cover on the headstock.

Here is what it looks like with the trussrod installed and neck leveled ready for a fingerboard:

I also cut off the excess from the fingerboard and rounded the end to match the curvature of the soundhole. The end is also beveled and hangs over the soundhole just a bit and I think it looks pretty cool. I just barely had time to get the fingerboard glued between dry clamping and waiting for the hide glue to be ready, but I got it on and used about 21 clamps total to glue it up. I somehow still had a slight gap on the bass side from the 7th-12th frets, but I have some various ideas about how that will be fixed. I really have no idea how the gap happened though....

Here's the fingerboard being glued:

I started shaping my neck at about 8:15 this morning after finding a neck shaping jig and a decent spokeshave and got pretty close to finishing it by lunch time. Unfortunately, it still has some work to do, but I now have until may to have the guitar ready for finishing so I will get it fine tuned over the next month or so.

Here's some shots of the neck shaping in progress and the method of holding the guitar in place to do the shaping:

Well whaddya know, the guitar is almost done. I just have a lot of sanding and scraping to do, some fret work, some lacquer spraying, finish shaping the neck, and make a bridge/saddle and nut. I'm starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel...

Here's a couple shots of the guitar:
Yes, there is a lot of glue squeeze out all over the place, but it will be scraped and sanded off so it really will look pretty I promise.
Well, that's it for today. I'm off to archtop to do some scraping!

1.5 days left to finish the neck...

Am I nervous? A bit. I will get it done! I'm determined to.

Today felt like progress and that's always a good feeling. After an hour long lecture, I pinned and glued my headcap laminate to my headstock and had to wait for it to dry, but conveniently had another lecture on inlay work in the time it needed to dry. After unclamping, i rough thicknessed the headstock with the safety planer to give the back of the headstock a flat enough surface to stick a block to for supporting the headstock and keeping it square while cutting out the shape on the bandsaw and smoothing it out on the spindle sander. I then did a little hand touch up involving some rather complex sanding tools including a couple of flexible rulers and a sandpaper roll. Once I was satisfied with the headstock shaping and symmetry, I laid out the tuner locations and drilled the tuner holes. My 3/8" drill bit wasn't quite big enough for the tuners, so I had to do a little reaming by hand and the tuners fit like a glove.

Here's a photo of the tuners in the headstock. I only put one bushing/washer in to see how they worked(lower left tuner), but all the tuners will have them on the assembled guitar.

You can use your imagination here to get an idea of what the finished guitar will look like. It's getting close!Here's a shot of the end graft as mentioned in previous blogs. I should have made sure the camera was in focus when I took this. I'll post another pic of this later after it's been cleaned up a bit.

In archtop news, I'm finally done carving the outside arch on both the top and back. I starting scraping tonight and it will probably take me all of the class period on thursday to finish the scraping, but it really feels good to be moving on and know that I will be starting graduations(inside arching) very soon.

Here's a couple shots of the back in the scraping process:


Tomorrow will be a busy day. I have to get my neck taper rough thicknessed, glue on the neck, install fingerboard side dots, and glue the fingerboard on so I can shape the neck on Thursday. I'm sweating a little bit, but if I focus it can be done...

A triad of photographic updates.

I cannot say that I've had a single day in the last month without something to do. The acoustic is nearing completion, I'm finally starting to feel like I'm making some progress in archtop, and the electric is starting to take shape as well. I have been a little bit stressed out over whether or not I am going to finish these guitars, but I am determined and I know I will find a way to make it happen.

I finished up my end graft on Tuesday and have since forgotten to take a photo of it. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, but there is just one miter that will need a bit of "touch up" before the finish is sprayed. I also got my heel carved sometime between Tuesday and Wednesday, but I don't exactly remember what day I did that. Other than that, Wednesday and Thursday were spent fitting the dovetail. Even with a fancy dovetail routing jig, there is still a good deal of dovetail fitting necessary to get a good joint and a good looking heel. I did really well in neck reset class and so I thought I would be able to fly through this on the real guitar, but this sadly did not happen. I am happy to say however, that I am one of the few people in the class not needing to shim the dovetail. That is one task that I am feeling really good about being done so I can move on to more exciting things. I think the next flat top steel string guitar I build is going to have a bolt on neck.

Here is a shot of the carved heel and fit dovetail. Yes, there is a gap showing because the dovetail would not stay all the way in for the picture due to the heel not being cut down to length.

Today, I routed the truss rod slot in the neck. Because it is going to be adjusted through the soundhole, I had to make the truss rod slot a little deeper at the neck/body joint to allow access to the truss rod underneath the top. This was done by shimming the neck at the nut end on the router table so the depth of the slot actually tapers from deeper at the body to about 1/64" over the thickness of the truss rod at the nut. Before gluing the fingerboard on, there will be a spline glued on over the truss rod so it won't be loose in the slot, preventing it from functioning properly.

Here is the neck with the truss rod slot routed. There is an area marked on the top which will be routed out to allow the truss rod to enter the body and make neck removal much easier when a neck reset is needed in the future.


After routing the truss rod slot, I glued some wings onto the headstock, as the neck blank was not quite wide enough to accommodate my headstock design and really didn't want to alter it. The funny thing is that only a really small 1/2" x 1/8" section of the wings are actually needed for the headstock, so most of the "wings" will get cut off anyways. That will be happening tomorrow.

Here's a photo of the headstock wings glued on:
I also did some work on the fingerboard today, getting it radiused and tapered. It's the little things like this that get me excited and make me think it's actually going to be a guitar eventually.

Here is the fingerboard laid on the neck to show what it is going to look like:

Archtop is moving along, slowly but surely... Top final arching is nearly done and back final arching is nearly done. I should be scraping by tomorrow night and moving on to graduations by next tuesday. Hopefully the box will be together by the end of march, leaving the month of april to get necks done. I may actually finish this thing...

Here's the top arch almost done with the carving and just about ready for scraping:

I made a good deal of progress in electric on Friday. I finished routing the chambers and got the wire channel locations laid out and routed. I did forget to route the channel for the bridge ground, but it's just one wire and the channel doesn't need to be very big and can be drilled. The body looks pretty holy right now, but there is still a lot of wood to be routed, including the tremolo/spring cavity, control cavity, neck pocket, and pickup cavities which will all be done at a later time.

Here is a shot of the body with chambers and channels routed:

As I had written in the previous post, I was kind of worried at how my top join would come out. It didn't help that it was 1/2" thick in the first place and I was using the same method I'd use to join an acoustic guitar top, so needless to say I was crossing my fingers. Thankfully, crossing your fingers is a good tactic and one side of the joint looked good. The other side, however, looked like somebody was trying to glue a plate and a bowl together or something. Because the top on an electric guitar is more aesthetic than structural as opposed to an acoustic or archtop, the one good side of the joint was enough to suffice. After thicknessing, I was happy to find out that it was still 7/16" thick, 1/16" under my desired dimension, but I can still make it work out with the depth of my preamp electronics.

I then cut out the top wood to the outline of the guitar body and drilled some locating pin holes in the location of the neck pocket and bridge pickup for gluing, cut some dowels to length and glued the top to the body using some veneer presses.

Here is a shot of the body with the top cap glued on and ready for flush routing:
And another shot of the body with some different camera settings. This cap wood is so cool because it looks a lot like Koa:

And that's it for this post. More neck progress later this week...

Electric ups and downs.

Well, electric construction had it's ups and downs today. I spent the first half of the day trying to join my top cap. This may seem to be a simple task, but today it was anything but. I made the mistake of resawing my cap wood last week after I had flattened it on the jointer so at the end of class last week it would have been good to be joined. Fast forward a week and the things I learned the first few weeks of class about wood movement came back to haunt me. It was now cupped quite severely and I didn't want to run it through the jointer again because it was too close to the finished thickness I wanted, which is crucial for me to be able to fit my preamp in the body. I decided to try to get this cupped piece of kindling joined by hand with a jointer plane and block plane, but it still was not going well at all. I decided to glue it and hope for the best. I took it out of the gluing deck after a few hours and I must say that it is the worst join I have ever done. I have fortunately seen worse, but when it comes to joinery I'm pretty picky. I think I will thickness sand it down and see where I stand. Maybe when it's sanded down, there will be one side of the joint that actually looks good that I will decide to use. If not, I can always inlay a strip of cocobolo with some purfling over the joint and solve the problem that way. It'll work out, but I'm just a bit irritated because I am a perfectionist and when things don't turn out as close to perfect as I like them, it really bugs me.

On a more positive note, I did get my electric body cut out, flush routed to the template, and 3 of the chambers routed. The purpose of these chambers is mainly to remove some weight from the body since the cap is going to be 1/2", but some people say that they affect the sound of the guitar. I think it will still sound like a regular solid body. Here is a photo:
That's the primavera. It's from Mexico and stinks like a barn. I just have one more chamber to route and some wire channel routes to do before it's ready for the top cap. It's exciting to finally be doing some woodworking in electric instead of drawing blueprints and making templates.

Success!

When I got into class this morning, it was just like Christmas unwrapping the tape from the binding to see how it turned out, and I was very happy. There are virtually no gaps in the top binding, which my instructor said doesn't happen very often with wood binding. With some confidence in what I was doing, I got the back binding installed before lunch. The back binding is a little more difficult, due to the curvature or the back and the fact that you have 2 butt joints which are both visible that have to line up with the center line perfectly. The top is much easier in that respect as it only has one butt joint at the tailblock and the binding is covered up by the neck/body joint at the dovetail and does not come together because of the dovetail mortise. Around 2:00 this afternoon, I removed the tape from the back and was pleasantly surprised to see that the back binding turned out even better than the top, and I have been in a good mood all day since. Starting to scrape the binding flush is very rewarding because everything looks so dirty when you take the tape off, but scraping really cleans it up and makes it look nice.

Here is a shot of the bound box:
There is still plenty of scraping to do.

I also started on the end graft today and should finish it on tuesday. I got the 4 miters cut in the side purfling(next to the binding) and got one of the end graft pieces of purfling mitered and cut. I'll just have to fit the 2nd piece of purfling and the cocobolo piece that is going in the middle on tuesday and it is going to look awesome.

Here's what the end graft looks like so far:

I did get my neck rough cut on Tuesday and the fretboard slotted yesterday, so next week will be all sorts of fun stuff like cutting the neck angle, routing the dovetail tenon, carving the heel, fitting the neck, radiusing the fretboard, cutting the taper, gluing the fretboard, and maybe some work on the headstock and neck shaping...

I should be doing some actual cool stuff in electric tomorrow, so I will try to take some pictures and blog again this weekend.

Even more on binding.

We didn't have a lecture this morning, so I was able to get right to it with the binding first thing in the morning. The first order of business was to select the proper router bearings for the size of binding and purfling that I'm using and make some test cuts. After everything was set up for my purfling to fit correctly, I had to set up my guitar in the binding cradle and make sure that the top edge was even with the table to ensure accurate cuts.

One of the dilemmas that luthiers had previously come across when routing binding is that when you use a regular router with a bearing, the binding channels are not straight up and down due to the slight curvature in the top and back. To correct this, Tom Ribbecke, a well known guitar maker, designed the Universal binding machine. This device holds the router upright and the guitar is passed underneath it to get a straight binding channel route. Using this machine, the binding routing went smoothly, quickly, and easily. It was a lot less stressful than I thought it would be.

Here is what the binding machine looks like. I've decided that I must get one of these when I'm building on my own:

The only actually time consuming part in routing for the binding is that you have to readjust the cradle for routing the back and once the purfling channel is cut, the bearing needs to be changed and the depth adjusted, again making test cuts to ensure a good fit for the binding. After the routing was done, I marked out my end graft location and routed out a slot for that.

After routing the end graft, I took my bent pieces of binding out of the mold and discovered that the side purfling had come off of most of them. This was kind of a bummer, but doesn't really matter because the purfling pieces still bent the way I wanted them too and that is the important part. It was just a little difficult when installing the binding and purfling because they are all glued in together, so I had 3 pieces to contend with instead of 1 or 2 which most people had. Why does Cocobolo have to be so oily? After a session of chisel sharpening and a little trimming, I got the top binding and purfling completely in. It'll be on to the back binding/purfling and and graft installation tomorrow, which I'm a bit nervous about as I plan on mitering the purfling that runs up and down the end graft to meet the side purfling at about a 45 degree angle. If done right, it is going to look awesome!

Here is the binding clamped in place with one of the most high tech tools I used today, tape:
And the binding and purfling out of the mold and ready to be installed in the back:
I can't wait to take the tape off of the top tomorrow and see how it turned out!

A bit on binding.

Well, it didn't seem like I got as much done as I wanted to today, but what can I say it was a monday... We had a fairly long lecture today on binding, as binding is one of the things that really differentiates a fine guitar from a mediocre guitar. I'm not going to go into all the specifics of it right now, but needless to say there is a lot more to just routing the channel and gluing it in.

I did get my back glued on and flush routed today, as well as getting my binding prepared. The binding that I'm using is cocobolo with b/w/b side purfling and b/w/b top and back purfling as well. When doing side purfling, it needs to be glued to the binding, so it can be bent with the binding and because of the structure of it, the side purfling would not bend by itself. To attach the side purfling to the binding, the two pieces are wrapped together with thread, and then thin super glue is wicked into the joint between the two. Then, they are thickness sanded to a consistent thickness and ready to be bent. I had to do some cleanup work of the binding/purfling pieces before bending, so they did not get bent today, but will be first thing tomorrow. I will also start the neck construction tomorrow, and will probably post another update on wednesday. In the meantime, here are some photos for you all.

Gluing the back on using the same method used for the top:

Here is a shot of the box all together and ready for the binding routes:I'm really excited to see how this is going to look finished. You can't see the mottled flame in it all that well right now, but it will really pop on the back and sides with some finish.

Here is a shot of the binding pieces all ready to be bent:
Yes, there are 5 pieces there. I made one extra just in case there are any bending issues.