And I thought I was all done with braces in high school........

DAY 11

Today I started the back braces. The first thing I did though was to take the high tech clamping devices (clothespins) off of the back kerfing and installed the top kerfing. Once that was done I set it aside and started with the bracing. After marking the back to the brace layout on the plans, I cut 4 sections of bracing material from the billet that came with the kit. It is a pretty straight forward thing to do, I just had to make sure I had the wood grain going the correct way. A table saw makes this a snap. Once I cut them to rough size, I marked the radius on them and sanded them to match the radius dish. I used a sanding drum in my drill press to do this. The DVD says that I should have glued them to the back at this point, but I decided to do some of the shaping before gluing them down. I figure that it is much easier to do a lot of the sanding and shaping using my sanding drum as well as hand sanding while they are still loose then to do all the carving with them on the back. I will still need to do some final sanding and shaping but the bulk of the work is done. Once that was done, it was time to try out my fancy new go-bar deck. It really works slick! it is much easier to use a dish and go-bar deck than the clamps like I did with the Stewmac kit. It is really cool to see the back bent to the correct contour while the glue is curing instead of hoping the spring of the wood is enough to pull it into shape afterwords.

Here are some pictures of today's progress:

This is the top of the guitar with the kerfing clamped and drying.

I marked the brace locations on the inside of the back. You might notice that I didn't use the side LMI marked as the inside. I decided that this side was less attractive than the other so I reversed the sides.

Here are the braces cut to rough size. You can see that I scribed pencil marks to show the radius in the approximate locations where they will go in the deck.

Here they are sanded to radius. You can see I sanded right to the pencil line. To get the final shape, I held a long strip of sandpaper in the dish at the location where they will go and sanded them against the dish. It worked quite well.

Here are the braces shaped . I think it is a lot easier to do it before gluing than after. I will do the top braces this way too.

Here is everything all glued up in the go-bar deck. It is amazing how much pressure all those bars put on the top where they push against. The top board has a bow to it!