I didn't get quite as much done today as I was hoping, but I did get the sanding dishes done and the outside mold made. My first problem was when I went to route out the 30' sanding dish, my router would not work. I have a Bosch 3/4 HP router and have read online that they have a problem with the on/off switch getting full of sawdust and not working. Well after about an hour, I had torn it apart, removed the switch, disassembled and cleaned out the switch and re-assembled the router. It works fine now but it was kind of annoying. I have only had this router for about 8 months so I hope that this won't be an ongoing problem. Once I had the dishes routed out, I sanded them and gave them a coat of spray Polycrylic to protect the dishes. I then started making the side mold parts. I traced the outline of the guitar half onto a piece of masonite to use as a router template. I then rough cut MDF parts, attached the template to the pieces and routed them using a flush trim bearing bit. I decided that I didn't want to stack 3 parts per side, but I wanted the full thickness of 3 pieces. I ended up using two full mold parts and put a bunch of MDF spacers between them to make it 2 1/4" thick. I drilled the ends and installed all-thread with wingnuts and washers to complete the mold. After I finished making the side mold, I was just about to get started on making a side bender only to have my bandsaw blade break. The only other blade I have is too big to use so I have get a new blade before I can make the bender. Fortunately it broke after I got all the parts cut for the mold so at least I was able to finish that up. So I decided that it was time to stop for the night and clean my shop a bit. Here are some pictures of today's progress.
Here are the 15' and 30' radius dishes I made. I decided to wait on the 25' dish as I had gotten a late start because of the router trouble.
Here is the MDF all drawn up for the side mold parts.
This is how I got accurate sides. I made a template out of masonite that I could use with my router table. I used a flush cutting bearing bit to do the final cut after doing a rough cut on the bandsaw. On a side note, this router station is one of the best investments of time I have ever spent building something. I use it on almost every project I do. It is my own design loosely based on Norm's router station from the New Yankee Workshop program on PBS.
Here you can see that the cutout is pretty accurate. Not perfect, but pretty darned close.
Instead of stacking 3 pieces together, I decided to use spacers between two mold parts. It should still work fine and it weighs less and took less MDF.
Here is the completed mold. The two parts line up correctly even though the picture doesn't look like it. I think it has something to do with the flash and the grain of the MDF.
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