Bridge, bridge plate, and fingerboards oh my....

The first thing I wanted to get done today was to get the bridge glued onto my OM with the intentions of doing the setup this weekend. I glued and clamped it all up and put it away until tomorrow. Once that was done I finished putting the side braces on the OOO. I had already cut and shaped them so it was a quick and easy job.

I then pulled the top out of the go bar deck and gave it a tap. Wow! It is just amazing what bracing does to the tap sound of a top. I am going to do some experimenting with brace shaving and tapping to see if I can hear the differences. Hopefully I don't mess it up. I was going to put the three sound hole braces on when I realized I made a slight oversight with the top bracing. I undercut the X-brace for the two tone bars, but I forgot to undercut it for the bridge plate. Not a big deal. I used a curved blade, chisel, and file to make the undercuts, and then installed the bridge plate. Once that was glued up along with the sound hole braces, I went about working on the fingerboard. I had radiused the board a few days ago, but the entire board was still too thick. Comparing it to a scrap I had of a fingerboard from my other builds, the one I had made was about 1/16" too thick. After a bit of head scratching trying to figure out how I was going to thin it out without any type of thickness sander, I came up with a simple yet effective idea, which if it worked would save me a ton of sanding, and if it didn't work would create a nice slotted piece of fire wood! I used my table saw to cut the back of the board by a hair more than 1/32". The way I did it was I raised the blade to the amount I wanted to remove, in this case 1/32" and inserted my zero clearance insert. I set my fence to 1/8" from the blade, and then ran the board back side down down the blade. This made a shallow cut parallel to one edge. Then I flipped the board and ran the other edge. I then moved the fence 1/8" and repeated. I did this over and over until I had the center of the back hollowed out by 1/32" with two 1/8" wide 'rails' on either edge. This removed the bulk of the wood. I took the fingerboard to my work bench , clamped it down, and planed the two rails off. I hit it with a sanding block to smooth it out and 'viola' my board was now the correct thickness!

I then sanded the edges so that the fingerboard was the exact width of the neck blank and then used my router station and holding jig to narrow both sides of the board by the thickness of my bindings. I used this method on my OM so if you want to read the details of that and see a couple more pictures look at the Feb 7, 2007 entry.

Tomorrow I am planning to install the tuners, nut, saddle, and strings (except for the high E, I broke one and stole it so I am short one!) and level the frets in the OM and hopefully make a some nice sounds come out of it. Hopefully my downcut bits come tomorrow too so I might be able to do some inlay work on the OOO.

The OM ready for the brige glue up. Note the two locating pins. I have them drilled through and into the backer block holding it up until I get clamps in there. It is really difficult to get the clamps in and hold the block up all at the same time!

The bridge all glued and clamped up. The end is in sight!

Here is the OOO with bloodwood braces. I figured since I had the spare bloodwood from the failed binding bending fiasco, I would use it here. I like the look.

Notice anything wrong here? Yep, no undercuts for the bridge plate.

The bridge plate after I undercut the braces and ready for the go bar deck.

The jig I use for routing the binding width on the fingerboard.

I think it is going to look nice with the bloodwood bindings.