New addition to the shop.....

It arrived! My thickness sander showed up around 6:00 tonight. That thing is heavy! I un-crated it and took it up to my shop in pieces. The entire unit weighs just under 200 pounds (91kg) so getting it up the stairs to my shop was a bit of a workout. After a some sweat and a lot of heavy lifting, I got all the pieces were up there ready for assembly. It took me about 3o minutes to get it all put together and another half hour to finish the dust collection duct to it. I ran some test pieces of wood through it and man does this thing take off some wood in a hurry. It also makes a ton of dust! After running some wood through it, I used my micrometer on them to check the evenness of the board from all 4 corners. I am happy to say that all 4 corners are within 3/1000 of an inch of each other and that is with the unit straight out of the box. I am very happy with that.

I didn't actually do much on the guitar, I just un-clamped the peg head and to my dismay, I noticed that the ebony veneer piece had slipped away from the nut location quite a bit. I did a bit of head scratching to try and figure out what to do about this and I decided that this gives me the perfect opportunity to try my hand at binding a peg head. Typically, builders bind only the top and sides of the peg head, but I figure that if I bind all 4 sides of the peg head, that will give me a shim that will fill the gap between the nut and peg head. So, I guess this is one of those situations where the old saying holds true. "When life gives you lemons, make lemonade!" That is what I plan on doing. I trimmed the excess off and it looks nice. I need to thin it quite a bit so I can put a ebony veneer on the back side of the peg head and maintain the 15mm thickness I want. I also am going to try something new on this one. I want to try and recess the tuner holes to the width of the washers so the washers will be flush with the peg head veneer top. I saw it on a site somewhere and I thought it looked really classy. I need to think about how to do this but I have a couple of ideas. One would be to find some kind of bit that is stepped with a flat bottom on the wide section. The other way is to drill the recesses first using a flat bottomed forsner bit, and then drill out the tuner hole. That will probably be the easiest for me and I am guessing the bit will be a lot cheaper too!

I got an e-mail confirmation from UPS that should be my SJ plans. They are scheduled to be here on Wednesday. I can hardly wait!

On a totally different note, I have noticed something with my Dreadnought. Since I have been practicing on it every day, I am noticing some changes in the tone and volume of it. It is getting a much deeper mellow sound to it, and it is getting significantly louder the more I play it. Having never played a guitar before, this must be the "opening up" I keep hearing from players. All I know is that it really is making the guitar sound quite nice. It sure isn't my playing that is making it sound good!

The newest addition to my shop. This is a 18"-36" open sided drum sander. This thing really removed some wood. It will be great for thicknessing tops, sides, and backs.

Here you can see the ebony slid towards the end of the peg head. It moved about 3/16".

I shaved the maple veneer piece so it is angled to match the peg head and then held the nut blank along with a piece of maple binding material to get the front edge of the nut location. It will work okay I believe. One other thing I thought about trying is maybe doing a 0 fret which would allow me to move the nut toward the peg head and that would solve the problem too. I will give it some thought.