Top glued up and volute carving.....

Today I was able to get the top glued to the body, and also the back laminate glued to the peg head. First I decided I wanted to carve a little more on the tone bars to see if I could get a little more sustain out of the top as I tapped on it. I am glad I did as once I carved the tone bars, the top rings even nicer, and it has a nice quiet high pitched tone just before the ring dies out. Once that was done, I glued in my label, and then glued up the top to the sides in the go-bar deck. I then decided it was time to get back to work on the neck. I mentioned earlier that I wanted to laminate the back of the peg head with ebony. Unfortunately I decided this after I had already glued the laminate to the top of the peg head. I will need to remove a lot of ebony from the top laminate to get the overall thickness correct, but that's okay. Anyways, I needed to thin the piece of ebony I had for the back so I ran it through my drum sander until I had it at .05" thick. After looking at the neck though, I realized that before I glued the laminate on, I needed to carve out the rough shape of the volute on the back. I am using the typical Martin "V" on this one so I needed to carve that out. I have some pictures of how I did it, but in short I layed it out on the back as well as sides, clamped it up, cut the straight lines across the neck with a razor saw, then used chisels to cut the wood out. It was tedious work but it was a lot of fun too. I got a pretty nice looking V shape but more importantly I was able to flatten out the back next to the V so it is dead straight with the rest of the peg head. That was a little difficult to do, but with a long flat file I was able to get it done. I cut a V in the veneer piece, glued it up and clamped it all down. Everything is drying now, so tomorrow I will try and get some more work done on the neck.

I am debating on what to do for bindings. I bought curly maple for it, but I also happen to have a piece of purple heart wood that I could rip bindings out of. It is very bright purple color and I am thinking it might just look nice with the color of the body. I am still thinking about it but I might just have to cut the wood and see how it looks against the guitar body.

The back and sides all cleaned up with my label in it.

I decided to protect the label with some plastic until after the guitar is finished.

The top all signed, cleaned, and ready for gluing. Note the tone bars.

This is the new shape of the tone bars. My entire brace shape is sort of a parabolic/scalloped brace hybrid.

The top glued up to the sides and back.

These are pictures of the volute layout lines on the neck.

I also marked the sides so I knew exactly what to cut out. It is easy to start carving wood out without realizing that I am taking wood away that should be staying!

I carved a reference channel on the side so I knew exactly how deep to cut. I cut the horizontal cuts across the top using my razor saw. The block on top is there to stop my chisel if it gets away from me. That kept me from accidentally chipping down the rest of the neck. It saved me a few times!

The V all carved out and the flat spots next to it all leveled out with the rest of the peg head.

This is the ebony veneer just before glue up. You may have noticed the layout lines on the other end. I tried to cut with a razor saw and it immediately split the veneer because it was so thin. Fortunately the split only went a short distance (you can see it just to the left of the pencil lines) and that part will end up being cut off anyways.