X brace patches and more kerf notches......

Hallelujah!!! The temps are back down to human levels again. I was able to get up in the shop and work a little on the SJ tonight. I first got all the back all cleaned up from the glue squeeze out when I glued the braces. I then final sanded the braces, shaved the ends down to .1" and marked the notch locations on the rims. Again I used my dremel and router base with a downcut spiral bit to carefully cut the notches out. I am pleased with the outcome. I took an unusually long amount of time doing these as my notches on the other guitars look lousy. With the reversed kerfed linings, it is very important to make these notches look good and clean. These notches look very good. They aren't absolutely perfect, but they are really close.

After that was done, I needed to reinforce the center joints of the two X braces. I glued in a cotton cloth patch on the top brace, and made a little X patch for the top of the back braces. I made the patch out of some scrap side material so when it is all sanded down it should match the back wood. I glued the cloth patch down with some watered down titebond, and then I glued the X patch with the LMI white glue.

After a little practice on my Dreadnought, I decided that I wanted to lower the strings at the nut just a touch. I had them set up as Frank Ford describes on his site Frets.com where you fret the strings between the second and 3rd fret and look at the string at the first fret. It should be slightly over the first fret by "a hair". Problem is, what exactly is a "hair"? Well after reading a fairly lively discussion on Bill Cory's site, I decided to deepen the nut slots until I got the strings approx. .012" above the first fret open. Really, I didn't need to deepen the slots much, maybe 1/100" or so, but I really noticed a big difference in how much easier it is to fret the strings, especially at the first and second fret locations. Unfortunately with this adjustment , I induced a very tiny buzz in the second string when I pluck it open very hard. And I mean hard! Normal practicing like I do, I don't get the buzz but if I intentionally give it a good hard hit, it will buzz. I think I have it narrowed down to the buzz being at the nut, but I didn't investigate it too much. I will work on it later.

The back after the braces were final shaped, and the glue all cleaned off.

The back notches at the waist. The brace on the left is the worst out of all of the notches. You can see it is a little wide on the right side of the brace. Compared to my other three guitars though, this is perfect!

Here is the top X brace patch. I tried really hard to get a nice round patch to work on this like Martin does, but I just couldn't get it to look good. I finally cut slits in the corners to get it to wrap around the braces and lay flat.

Here is the little X patch glued up with one lonely little go bar!