Gettin' some exercise and a surprise at the end.....

Who said this guitar building stuff was easy work? I got the top kerfed linings all glued in and decided to sand them down to final radius. Doing 'the twist' sanding one guitar on the radius dishes is a little bit of exercise, but doing two is quite a workout! I sanded both guitars to radius and then sanded the braces to radius while I had the dishes out. I worked up quite a sweat doing that all in one session. After that was done I decided to cool down by running the back plates through the thickness sander to get them down to .078" thickness that I want. My goal is to have a final thickness of .07" so I left them a little bit thicker which will allow me to final sand down to the correct dimension. This is the thinnest back and side set I have done to date and I hope it will make for a light weight and more responsive guitar. I haven't decided what the top thickness will be yet, but I am thinking around .11". I am waiting on my rosette blanks to arrive so I can do those before I thickness the top plates anyways. They were mailed yesterday so I am hoping to have them for the weekend. Bob at RC Tonewoods sent me an e-mail saying he would do his best to get me some colorful blanks. I am kind of excited to see what he picked out for me.

The two back plates down to almost final thickness. That line on the top one is the joint, but it isn't what it looks like. One plate is a little longer than the other and that is a shadow line caused by the offset in the end. The actual glue line is almost impossible to find.

All of the braces sanded to radius.

The two rims lined, braced, and sanded to radius. All that is left is to notch for the braces and gluing them up!

Okay, a little surprise here. No laughing from the peanut gallery either! Here is my public debut of my mistake ridden version of Canyon Canon on my first build, a Stewmac Dreadnought. I have been practicing it quite a bit, and although I know all of the chords/notes I still make plenty of mistakes and my transitions are poor. However, I know I have been posting that I am practicing so I figure I might as well prove to you that I am actually doing it. I figure that for only a couple of months playing it isn't too horribly bad. So here it is, warts string squeeks (really they don't sound nearly that loud in person!) and all. Oh yeah, and that ugly dude holding the guitar is me. :) Sorry for the video and sound quality, the only thing I have is my Kodak digital camera and it has a video recording mode. The volume is fairly low but without buying some expensive recording equipment, this is the best I can do for now. Enjoy, or plug your ears and cover your eyes. Whatever makes you happy or keeps your ears from hurting....!