Priorities.....

I was doing some thinking this last week. I have been working my tail off for the last 5 months, with my work day starting around 6:30 in the morning and ending around 10:00 pm every day but Sunday. Although the work is necessary as I have two businesses that I own, why spend all of this time working only to have no time to do what I love doing and that is building and learning to play my guitars. Well this weekend I decided that I need to prioritize my time a little better to allow me at least an hour a day to work on my guitars and practicing. Every day that I go to my barn to get something for work, I feel sad that my shop is sitting quiet with plenty of wood for many guitars, and one guitar in process. I also feel guilty that I started learning to play and was doing well only to have let that drop off my radar. I picked up one of my guitars yesterday to play a little and not only are my finger callouses completely gone, but I am afraid that I have forgotten 3/4 of what I learned. Sigh..... I am sure it will come back but what a waste!

So, I am going to do my best to make guitar building and playing time a high priority. If that means a few things with work have to get bumped to the next day, so be it. Why work all of those hours and not take some time to enjoy my hobby.

Enough of that. Yesterday and today I spent a few hours working on the parlor guitar. I first started by laying out the top and back brace notches in the rims. I notched for the braces using my dremel as well as notching for the A braces in the neck block. I also drilled out the upper transverse brace for the truss rod adjustment access. (Ugh, 7 guitars now, 7 upper transverse braces that I forgot to drill the hole!) One day I will remember to do it. I cleaned up the top braces and realized that I had not installed the two sound hole support braces or the X brace cap. I cut those pieces and glued them in place.

I then decided to get started on the neck. I have a bunch of mahogany off quarter neck blanks I purchased on one of the OLF swap meets so I decided to use one of them for this guitar. Since they are off quarter then needed to be ripped and flipped end to end so the grain angle opposes each other on each half. This keeps the wood from twisting and adds strength. Since I had to do this, I decided this would be a good time to try my had at making a 5 piece neck. I had a nice piece of 1/4"x1" hard maple with nice edge curl, and a orphaned Koa side piece in stock. I ripped the neck, jointed the mating edges and ripped the Koa to size. Once stacked the neck will have a white stripe with dark edges in the center. I glued and clamped all of the pieces to make one solid neck blank. Next up will be finishing the top brace cleanup and gluing it to the rims.

Here is the rim sitting on the top so I could mark out the brace notches.

The rim after notching the top rims. I did the back notches after that.

The two soundhole braces being glued down.

I used my jointer to true up the neck blank. I was very surprised at the tension that was in this blank. Once I ripped it, both halves bowed and needed re-jointing.

This is why I had to rip the blank. I marked the grain direction on the end grain. You can see it is at about a 30 degree angle from quarter sawn.

Once I flipped one piece you can now see the grain direction opposes each side. This will make it much more stable.

The three center pieces along with the neck blank pieces. I like the look.

Here it is all glued and clamped down.

Finally, I glued in the X brace cap.