David's Guitar Building

An update.....

2010-10-20T16:07:00.003-05:00

Okay, after waiting a couple of weeks I finally spend the cash to buy a new dehumidifier for my shop. I got it all set up today and it is running. Hopefully the shop will get down to 45% in the next day or two so I can get back to work. It has been tough wanting to work but knowing that doing anything with wood that has been sitting in a shop with ambient humidity levels is just asking for trouble.

So, again I haven't gone away I just had to wait a bit to spend a couple hundred dollars for a dehumidifier. I shall return!

I'm still here...

2010-09-30T15:52:00.004-05:00

Just in case you all thought I dropped off again, I haven't I realized that before I got too far into working on my guitar I need to get the humidity level in my shop back down to a decent level. I took out the dehumidifier a couple of years ago to use in another area so my shop has been sitting without any humidity control all that time. It dawned on me this weekend that before I glue the fingerboard to the neck that it would be wise for me to de-humidify the shop and then let the wood acclimate to the new low humidity level. So, I need to get a de-humidifier and start it running up there before I do anything else with the guitar. I learned my lesson the hard way about working on a guitar without humidity control during my second build. That guitar has serious problems now because of it. I am not going to make that mistake again!

So, I am still here and chomping at the bit to work on my guitar but I am holding off until it is wise for me do get back at it. I won't be doing any updating until I feel that it is safe to get back to work. That may be a couple of weeks but as I said, better safe than sorry!

Inlay

2010-09-26T13:47:00.008-05:00

Well I got some shop time today to get the inlay pocket cut out and the inlay glued in and epoxy filled. I have to say, my inlay routing skills are a bit rusty but I got it done. It isn't perfect but not too bad, only a little bit of over cut in a few spots that are filled with epoxy and Ziricote sanding dust. Here are a few pictures.

First I copied the inlay piece and taped that copy to the headplate the way I wanted it set.

Next I cut through the paper to give me an etched outline in the wood.

Here is the etched outline to help guide my routing.

Here is the routed pocket ready for the Abalone inlay to be glued in.

The inlay was tacked in place with medium CA glue and then the entire thing is covered with epoxy mixed with Ziracote dust. Once it cures I will sand it all flat. The inlay was set just a hair proud to allow for sanding flush.

Major changes in my life.......

2010-09-24T18:24:00.007-05:00

Okay, I know that I have been terrible about keeping up with this blog since I got about half way through the parlor guitar. I also know that I have said that I am going to get back at it and then never did.

Well, there is a reason. No excuses but a reason.

Over the last couple of years I have been working very hard to create an online book business with the hopes that one day I would be able to shut down my contracting business and go full time into something that

A. I like doing

and

B. Is easier on my body.

Well, after a lot of hard work, a lot of long hours and a lot of preparation I am here to say that I am now a full time book dealer and am no longer dragging wires through hot attics and spider infested crawl spaces. 30 years of doing something that I didn't like just wasn't sitting well with me so something had to be done. I am happy with the change, and my body is happy with it as well! I shut down my contracting business on the last day of June and have finally gotten everything finalized, sold off, and all of my customers moved to a trusted contractor I know. The bad part of this major change was for the last 3 years I was trying to run a contracting business, get a book business off the ground, and build guitars. The contracting and books were like having two full time jobs and something had to take a back seat. That was the guitars.

From June until now I have been adjusting to my new working life. It is very different.... but in a good way. But I still hadn't done anything with my guitars. The first week of Sept. we took a trip back to Denver (where I am from) to visit. It had been 6 years since I was back there. We were visiting with an old friend of mine who I have known since high school, and is an Electrician also (as was he the best man in my wedding!) and we were reminiscing. We were catching up with what we were doing and I brought up the fact that I had been building guitars but hadn't done much for the last couple of years. I pulled up my blog to show him some pictures when the spark hit me. I was excited about it again. I almost couldn't wait to get home so I could get back in the shop. I realized that now I have one less full time job so I can get back to building guitars again.

When I got back, I went up to the shop and spent a day just cleaning things up. Lots of dust, spider webs and dead flies all needed to be cleaned up. I spent some time getting re-aquainted with the parlor guitar just so I knew where I left off and where I needed to pick up from again. I still need to go back and read some of my old posts because as funny as it sounds, I can't remember some of the specifics such as ..... don't laugh.... the scale length. I know I did a lot of flip-flopping around as to what I wanted to do but I just can't remember what I decided. Oh well, I suppose I will figure it out. So, I am trying to get the rust off of my brain, and re-learn some of the things I had learned just a few short years ago. I am sure it will be a lot easier but I am determined to get after it this time and start producing these instruments that I enjoy building so much.

So without further ado.....

Since my last entry with pictures I have done a few things. Some of them were done without pictures being taken so you will see a fairly big jump in progress. I have completed the binding on the body, have made the fingerboard including the mahogany edge bindings, and have gotten the neck down to just about the final shape. The slot head is also cleaned up a bit and is ready for the inlay cutting. The fingerboard has been fretted and the markers are installed. Today I cut out the deer head inlay for the peghead and I plan on routing out the recess for it this weekend. I took a few pictures tonight and expect to be better at updating in the future.

For those of you who have given up on me, please don't. For those who occasionally check in to see if I am still alive, thanks for hanging in there.

Here is the body complete with the binding installed and rough scraped.

The fingerboard sitting on the neck. I will glue it on once I get the inlay finished.

The inlay as it will be installed. I will rout it out this weekend it time allows.

I know, not many pictures but hey, I am just starting to get back up and running. Give me a break!

I'm still alive!

2009-03-19T15:28:00.002-05:00

I know, some of you must be wondering if I am still alive and what has happened to my blog. Well I am fine. I have been exceptionally busy running two businesses and with that, my guitar building time came to a grinding halt. I just haven't had any time at all to spend in the shop until the last two days. It was kind of strange going up there yesterday and trying to pick up where I left off with my parlor build. I had to go back through my notes to see where I was and where I needed to start. Heck, it had been so long I had forgotten whether I was building a short or long scale! I had to measure my fret slots to see what I had done there to figure it out.

Anyways, I finally figured that I needed to do the tail graft. Several months ago I had joined two thinned pieces of mahogany that matched the Koa bindings to use for the graft so I needed to cut the piece, cut the tail and glue it in. That went fine so today I decided to glue on the top binding and perfling strips. I had already bent the bindings and cut the channels so all I needed to do was clean it up and glue them on. A million pieces of tape and some sticky fingers later and the top binding and perflings are installed currently drying. Hopefully I will be able to get up there tomorrow to glue the back bindings on.

I really want to spend a little time each day to get this project done. I really feel like I have abandoned something that I thoroughly enjoyed last year. I love building guitars and I just don't want to spend all of my time working and not having some time to do what I enjoy.

About a billion degrees.....

2008-07-19T17:01:00.003-05:00

That is what my shop feels like this week. The temps have been in the 90's with humidity to match this week and with my shop being on the second floor of a non-heated/non-air conditioned barn, well you can imagine how hot it is up there. Needless to say I didn't spent very much time working on the guitar. I did have one evening where we had some cloud cover and rain so I got up there while it was bearable to get the binding and perfling channels routed out. I went up today to make the tail graft but soon realized that I don't have any pieces of Koa left big enough to make the graft with. I have a back and side set but I am not going to cut into those just for this small piece of wood. I debated on using a piece of Ziricote which would match the rosette and headplate, but decided against it as there is just too big of a contrast in color for my liking. Actually, I was looking for an excuse to get out of the sauna I call a shop so in a warped kind of way, I was a little happy that I didn't have the piece of wood! Yeah, I know there is lots of work to be done on the neck but I'll just pretend that I forgot about that. :)

So, I am going to run up to Woodcraft one day next week to see if I can buy a piece that I can cut to size. I would order it online but I hate to pay the shipping costs for such a small piece of wood. Here are some pictures of the body after the routing and the neck as it sits now.

Here is the neck after a bit more shaping. There still is quite a bit to do but it is getting close to the final shape.

The binding and perfling channels. The top routing went very well.

The back went okay but I had a few mishaps with my router. This was the first time I used my hand held router for this. It worked well but I accidentally bumped a couple of spots with the bit. These are two of them Both are a lot smaller than the picture makes them look. They should be easily repaired after the binding is installed.

I had one more bump at the waist. Again, it is smaller than it looks in the picture. I had the camera very close so it would show.

The back all routed ready for cleanup.

It's starting to look like a neck.....

2008-07-05T22:07:00.006-05:00

I spent the last few sessions working on the neck. When I last posted, the fingerboard was still rectangular shaped and slotted. I laid out the taper so the nut end was 1 3/4" and the 12th fret was 2 1/4". I used my router jig to hold the fingerboard solidly which also gives a straight edge for the roller on the bit to ride on. I have used this on all of my guitars and it works beautifully. Once the board was tapered I used my 16" radius block to give the fingerboard the top radius it needs.

I then turned my attention to the neck blank. I first used the same router jig to taper the neck to match the fingerboard. I used a template I made for my 12 fret 000 to shape the peghead on my router table. After that was shaped, I drilled the tuner holes. I do this first because I don't want the holes to chip out inside the slots of the slot head. I laid out the slots and used a 1/2" forsner bit to rough out the bulk of the wood for the slots. I drilled almost all of the way through, then flipped it and drilled back the other way to eliminate any tear out. I chiseled and filed the slots to almost the final size. I am trying to decide how I want to do the ends of the slots. My last time with a slot head, I put corner notches in the tops of the slots, and square ramps at the bottom. I like the look but it took a lot of work to get it done. I have also changed my corner notches since then, so the square notches won't match now. So, I need to figure out what I want to do with them.

Then I rough cut the heel end with my band saw. I used my drill press with a sanding drum and rough shaped the neck and heel. I still have a lot of work to do on it but I wanted to get the bulk of the wood off. That is where I finished up today. If I get some time tomorrow, I will spend it on bindings and perflings.

Just a note, I forgot to take my camera up with me one day so there are some pictures missing such as me shaping the peghead.

Okay, I can see I have the pictures out of order again. I just started using the new bulk picture uploader and I haven't figured out the correct order thing yet. Please bear with me, I will get it! Anyways, here is the neck heel after rough sanding.

The heel after I rough cut the cheeks with my band saw. This is simply to remove wood bulk, it isn't supposed to look pretty.

The neck as I left it.

Here is the fingerboard with the taper layout lines. They are hard to see, but they are there.

The fingerboard after tapering and radiusing. Also the peghead has been shaped.

Here you can see the tuner holes have been drilled prior to cutting the slots.

Here is the peghead with the slots drilled. You can see that I stopped just short of going all the way through, well except for that first hole!

A bit of file and chisel work to get the edges straight.

Here is the tenon that I cut several days ago. I never posted the picture.

This is the peghead right after I removed the clamps from the veneer. It is a piece of Zirocote. I had to laminate it on crooked so the two stripes would end up running parallel with the neck.

This is the jig I use to taper the fingerboard and neck. The bearing of the router bit rides along the edge of the jig and flush cuts the fingerboard. All that is needed is to line up the two ends of the taper to the edge of the jig and everything else works automatically.

A couple of days of catching up.....

2008-06-29T20:34:00.005-05:00

I have spent some time in the shop working on the guitar, but I haven't had a lot of time to update the blog afterwords so this post will cover a couple of different sessions.

I started by routing out the channel for the truss rod. One nice thing about the center strips is that it makes lining up the truss rod route a lot easier. None of the tedious centerline measuring. After the mess that happened with the green twins neck, I was very careful to make sure that the bit was very tight! That didn't help much though. About half way through the cut the bit broke. Fortunately no harm was done (other than to the bit of course!) and I had a spare. I replaced the bit and finished the cut. Once that was done I marked out the tenon for cutting but before cutting it out, I drilled and installed the brass inserts for the bolts with epoxy. Once they were dry I trimmed the end dead flat and cut the tenon using my tenoning jig on my table saw. It was pretty uneventful. I also cut the curve for the heel block. Lastly I took the Koa bindings off of the bender to make sure they were okay. They all bent fine with not cracks or splits.

Today I made a small change to my plans. I originally was going to use a East Indian rosewood peg head veneer but at the last minute I changed my mind and decided to use Ziricote since that is what I used for the rosette. The fingerboard and bridge will still be rosewood. I glued the Zirocote veneer on and got it all clamped up. I then turned my sites on cutting the fingerboard fret slots. I have a jig I made for this but I had some problems with my clamp screws tearing out since the jig is made of MDF. I took a 5/8" oak dowel and cut 8 plugs 1/2" long, drilled out the base and glued the dowels in with thin CA. I sanded them flat and that gave me a nice hardwood spot to screw the clamps to. I printed out a fret scale based on 24.9" scale using Wfret. That scale was then used as a guide for cutting the slots. Once the slots were cut I had to call it quits for the day. Next up will be more neck work and possibly some binding work.

Okay, for some reason my pictures ended up out of order. I will need to figure out how that happened. Oh well. Here is the neck after routing the truss rod channel.

This is my slot cutting jig again. If you look closely, you can see where I glued in the oak dowels for the clamps. It is much more solid now. Yeah, I know the slots are already cut. You weren't supposed to notice that!

Here is the peghead veneer being glued and clamped in place. You just can't have too many clamps!

The neck end with the inserts epoxied in. You can also see the tenon layout lines.

Here are the bindings out of the bender. I bent 5 just in case one broke on me. Oh well, now I have a spare!

The neck with the truss rod in the channel. Nothing exciting.

The fingerboard after the slots being cut.

Makin' bindings and a nice surprise....

2008-06-24T19:00:00.008-05:00

This morning before heading off to work I scooted myself up to the shop and got the second heel block glued on. I wanted to do that so when I got home tonight I could get the last block glued on. The plan worked and I have all of the blocks glued on. Since my workbench was being used as a gluing and clamping platform, I decided to see what I had for Koa bindings. Darn, only 2 pieces in my stash. I was just about to order some when I remember I still had an orphaned Koa side that was 5/32" thick. I dug it out and went to work ripping binding strips out of it. I was able to rip a dozen strips out of what I had left. I had already used about half of the piece making the neck center strips so that was the most I could get. I got them all thicknessed down to .010" so I have pieces for the body and fingerboard. I put them all together and ran them through the bender. I will check on them later to see if any of them cracked. I bent 5 just in case one goes bad.

I had an exciting thing happen today too. We had a delivery of 4 tons of wood pellets (we heat with a wood pellet stove) and was talking to one of the men that made the delivery. I found out that he has been following this blog since last summer when my wife had told him that I built guitars. He is a player and has been reading along until I took my little hiatus over the winter months. I have a few friends who follow this, but that is the first time that I have had someone I don't know tell me he has been reading along. So.... if you are reading this.... (and you know who you are!)... thanks! It is really cool knowing someone else gets some entertainment from my blog.

On to the pictures.

Here is the neck heel with all 3 blocks glued up. Everything is lined up beautifully.

A dozen koa binding strips.

It just dawned on me that I have never shown the order I put things together when I bend. First I use a stainless steel slat, then put the wood wrapped in damp Kraft paper.

Next my heating blanket. If you look you can see the light bulbs are on in the bottom half of the bender pre-heating the form.

Next another stainless steel slat.

Fire up the blanket, clamp it down slowly and cook it for about 10 minutes to harden the bend. This method has worked well for me so far.

More neck work...

2008-06-23T20:50:00.006-05:00

With the body built less bindings and perflings, I am focusing on getting the neck made. I needed to thin the peg head and have found that using my scarf joint cutting jig to do this. I clamped the neck in so the peg head was parallel with the saw blade and adjusted it so the saw cut the right amount off of the top side. I cut it and it turned out well.

Once that was done, I laid out the neck length and cut off the excess. I cut the scrap into three progressively longer pieces to use as a heel. Now gluing the heel block on so it stays straight is a bit of a task. The LMI glue is very slippery and the blocks want to slip and slide when pressure is put on them with clamps. Normally with a solid block it isn't a big deal as there is excess and it can all be jointed flush. With a center strip however, things get a little more tricky. I am using a stacked 3 piece heel so it gets even more tricky. I decided that it was going to be easiest to do this one piece at a time. So tonight I glued and clamped the first piece on. It was tricky as I expected it to be but I got it straight with the center strips all lined up. Tomorrow piece two will be glued on.

Here is the scarf jig being used to thin the peg head.

Here is the first of three heel blocks being glued into place.

This is the tenon side showing the center strips lined up.

Everything clamped in place with the two other pieces waiting their turn.

Got to put the molds away finally......

2008-06-20T21:39:00.011-05:00

Today I was able to get a couple of things done. First I pulled both the neck and the body out of the various clamps and bars that were holding all of the glued pieces together so I could get a good look at my work. I am happy. The neck scarf joint turned out very nice and tight but more importantly the center strip lined up perfectly on the back of the neck. The top side isn't perfectly lined up but since that gets covered with a head plate, it isn't a problem. The body also turned out nicely. The top and back glue joints are solid and tight. I went ahead and routed the excess top and back wood off with a flush trim bit.

All along I have been thinking that I was going to use bloodwood bindings for the body and fingerboard. With the back strip of the neck being maple and koa, I have decided to use koa for the bindings. I need to check my wood stash, but I think I have enough to do this. If not, I will need to make an order.

Here is the body right out of the go bar deck and external mold.

The back side of the neck. Notice the center strip lines up perfectly at the joint line.

The top side of the neck head. You can see the center strip doesn't line up perfectly at the splice point towards the top of the picture. This doesn't really matter though as it will be covered.

The joint line.

And the other side of the joint line. Both are very tight and clean.

The body after routing the excess wood off. The sound hole looks really big but in reality the body is very small. The hole is actually a little smaller than it should be.

The back. I like this striped mahogany.

This is just for a size comparison. The guitar behind this is my OOO that I built from a stewmac plan. It is the smallest guitar I have and you can see this one is significantly smaller in both height and width.

Top glued on and neck glued.....

2008-06-18T17:05:00.011-05:00

Well I didn't get much time last night, I forgot we had dinner plans with friends but I did get a few minutes to get the body out of the go bar deck and clean up any glue squeeze out from the back glue up. Today I did get some time and decided I wanted to get the top glued on. I did the final test fit and noticed that it looked like the top had a large radius bow to it. I grabbed my radius board to check and found that the top had a 15' neck to tail radius instead of 30' that I wanted. I am not sure what I did, but somehow when I did the final sanding of the rims I must have done both edges on the 15' dish. Fortunately I noticed it before gluing the top down so I was able to re-sand the rims, and re-cut the notches so the top now has the correct 30' radius. Once that was done I glued to top to the rims. This is one of those things that seem to happen when I have too much time spent between work sessions. Mistakes happen and I forget where I left off.

I then decided that I wanted to get the neck scarf joint glued up. I built some anchor points on my work bench to hold the pieces in the correct position and glued it up. It was a little tricky trying to get the center strip lined up but given enough clamps I was able to get it all lined up without sliding. I am not sure if the top/face side is lined up perfectly as it was under cauls, but the back is straight and that is the important side as that will be seen. The other side will be covered by the fingerboard and head plate. I am still up in the air on whether or not I want to do a back plate also like I did on the SJ. I really like the look but it is a lot of work to get it to look right. I am still thinking on it. If you don't remember, this is going to be a 12 fret slot head so I am still working out the design elements of the neck.

Here is the back in the go bar deck. I forgot to take a picture of it the other night so I took the just before taking the go bars off.

The body with the back glued on. Very little squeeze out was inside. I am getting better with this part!

A shot of one of the brace notches and the glue line. They turned out pretty nice.

Here you can see the 30' radius bar against the top edge at the waist. The waist sticks up about 3/16" higher than the radius stick which caused quite a bend with the top. If I would have glued it up like this, it would have been almost impossible to get the neck alignment correct. The straight edge would have most likely been at least 1/4" above the bridge which is pretty much a lost cause. I am REALLY glad I caught this error!

This is another picture with the radius board touching the tail block and the waist. You can see that it is floating 3/16" above the neck block.

So after some sanding and re-cutting the brace notches, the radius bar sits nicely touching at the neck, waist and tail.

My label glued in just before the top glue up.

The top glued on in the go bar deck.

Lastly, the neck scarf joint glued up and clamped in place.

3 days in a row!!!

2008-06-16T18:06:00.003-05:00

Yep thats right, I actually got to work on my guitar for the last 3 days! After all of the time out of the shop this feels like a huge progress streak.

Well the top is done, the back is done, and the rims are notched. What is left to do but sign the top, take some pictures and then dive into gluing the back to the rims. I got my go bar deck all set up for the glue up, checked the fit and got to work gluing it up. It went quite well. Everything fit nicely and the glue up was uneventful. Once that was all clamped up and drying I turned my attention to the neck blank I glued up yesterday. I unclamped it, and ran the blank through the thickness sander to clean up the glue and level out all of the wood edges. It turned out nicely. I am very happy with how it looks. Next up on the agenda was to cut the scarf joint. I dug out my scarf cutting jig, blew the inch of dust off of it and got the blank all clamped in place. This was a little different than the other necks I have made because everything needed to be cut very square so the center strips line up. I ran it through, flipped the pieces and put them together to see how I did. It turned out pretty well. I had to run the long blank through my jointer because one side of the mahogany was a touch wider than the other so flipping the pieces made the center strip move off center. The jointer made it easy to correct. I need to clean up the joint a touch as the line isn't perfectly straight. I have learned however that this actual joint line doesn't actually need to be perfectly straight because one side gets hidden by the fingerboard, nut, or headplate, and the back side gets carved into a curve which can easily repair any minor irregularities. What is important however is the joint line on the edge. It has to be perfect as that joint is very visible on the finished instrument.

Tomorrow my plan is to glue the scarf joint and glue the top to the rims.

Here is the neck blank after I pulled it from the clamps and ran it through the thickness sander.

The top with the completed bracing. It has a really nice tap tone. A very long ring but some nice deep tones also.

Another shot of the top showing the depth of the brace scallops.

And yet another angle.

This is the back bracing.

The neck blank in my scarf joint cutting jig.

Here is the scarf joint on the back side. This is the side that will be seen so it is very important to get that center strip lined up perfectly.

Well, I thought I took a picture of the back and rim glue up but I guess I forgot to take the picture. I will get one before I pull it out of the go bar deck.

Priorities.....

2008-06-15T16:03:00.011-05:00

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.

Rough brace shaping

2008-05-19T15:24:00.005-05:00

Today I spent a couple of hours in the shop working on the top braces. I decided that I wanted to go with scalloped braces instead of parabolic. The reason for this is that I want to loosen the top up as much as possible with this being such a small top. One thing I did on the scalloped braced Twin was to measure out the peaks so none of them are in the same circle radiating from the center of the bridge plate. That guitar sounds incredible with a lot of low end 'boom'. I decided to do the same on this guitar. I spent some time laying out the centerlines of the braces, marking where I wanted the peaks to be located and then shaping. I started by cutting the edges to a 45 degree angle to create a triangle shape to the center of the brace stock. Once that was finished I roughed out the scallops. This made a huge difference in the tap tone giving it a very long ring. I haven't finished the braces as of yet because I didn't have the bridge plate glued on. Tap tuning without the bridge plate is useless as the plate will make a difference. I glued the plate on and will finish brace shaping next session.

Here you can see the location marks for the scallop peaks.

The top after rough cutting the braces. They still have a lot of work yet to be done but this already makes a big difference in the tap tone. Right after this I glued the bridge plate on.

Bracing and profiling....

2008-05-03T17:30:00.010-05:00

Although I didn't post this week, I did get some time a couple of evenings this week to work on the guitar. I spent the time making a back reinforcement strip and gluing it down, chiseling out the brace spots in that back strip, sanding the side profiles, and gluing down the remaining braces. Lastly I made the bridge plate out of maple.

Here is the center reinforcement strip glued down and clamped in my go bar deck. I used some scrap quartersawn redwood for the strip.

The top with all of the braces glued down.

In between glue up sessions I spent time sanding to rims and kerfed linings to the back and top radiuses.

I also made a hard maple bridge plate. I wanted EIR but I didn't have a piece to use so I am settling with maple.

Before gluing the back braces down I chiseled out the spots in the center strip.

Finally I glued down the back braces.

Wow, has it really been over a month....

2008-04-27T14:55:00.009-05:00

It is hard to believe that it has been over a month since my last update. As I have mentioned in previous posts things have been quite busy around here and something needed to give. Unfortunately that has been guitar work as well as practicing. I feel quite guilty whenever I look at my guitars and my shop knowing that all of my wood is sitting there collecting dust, and all of my hard work practicing is slowly going down the tubes. Fortunately, it looks like things are beginning to get under control and I might just get to spend more time building and practicing before long. Spring has sprung around here and the shop isn't cold anymore so I can now get up there and work during any free time I get without having to get temp's up to a comfortable working level. I have also been able to run the de-humidifier for the last two weeks which was able to get the RH back down to a workable level. When I got up there yesterday the RH was 44% which is almost perfect. Today it was a bit lower because I forgot to turn the air conditioner off last night and it ran all night sucking water out of the air. It was 39% this morning but that is okay. I would rather it be a bit too dry than too humid.

I was checking some other blogs and noticed that my buddy Ted has come off of his building vacation and is starting a new guitar by creating a lot of dust building radius dishes. Ted, I know all about that dust mate. I was covered from head to toe in dust when I made mine! Anyways I figured that seeing Ted get started again was the kick in the pants I needed to get going on mine.

So, where to start. That is exactly what I was thinking when I went up there yesterday to pick up where I had left off. I had rough cut the top braces several weeks ago so I figured that was as good a place to begin as any. I am doing a couple of things different on this one as an experiment. First, I am using a modified 'A' brace under the fingerboard extension instead of the popsicle brace that is typical, or the A braces I used on the Twins. I spread the 'splay' of the braces a bit so they don't hit the truss rod access hole and I put two diagonal braces across from the A brace to the transverse brace to provide more support to the extension. I am a bit concerned that the redwood top could possibly split along the edge of the extension so I wanted to provide just a bit more support there. Since the stiffness of the top above the soundhole doesn't affect the sound much I figure these two pieces of wood shouldn't make much of a difference in tone. The other thing I am doing different is that I am trying to keep the top above the soundhole flat instead of radiused. On all of my other builds I have radiused the entire top via the braces. It makes for a nice looking top, but it also introduces a bit of complications to the neck set particularly the fingerboard extension. I am attempting to keep the radius of the top to below the soundhole so the extension will sit more flat on the top. Martin does this and I figure that if they do it, there must be something to be learned from the technique.

I got all of the braces ready and glued the upper braces using my go bar deck and kept the top flat. Once those were dry, I put the top on my radius dish and glued the X braces on. Once those are dry I will glue the finger braces and tone bar.

I have had some good reviews on the Twin guitars. My daughters have played them a lot and shown them to friends and other players. All of them have raved about how good they sound and a couple have inquired about me building guitars for them and what the cost would be. One player asked my daughter how much I would charge to build and she guessed a price quite a bit higher than I was thinking and the response was "It is worth every penny". I have two people who are very interested even after hearing what I would charge for one like the twins. Who knows, I may get my first commissioned build this year!

Here is the 'new and improved' A brace design. Note that I put the intersecting point of the A just outside the neck block. On the Twins I put that point just inside the block. This was a little problem as it interfered with the truss rod adjustment hole. I added the two angled piece to give a little more support for the fingerboard extension.

Just another angle of the braces. All of the pieces are notches into the transverse brace and the angled pieces are also notched into the A braces.

All of the braces sitting on the top. Remember this is a parlor sized guitar so I am going with a single tone bar.

I cut out the sound hole with my dremel and circle cutter.

Here the top braces are glued and clamped in place on a flat surface.

The X brace was glued on the radius dish.

I also cut and radiused the back braces. I am use a typical ladder brace pattern on the back.

Hopefully my activities in the shop will increase as will my blog updates.

Got some shop time......

2008-03-15T13:23:00.013-05:00

Yeah, I know I said I would be better at posting. Well, things are still quite busy and to be quite honest, it is hard to get motivated to go into a sub-freezing shop to work on the guitar. It takes a good half hour to get the temp up to a decent working level and the humidity level in my shop has been too high to do much. Once the shop temperature gets above freezing consistently, I will be able to fire up the de-humidifier again and hopefully get back to work.

I spent a couple of different days in the shop and as of now I have the rosette done, the side braces on, and the top braces cut. Instead of writing everything I did, I took pictures that I will show instead.

Here is the Ziricote rosette ring after sanding flat and before routing the channels for the perfling strips.

If you look, you can see that I routed with the bit splitting the redwood and ziricote. This gives a nice clean edge on the ziricote. The wood was very hard to cut originally and get a clean edge. This method works well to get a nice clean edge. I used this method on the last 3 guitars and I really like it.

The outer channel cut and the strips temporarily put in to see how it looks.

Both channels are routed and ready for the perfling strips.

The perfling strips glued in and ready to be weighted down. The joints are on the left side of the picture which will be hidden under the fingerboard extension.

Here are all of the side braced cut and ready to be glued in.

Here is the rosette sanded flat and wet with naphtha. I am happy with the look.

Here are the top brace blanks cut and the X brace notch has been cut.

Here are the side braces glued in place. I ran out of clamps when I glued in the first batch so that is why the last 4 are clamped in place. The others are dried.

More kerfing and a rosette started

2008-02-25T16:43:00.006-05:00

First things first. WHOEVER IS SPAMMING MY COMMENTS WITH LINKS TO CRAP WEBSITES PLEASE STOP! YOU HAVE BEEN REPORTED!

I feel better now.

Okay, I know that I promised that I would post last week after getting back to work last Saturday. Well I didn't get a chance to work on the guitar until Sunday after church. I started by removing all the clips holding the kerfed linings on the top edge and fit the kerfed linings on the back edge. I glued them up and got them clamped in place. I then turned my attention to the top. I needed to lay out the sound hole location based on the 12 fret short scale design the guitar will ulitmately be built to be. It took some work figuring out the actual measurement but I finally got it. Hopefully it is right! I laid out the brace locations on the inside to make sure that the sound hole is actually in the right spot. It is kind of scary trying to lay such an important part of the guitar with no plan to work off of. All I had to use was a plan of a short scale 14 fret guitar and a plan of a long scale 12 fret guitar. After comparisons and some math I was able to figure out the actual center spot for the sound hole.

Once I had that done I dug out all of my rosette blanks to see what wood I wanted to use with the redwood top. I settled on Ziricote. I like the dark brown striped coloring with the redwood top. I have several pieces of Ziricote that I can also use for headstock veneer so I like the idea of matching the two components. I cut the rosette ring with my Dremel and circle cutter, routed the channel in the top and glued it in place. I will sand it flat tomorrow and then I will route around the inside and outside edges to inlay a black/white/black trim around it. I think that will give it a nice classy look. I have done my rosettes this way on my last 4 guitars and I really like it. I do the solid wood part by routing the channel for it. Because of the hardness of Ziricote, the circle cutter does a fair job but it puts imperfections all along the edges of the rosette. I like inlaying it in the top first and then re-routing around the edges, just skimming the actual solid wood piece which gives the edge a nice clean line. It also allows me to do the rosette in 'phases' instead of trying to get the solid piece and 6 strips all glued in at one time. This method just seems to work better for me.

So tomorrow (or next time I get back in the shop!) I will sand it flat, route the inner and outer channels and inlay the strips.

The rims with the second set of linings clamped and glued.

This is the brace layout. Note that there is only one tone bar. Because of the small size, a single tone bar will allow the top to vibrate a bit more freely. It should give a bit more low end tone.

The rims with the clamps removed and the insides sanded clean. I still need to do the side braces. Yep, I forgot them before doing the linings. I wanted to use cloth but now I will use wood.

Here is the first stage of the rosette glued in. It is a nice stripy piece of Ziricote. I like the contrast with the redwood. The B/W/B trim should give it a really nice look.

FINALLY, back in the shop!

2008-02-17T16:08:00.013-05:00

Yep, that's right I found some time to get up in the shop today and do some work on the '0'. I have been extremely busy with work and I started selling books online in January. I was expecting the book sales to be spotty and slow at first and would build up gradually over time as my experience progressed. Wrong! I listed my first 125 books on a Sunday afternoon and by Monday night had 10 orders. Sales have been strong every day since that day. Needless to say I had to hit the ground running, learning all about shipping, packaging, and stock replenishment very quickly under the heat of battle so to speak. Things are going well and I feel now like I have things somewhat under control. Those first few weeks were crazy though. As I have mentioned before in this blog, my ultimate goal with guitar building is to hopefully one day start a business building and selling custom guitars. I have been spending a lot of time and money towards that goal and I feel like I am progressing nicely. The pitfall however is it costs a lot of money to learn the way I have been doing it. I finally decided that if I am to continue towards this goal, I need to find a source of additional income to pay for it. That is where the online book selling comes in. It is a venture that produces income quickly and it is something I can do outside of my normal work hours. Now that I am getting a system down, it is also a venture that can be done and still allow me time in the shop as well as provide money to buy tools and wood as needed. The big advantage I have is that my father is an online bookseller so he has been a huge help getting me up and running. It is nice to have someone who has 'been there-done that' who I can bounce questions off of. All through the middle of the book selling learning time, I decided that would be a great time to get a new computer. Anyone who has changed computers knows what a pain in the neck that can be. Getting everything moved to the new machine and getting it all running smoothly is a chore. I got it done and was able to get everything working again. I still have some websites that I have lost the passwords from and of course the cookies that hold them are buried somewhere on the old computer. Things will smoothen themselves out in short time though.

So for all of you who frequent my blog, and wondered if I dropped off the face of the earth I apologize for the sudden lack of activity. For all the forum readers who wonder where I disappeared to, now you know. I am still reading and posting, but I just haven't had the time to dwell in the forums as much as I normally do.

Anyways back to guitar stuff. I spent a few hours last week making some reverse kerfed linings and then bending them. I used my fingerboard slotting jig and the fret slotting blade in my table saw to cut the kerfs. I taped all 4 blanks in the jig and cut the slots all at one time. It was a pretty easy and uneventful task although I think it is worth spending the few dollars per piece just to buy them from a supplier. Mine work, and they look okay but they take a lot of time to do and they don't look as professional as a pre-made set does. Today I took them out of the bender, cut the top pieces to length and glued them in. My plan is to get the back ones glued up tomorrow.

I received a package of some back and side sets I ordered from an online auction this last week. I get a set of striped Maple, Pauduk, African Mahogany, and Canarywood. I also got a mahogany neck blank. My wood stash is growing nicely. I have purchased a lot of Lutz top sets from the same auction over the last few months so I now have 10 back and side sets with 4 more sets coming, 20 top sets, and 8 neck blanks with fingerboards. I also have one Lutz billet that can be sawn into 3-4 top sets as well. It is nice to have some wood to choose from when designing a guitar. It is also a lot of fun to tap the different tops and listen to them ring.

Here are the 4 pieces of reverse kerfed linings I made before bending.

The bender all set and ready to go.

All 4 pieces got bent at the same time.

Here is the rim thicknessed down to size and roughly radiused.

The next four pictures are of the new back and side sets I got. This one is the striped maple set. I dampened it with naphtha to help show the stripes.

The African Mahogany set

The Canarywood. This picture doesn't do the set justice. It is very yellow in color.

The Pauduk. Again the color isn't quite right. The real wood is very orange/red in color. I am a bit nervous with this wood. It is very brittle stuff and I have read a lot of horror stories of people trying to bend it. I think I will hold off until I have a lot more bending experience before trying to build anything out of this set.

Here is a picture of my wood stash. There are 10 back/side sets, 20 top sets, 8 neck blanks with fingerboards, and a ton of rosette blanks. The plank sitting on the table to the right is a Lutz top billet.

The Kerfed linings fresh out of the bender still wrapped in kraft paper.

The top linings glued and clamped.

Sorry I have been .....

2008-01-16T20:18:00.000-05:00

a bit remiss in updating this blog. I have been crazy busy and just haven't had any time to work on the guitar this last week other than spending some time profiling the rims to the needed width, and then sanding them on the radius dishes. I am waiting on a couple of parts to arrive, but really that isn't holding me up. What is holding me us is work and online book selling. It has just been crazy. Hopefully I will get some shop time this weekend. I also have a small cheap classical guitar that my daughter's friend asked me to do some minor repairs on. It really is a piece of ...... well you know what.... but it gives me a little repair experience. Unfortunately the neck is very much out of alignment and it has a Spanish heal. I have no experience at all with them and I won't even attempt to re-set it. Fortunately I can make a new saddle, level the frets and get the action back down to a playable level instead of about a mile above the frets like it is now. It is a garage sale special so really no harm....no foul on this one. The girl who owns it can't play and just wants it cleaned up, new strings, and fix some chips. I figure if I can get it playable that is better than it is now.

Sorry, no pictures tonight.

Glued in blocks.....

2008-01-07T21:24:00.000-05:00

I didn't have a lot of shop time today but I did get the neck block finished and both glued to the rims. I also got the back and top sanded down to thickness. The top is .122" now and I figure I will have it down to .115 for final thickness, and the back is sanded to .085". I went down to .075" on the twins and it felt like I went a bit thin on them. They are solid, but they can be bowed back without too much effort so I wanted to stiffen this one up a touch. I went a lot by feel on both the top and back this time. I did a lot of flexing, especially of the top to get a feel for stiffness. When I felt the top starting to loosen up, I stopped sanding.

Here is the neck block ready for gluing. Well almost ready, I gave it a coat of shellac before gluing. Again, note the fancy edges. :)

Here are the rims being glued to the blocks.

Making blocks...

2008-01-06T16:35:00.000-05:00

Today I decided to make the neck and tail blocks for the 0. This is when I realized that I didn't really have any wood to do this with. Well, that really isn't true, I just didn't have the wood that I was accustomed to using. After digging around in my scrap box, I was able to scrounge up a piece of Sapele neck wood that will make a nice neck block, and I have lots of 1"x6" mahogany planking that is suitable for the tail block. I was able to cut a single piece tail block, but the neck block was a touch too short for the overall length I need. Not a big deal as I have had to shim pretty much every neck block I have made so far. I glued up the neck block to a shim and set it aside to dry. I then shaped the curve of the tail block and knocked the edges. Typically I have cut the edges with a 45 degree angle. While that looks fine and works, I decided that I wanted to dress this one up a bit so I grabbed a decorative router bit and knocked the corners with that. I like how it looks and I think I will continue to do that in the future. It is purely a decorative touch, one that almost nobody will ever see but I like it.

I spent some time making a base for my laminate trimmer that I got for Christmas that can be used for binding channel routing. I made it out of Lexan and basically it makes a thin 'shoe' that rides along the very edge of the guitar. There is a roller bearing that rolls along the side. The reason for the shoe is that with the angle of the back and top radiuses, there are some spots that the guitar will 'tip' while routing on a router table. This requires some clean up of the channels because those tipping spots will cause the channel to be narrower than required. I decided that I want to get better with my bindings and although they look good now, anyone with a keen eye or ruler will quickly realize that they are not perfectly uniform all the way around the guitar. I want to improve this aspect of my guitar building.

First off, here is the air filtration unit I put in the shop. It seems to work quite well as the filter already looks dirty and I really haven't done much dusty work.

Here is the neck block glued up and clamped. The shim on top is significantly larger than needed. The block was actually only about 1/8" short.

Here is the tail block. Note the fancy routing on the edges to knock them down.

Here is the binding unit for my laminate trimmer. The bearing on the bit keeps the bit the proper distance for cutting depth, and the bottom bearing is completely adjustable both in and out, and up and down. If you look closely you can see the narrow shelf I attached which will ride on the top or back. In theory this should work well. :)

It just dawned on my that I never posted a picture of the finished Troji. I got some 2" foam rubber for padding and glued it in. I then sanded the edges and then I gave the whole thing 2 coats of poly and called it done. Here you can see one of my finished guitars being used as a Guinea pig for testing. It works great. It holds the guitar very securely without putting much pressure at all on it.

Vacation is over....

2008-01-05T17:08:00.000-05:00

...and it's time to get back to work building guitars. If you remember, I am going to build a 12 fret size 0 redwood and striped Honduran mahogany. In December I joined the top and back plates and built the bender mold, but didn't do anything else as I was pre-occupied with the twins. Today was the day to bend the sides. I was a bit nervous about this bend as the wood is highly figured striped mahogany and as such, it has a great tendency to want to crack or have the grain separate. I did a lot of research on the most reliable way to bend it and got to work. A couple of days ago I thinned the sides down to .075" thickness and then spritzed them with SuperSoft 2. I let them dry for a couple of days so the wood was ready. I wrapped the sides in kraft paper that was lightly spritzed with distilled water so there was some moisture to help the bend by allowing steam to penetrate, but not enough to get the wood wet. There is some mixed opinions on bending mahogany. Some say to bend it wet and hot, yet others say bend it dry, fast, and hot. I decided to go towards that dry, fast and hot method. I got the wood up to 295 degrees and started the bend. Everything went well and much to my delight, both sides came out beautifully. This was some expensive wood so I wasn't too thrilled at the idea of ruining a set of sides and ending up with an orphan back. I cut the sides to length and clamped them in the side mold. Next up will be making and gluing in the neck and tail blocks.

I received my shop air cleaner on Thursday and got it installed in the shop. I hung it directly over the table saw with the input facing the sanding and routing area. My thinking is I want the dust to be pulled up into the unit as quickly as possible. The unit is very quiet and it seems to be effective according to my highly scientific testing. I took a handful of saw dust and threw it in the air in front of the input. The dust was quickly drawn in and trapped by the filter. I forgot to take a picture today but I will tomorrow.

This is the second side after being bent. I had to shorten the base of my bender a little bit because the parlor size mold is so much shorter than the other sizes I have built.

One of the sides just out of the bender. Note all of the oil that has penetrated the paper. It is a lot easier to toss some dirty paper than it is to clean up the bending slats!

And here is a bent side. No splits, cracks or scorches.

The sides clamped in the mold.

There was one section of one side where the wood grain separated a little bit. You can see it here as black horizontal lines on the left side. Fortunately that was the only spot that this happened, and it is well outside the profile area so it is no problem. The cracks are however all the way through and I can see light through them if I hold the sided up to a window. I am very glad this didn't happen in the middle of the side!

The twins were a hit.......

2007-12-28T14:07:00.000-05:00

Christmas has come and gone now and we spent the holiday in Pennsylvania with my parents. We had a great time and it is always wonderful to be with family for Christmas. The twins were both given to my daughters, and they were very surprised. The expression on their faces as well as the smiles was the best gift I could receive. It was fun hearing my playing daughter play them. I always hear my guitars when I play them, but rarely do I get to hear them from the other side of the sound hole. I have to say, I was blown away by the bass, volume, and clarity of both of these guitars. The scalloped braced one as I mentioned earlier has more bass than the parabolic but they both sound amazing. I got to hear the them compared to the inexpensive dreadnought my oldest daughter has and there really is no comparison. It is like comparing a '75 Chevy Vega to a '07 Caddy. Night and day. What really surprised me was the richness of the bass on these two guitars in comparison. You would think that a dreadnought, even an inexpensive one would out-bass an 000 but not here. Both of these guitars have a deep boomy bass that isn't muddy sounding. When I get a chance I will have my daughter sit down and play something on both of them so I can record it and compare the differences. The bottom line, I am absolutely thrilled with the volume, tone, and clean sound of both guitars. My big gift was a new Ridgid laminate trimmer that I can use as a dedicated binding router. I need to make a base for it but I am excited to give it a try on my next guitar.

UPDATE: My daughter was kind enough to post a video of her playing the red guitar and singing. Although the video is not the greatest quality as it was taken using a digital camera, you can get a bit of an idea of how it sounds. Here is the link.

Last week I decided to make an end of the year purchase of a couple of shop items. I ordered a Jet air cleaner with electrostatic filter, and a Grizzly 6" jointer. I have been wanting to get the air cleaner for a while and Amazon had a good deal on one with free shipping. I couldn't pass it up. Grizzly had a $30 off sale on the jointer so I went ahead and pulled the trigger on that too. The jointer arrived yesterday afternoon, and after a bunch of heavy lifting I was able to get it up into my second floor shop....... by myself! Fortunately it was in pieces so the heaviest part was the jointer table which was somewhere around 100 lbs. The rest of the pieces were under 50 lbs each. I got it all assembled and I did some test cuts with it. It really works well however the motor seems to not be running right so I will be contacting Grizzly about a replacement motor. It doesn't seem to want to start correctly, it kind of surges until it gets up to speed. It isn't the belt slipping but it is the motor itself cutting in and out. Hopefully they will be good about replacing it.

Today I spent some time in the shop building a Troji. I got some plans off of a post in the OLF so it was a pretty easy build. I didn't take many pictures of the assembly but I will post what I did get pictures of.

Here is the new jointer. I still need to do the dust collection, but that didn't stop me from trying it out!

I moved my bench sander to a spot where I can work around it easily. I moved my drill press around the corner to make room.

Here is one side of the Troji after I attached it to the base.

This picture is for people who are wanting to build one using the same plans, only I did a different kind of nut attachment. This allows full force to both push and pull on the nut. The original plan had a T nut on the back which can get pushed out if the troji gets squeezed.

Here it is assembled. I still need to pick up some foam to pad the cradle area, and I need to finish sand the edges but other than that it is done. I might give it a coat of poly just to protect the wood.

Here is the inside. The side on the left is hinged and the other side is stationary. Turning the crank closes and opens it to allow for the body to be installed. Tighten the crank and it will hold the body securely on edge so the sides can be worked on.

The twins have been born.....

2007-12-22T20:25:00.000-05:00

Well at long last, the twins are finished. I got them finished this morning, polished them all up and took a bunch of pictures. Then when I was inside eating lunch, the mailman came and delivered the colored bridge pins I ordered for them. So, I went back out, changed the pins and re-took pictures of the fronts with the new pins. Anyway, they are done, in their cases and waiting for two teenagers on Christmas morning.

Here is all the info:

000 14 fret 24.9" short scale based on Martin shape.
Sitka Spruce tops
East Indian Rosewood Backs and Sides
Sapele necks
East Indian Rosewood Pegheads,Fingerboards and bridges
Koa bindings, heel caps, and end wedges.
Colored strips for the perflings.
Spalt Maple and Curly Bubinga rosettes
Paua Abalone inlays
Target USL finish on the bodies, Tru-oil on the necks.

Here they are. First up the backs.

And the fronts.

Here you can see the sound ports.

First up, the red bridge. Note the red bridge pins.

This next batch is of the red guitar. Here is the back reflection shot.

Heel cap with inlay.

These back and side sets were "opportunity grade" sets. What that means is that they are perfectly structural sound sets, but they have some cosmetic issues that keeps them out of the higher graded sets. The plus side to this is that they are an absolute bargain. On this back you can see that both outer edges of the lower bout have some color changes. It looks to me like this was close to a branch by the way the grain starts to curve. Other than that, and the wide grain, these sets are a fantastic value.

The peghead. That white spot in the center above the nut is actually the reflection of my camera lense.

This is a curly bubinga rosette.

On to the green guitar. Note the green bridge pins.

This is the Koa heel graft I used. For some reason I forgot to take a picture of the other one. Oh well, they are the same.

The obligitory reflection shot.

The heel cap with the inlay.

This is the spalt maple rosette.

So there they are. Next up is the redwood and Honduran Mahogany size 0 parlor guitar. Other than joining the top and back, I haven't done anything else with it. I am going to build a guitar Troji this next week and then I will get started on the guitar. A troji is a clamping device that holds the guitar body vertically so I can work on the sides easily. After seeing how great having a guitar caddy has been, I figure a troji will be good too. Oh, and another addition to the shop should happen this next week or so. I ordered a new Grizzly 6" jointer and a Jet air cleaner. I am sure you remember that I put in dust collection this summer, but I am still getting a fine layer of dust on things and I am breathing it in. The air cleaner should help keep the air quality better in my shop. My lungs will thank me for this! Both of these items should be delivered in the next week or so.

The SJ is done......

2007-12-15T16:21:00.001-05:00

And here are the pictures to prove it! I am thiiiiisssss {holds finger and thumb really close together} to being done with the twins. All that is left is to make a new saddle for the green one, do a little touch up polishing, and taking pictures. I ordered some colored bridge pins so the red guitar will have red pins and the green guitar, green pins. I hope they sound okay. Since both guitars are going to teenagers, I think that some flair is in order, and as long as that flair doesn't affect tone too much, I am willing to sacrifice a little bit of tone to get them something that they will like the looks of.

Anyways, here are the pictures of the SJ. As a review, here are the spec's:

Scratch build using the OLF SJ plans
Camatillo back and sides
Bearclaw Sitka top
Curly maple bindings
Black/Maple/Black strip perflings
Box elder back inlay, heel cap, and rosette.
Paua abalone rosette, fret markers, and peg head inlay.
Ebony bridge, fingerboard, and peg head veneers
Peg head has back and front veneers
Honduran Mahogany neck
Target USL water based lacquer finish

Here is a fairly good representation of the mirror finish I got on this guitar. The light is approx. 10' away across the room.

The front shot. I had a hard time getting a decent front shot because of the flash reflection. This was the best of the bunch.

Front at an angle to bounce the flash away from the camera.

And the other side. Note the amount of claw in the top.

Here is the bridge I made. I changed it from my last one by making the bottom into a V shape. It matches the bottom of the fingerboard.

The rosette and fingerboard bottom.

The peg head. It is black ebony and I put a maple strip .020" away from the edge to frame it. There is black outside of the maple so the white line is inset around the edge. It turned out really nice.

The back. I like this wood.

From one angle.

And the other angle.

The heel cap an back inlay. I did a duplicate point on the other end of the back to match.

The back of the peg head. I like the looks of veneered peg head back.

Here you can see the reflection in the top. Also, if you look closely you can see that the side wood had sapwood which I used next to the top.

The back reflection. This is probably the best picture that represents the actual color of the wood. Although it looks brown, when sanded the dust is bright purple.

This shows both inlays in the back.

As does this picture.

And finally a poser picture.

Houston, we have a problem....

2007-12-10T17:08:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I decided to do the final touches and set the action on the twins. I did the red one first, I set the nut height so the strings are .020" above the first fret at the low E, and .012 at the high E. That is still a touch high, but it give some room for fine tuning once the giftee gets to play it. I set the action at the 12th fret to 8/64" for the low E and 6/64" at the high E. This is a good middle of the road to high action which allows for lowering. I set the relief to .007" at the 7th fret and checked for any buzzes. Everything went well and I put it away, then got the green one to do the same thing. That is when I discovered a problem, a fairly significant problem. I got all of the settings the same as the red one, but I was having trouble with the relief. I was getting barely .002" at the high E 7th fret, but I had .012" at the low E. Something was definitely wrong. I adjusted the truss rod, and only could get the bass side to change, the treble side didn't want to bow much. I was able to get it to .004" but that was it. So I sited down the neck to see what was happening and that is when I discovered a twist in the neck. It wasn't a huge twist, but the head stock was not straight with the body, and the fingerboard had a slight twist raising the treble side. When I released the truss rod, it helped remove some of the twist, but it was still there.

I had a decision to make at this time. The guitar was very playable, and there were no buzzes. I was able to get the action where I wanted it, and I could get enough relief to let it play cleanly. The problem was if anyone looked down the neck, they would see the twist, and the head stock was twisted. The decision was to leave it alone as the person getting this guitar is a teenager and has never played before so it would be fine for them. But, if I did this, I would always know that I didn't try and fix it. The other option obviously was to try and correct the problem. I decided to give the repair a shot. I got online and learned about heat pressing the neck to help remove twists. It is a fairly successful method used and it saves having to re-fret and plane the fingerboard.

Basically, what is done is the neck is twisted in the opposite direction of the original twist, then heat is applied to the fingerboard. There are a couple of tricky parts to this job however. First, a method of holding the guitar firmly down, while a jig is used to apply the opposite twist must be figured out. The other issue is how much heat to use. The idea is to heat the glue under the fingerboard just enough to cause it to creep, but not so hot to break the bond, or to warp the neck. The idea is to get the glue to right around 140 - 160 degrees so it will creep but not heat the rest of the neck too much. After much thought, I came up with a method to hold the guitar, apply the required back twist, and then heat the neck using my bending blanket. I rigged everything up, put the heater on a couple of metal rulers sitting on the frets so the blanket wouldn't scorch the fingerboard, and clamped a wood caul over the entire setup. I fired up the blanket and let it go until I could just feel warmth on the back side of the neck, and could see the glue line along the binding creep a very small amount. Basically just enough to feel with my finger but not any more. I let the entire thing cool down over night and removed the clamping jig. I am happy to say the neck is much straighter than it was. It isn't perfect and it still has a very slight twist but it is nowhere near what it was. I leveled the frets, re-adjusted the truss rod and strung it up. The truss rod is still not moving the treble side as much as the bass side, but I think that has to do with the wood possibly being stiffer on one side than the other. I am able to get .006" of relief on the high E now, and .007" on the low E. If I adjust for any more however, it only moves the low E side. Hopefully over time, the pull of the strings will create a bit more relief so that I can back the truss rod off of it's current tight setting.

So, the guitar isn't perfect and it will most likely need a re-fret and fingerboard leveling in the future, but it is perfectly acceptable to me for this being a student guitar. It has no buzzes and it sounds great. I do need to replace the saddle as it had a hollow spot in it that showed when I was shaping it. It makes the two high strings make an odd sitar type sound. I have one more nut blank so I will probably do that tomorrow. I will watch the guitar for the next year to see how things are holding up with the neck, and if needed, I will remove the frets and level the fingerboard. But for now, I am leaving it alone as Christmas is right around the corner! I have to say, this guitar neck has been nothing but trouble from the beginning. First the truss rod channel problem requiring the cutting of the neck and adding the mahogany piece down the middle, then the neck block being crooked, and finally this neck twist. This one has been a real test!

Okay, enough of my rambling, here are some pictures:

The green guitar, just before all of the drama happened.

I picked up one of those little Mouse random orbit sanders a few weeks ago and it works great for things like this. I used it to shape the top of the nut once I had the nut slots cut to depth. It is a lot easier than using a file and sanding block.

Here is a picture I took down the neck just before I started the heat pressing. If you look closely, you can see that that treble side is higher than the bass side. The peg head is also slightly twisted in that same direction.

Here it is clamped in the jig. You can see that I had the jig pulling down on one side and pushing up on the other causing an opposite twist.

Here it is from the peg head. You can see that the fingerboard is straightened out and the peg head is slightly twisted in the opposite direction.

I put two metal rulers between the blanket and the frets, and a flat board on top. I clamped the board down with 3 bar clamps before heating it up.

This is the glue line that I spoke about. You can see that the fingerboard slid very slightly on the neck blank which helps counter the twisting. I will sand the edges smooth and re-apply tru-oil so the glue line can't be felt.

Here it is now. The fingerboard is pretty straight now. It still has a very slight twist but it isn't very noticeable, and it doesn't affect playablity. The picture is kind of deceiving as the saddle is angled and the strings have different action heights which gives the optical illusion that the neck twists. I had to remove the saddle to line my eye up with the bridge to make sure things were straight. The saddle angle and string action makes things look crooked when they really aren't. I probably should have taken the picture without strings or the saddle now that I am thinking about it!

Stung 'em up....

2007-12-06T20:47:00.000-05:00

Well I got some time both yesterday and today after work to get both of the the twins strung up. I had to make both nuts and saddles for them, but that was a fairly easy task. I finally broke down and spent the money on a proper set of nut files. I can't believe that I waited this long to get them. They make the nut slotting so much easier and accurate than the methods I have been using in the past. Anyway, I started with the green guitar, went over the top with swirl remover and then made the nut, saddle, and then strung it up. I am stunned at the difference the sound port makes. Not only does it give the player the same sound as the people in front hear, but it actually adds volume to the guitar. I played around with it by closing the hole and opening it up and there is a definite difference in volume, and it is a pretty dramatic difference. I put that guitar in it's case to settle in for a few days, and got to work on the red guitar. Again I had to make the nut and saddle, attach the tuners, and string it up. This guitar has the same great volume and 'stereo' sound as the other. I did have one mishap on the red guitar. While I was slotting the peg holes in the bridge, I accidentally let the file come out and poke the top just under the rosette. Fortunately the tip of the file is a very fine point so the hole was small, but none the less there is now a small hole in the top. It didn't go all the way through, but it made me feel a little sick when it happened. Really, I can't think of any way to fix it that won't be visible so I decided to just fill it with finish and call it a beauty mark. I wish it hadn't happened, but it did and there isn't much I can do about it now. I also have one spot on the top that I sanded through when level sanding at the bass side waist. I brushed on some lacquer and will level it out in a week or so.

Both guitars right now have the action a mile high and I will leave them that way for a few days to let things settle in a bit before I start to set them up. I need to adjust the neck on the red one too as it doesn't have any relief. I thought the strings would pull some in but this neck is fairly stiff and with the short scale having less string tension, it doesn't look like it has enough force to pull the neck into the bow. That is what truss rods are for.. right!

I played them a little and I am noticing a bit of difference in the tone of them. The green one (parabolic) seems to have a little better note separation than the red (scalloped) one and it doesn't have the bottom end that the scalloped one does. The scalloped one is quite a bit louder and brighter sounding than the parabolic one. Both of them sound very good, leaps and bounds better than my first OM. Once I get them set up so the action is good, I will spend a little time playing them to get a better idea of the tonal differences. I will record both of them and post the files so you can hear what I am talking about. I wish I could play better but hey, you get what you get!

So, other than a final setup, some final buffing and polishing, some cleaning of the fingerboard and bridge, and compensating the saddles, these two are basically done. Just in time for Christmas!

Here is the red guitar in the work stand. This is the scalloped braced guitar. On a side note, I really like the stand. It keeps the guitar off of the table and holds it securely while I work on it. The tools with the yellow and red handles are two of the nut files I bought.

Here is the green parabolic braced guitar sitting in it's case. It still needs some cleaning and final polishing as you can see!

Here is the 'oops' that happened tonight. See the black spot between the top two strings? That is the hole my file put in the top.

Here is the spot I sanded through while leveling out the top. I roughed it up and sanded it down and that is when i took this picture. I have coated it a couple of times now with lacquer.

Odds and ends.....

2007-12-02T09:28:00.000-05:00

Well, not a lot to update on the double build as I am waiting for saddles and nuts to arrive in the mail but I did do a couple of things and purchased one new item for the shop. I have also ordered 3 cases, one for the SJ and two for the twins. I still am a big fan of the inexpensive 5 ply hard cases that Musicians Friend sells. They aren't travel cases, but they do a great job of keeping my guitars safe and the humidity level in check. For $40 each with free shipping, they just can't be beat for storage cases.

First, I spent some time getting ready for the parlor build by making a side mold, and a form for the bender. I did these the exact same way I built the others so I won't bore you with the details. One thing I have been wanting to build for a while now is a dedicated caddy to hold my guitars while I work on them. I saw a picture of a caddy with adjustable feet to hold the guitar by the edges off of the table online, and that is what I wanted. I also wanted to add a neck support and I wanted it to be on it's own stand that didn't take much floor space and that would allow me to swivel it around. I made a caddy out of 3/4" birch ply using ideas I took from other designs put together, and mounted it on a 3' piece of 1 1/4" rigid pipe on flanges. It works pretty nice! My only complaint is that it is just a little high for my comfort. Being a 'vertically challenged' person, it would be nice if it was about 3" lower but because I am using threaded ends I can't cut it without having to get it re-threaded. So I will either have to grow a little (not likely!) or learn to deal with it. It isn't bad, just a little above my comfortable working height. If it is just not workable, I will get it cut and threaded. I work with a lot of different plumbers so getting one to do it for me isn't a big deal.

Last but not least, I decided I have had enough of doing this luthiery thing without a sander. I went to Home Depot and picked up a 4"x36" belt/disk sander. I haven't really used it yet other than to play around but it seems to work well. It has a cast iron base which is nice because it holds it solidly to my work bench.

Okay, really last but not least...... It has started to get cold around here. I mean cold, 10 degrees cold. My shop was 20 degrees yesterday when I went up there. Too cold to sit and practice my playing in so I have taken a huge step and moved my practicing inside the house where everyone can hear me play. So far nobody has heard me play other than a couple of videos that I posted. I am a pretty shy person and playing where people can hear me is a pretty scary thing, even with them being family. But I figure either I suck it up and get over my fear, or I give up practicing over the winter and I don't want to do that. So here is a little financial advice for you all..... Anyone out there wanting to make a few dollars on the side, you might want to buy some stock in an ear plug company! I have a feeling that my family will be buying them in bulk shortly!

Here is the newest addition to the shop. A nice little unit which will get a lot of work.

I don't think I have shown this before. This is a Honduran mahogany striped back that I will be using for the parlor I am starting. I already joined this a week ago or so, and have marked the 'money' side.

Here is the caddy I built. Every part is adjustable so it will handle anything from a jumbo all the way down to a small parlor. The neck rest is also adjustable both up and down, and front to back for short necks. This is my Stewmac Dreadnought in it now.

And finally, here is the mold for the '0' parlor I will be building later this month.

Bridges on....

2007-11-28T18:11:00.000-05:00

I got a chance to get the bridges glued on yesterday using the two new bridge clamps I made. They worked really well and they work quick. That is important when hot hide glue is involved. I got the bridges cleaned up today and did some small touch up's on the top lacquer where there were some small gaps around the sound hole and perflings that didn't get filled correctly. The gaps aren't noticeable until the polishing gets done because the white compound gets in and then they gaps look white. I picked the compound out with an x-acto blade and them drop filled the spots with thin CA glue. I re-sanded the tops to level the drop fills out. After that was done, I did some touch ups where I sanded through the finish at a couple of spots on the binding edge when I did the original level sanding and polishing. I am still waiting on the saddles and nut files I ordered so I don't have much left to do on them until those items arrive.

Here are the bridge clamps I made. Really simple and very effective. It's a lot better than trying to cram 3 C-clamps through the sound hole without damaging the edge of the hole!

Both guitars with the bridges attached.

And the backs. The tuners are just stuck in with the nuts only. I still need to screw them down but I want to polish the peg heads before I permanently install the tuners because it is much easier to do without them in the way.

Necks attached.....

2007-11-25T17:44:00.000-05:00

I have to apologize for the lack of updates lately. Things have been crazy busy with the Thanksgiving holiday and hunting season being in full swing. I have been spending as much free time as possible in the woods so I haven't had much time in the shop. Today after work and in-between some other neglected chores around the house, I spent a couple of hours in the shop getting both necks glued to the bodies. I used hot hide glue on these necks as I did on the SJ. Other than having to work fast getting the bolts in and clamps on, the glue-ups went well. According to the weatherman, tomorrow is supposed to be a lousy rainy day so that will keep me out of the woods and in the shop after work so I can get the bridges glued on. Of course the weatherman has been known to be wrong before so I may just end up in the woods after all! I live for hunting season so pretty much everything comes to a grinding halt during the season. I spend as much time as I possibly can in the woods which usually is most nights after work, and all day Saturdays. I am really glad that I have the twins to this point in the building process so I don't have to rush the final setup and I also don't have to choose between hunting and building. As much as I love building guitars, it would have to take a second seat to hunting.

Unfortunately, winter has arrived in it's full glory so my shop is very cold. I had to drag the propane tank up there today so I can fire up the propane heater shortly. So far my electric heater has done a fairly good job of warming things up but I think we are at the limits of what that heater can do.

I did join up the back for the parlor guitar that I am going to build next. I have a small set of striped Honduran mahogany that was just barely enough for an 00 sized guitar. After joining and gluing, the top right now is EXACTLY the same width as the 00 size lower bout width. I do mean exactly too. The body is supposed to be 14 1/8" wide and the wood is 14 1/8" wide. So, I have made the decision to change to an 0 sized guitar. That gives me a little bit of extra wood around the lower bout, roughly 1/4" on each side which I am a lot more comfortable with. I really didn't have my heart set on the 00, I was just wanting to get the most out of the back set. I am just not comfortable using a back that has zero room for error. The back is a beautiful piece of wood and I am very excited to see how it will look when finished. I am still deciding what neck wood to use. Part of me wants to use spanish cedar again, but I really hate the resin that gets on my hands when working with it. I like how light weight it is however and it does work very nicely with tools. I am leaning towards using mahogany so it matches the back and sides. I still have some time to think about it.

I picked up a couple of "Kermodie" tops this last week. It is a trademarked name for Lutz spruce. I have to say, I am impressed with the stiffness of this wood. It is incredibly stiff and the ring count is too tight to actually count. I have a few more of these tops coming as well as a billet of it for re-sawing. My next build after the parlor will probably be using one of these tops.

Two shiny guitars....

2007-11-20T21:01:00.000-05:00

I was able to get the twins all polished up this weekend and tonight I got started with the final neck sets. I realized that when I bolted the necks in and sighted down them, I had a pretty major hump at the 14th fret where the fingerboard extension bowed upwards. This is because I radiused the top braces and with the A frame bracing I used, it puts a pretty big hump above the sound hole. So, I had to do some sanding on both the top of the guitar and the underside of the fingerboard extension to bring it down so the fret line is straight. Both guitars had this problem and I am not sure why I didn't notice it when I was doing the initial neck sets. The lesson I learned on this is that I am going to stop radiusing the braces above the upper bout. Every guitar I have built I have had to deal with the radius under the FB extension but nowhere near this extent. Anyways, I finally got them leveled out and ready for gluing. I also finished the bridges and sanded the undersides to the radius of the top. I am going to make a bridge clamping jig for these two guitars to clamp the bridges down during the glue up. I am going to make them based on the Fox style clamp with a couple of small modifications. This should make my bridge gluing a quicker and more accurate procedure. If all goes well, I might just have these two strung up in the next week. There is a lot happening with Thanksgiving and hunting season so I am not sure how much time I will actually get to work on them, but it would be nice if I got them done before December.

The two at an angle showing the sound ports.

A poser picture.

Here are the backs. The picture does a lousy job of showing the finish. It is a mirror finish like the others I have built.

This does a better job of showing the finish reflection.

Building bridges......

2007-11-15T22:05:00.000-05:00

Today I decided it was time to make the bridges for the twins. I used the same design I put on the SJ as I like the look. I won't get into great detail of how I do it, but I do have quite a few pictures of the process. Basically I cut the shape using a template on my router, I cut the wings using a chisel, saw, and file, I radius the top, round the edges and then cut the slot. I should get to polishing the twins sometime next week as time permits. Things have been (and will be) busy around here so I haven't spent much time working on them. I need to get moving if I want them done by Christmas.

First I cut the blank to shape using this template. One side is one half of the shape and the other side is the other half. It makes very quick work out of shaping the blank.

The two shaped blanks.

I then cut slots to define the wings down to 1/8" from the bottom.

I chiseled out the bulk of the wood then used a file to flatten the wings.

I then sanded the top to radius bringing the edges down to 1/8" above the wing surface.

I then filed and sanded the leading edge round and the trailing edge to a 45 degree angle.

Into the slotting jig.....

and I end up with two slotted bridges. I still need to drill the pin holes and sand/polish them but I can do that later. The observant reader might notice that these two bridges have a slightly shallower compensation angle than my others. That is because this is a short scale instrument. I have been using just under a 5 degree angle for the long scale but after some research I learned that a 3.5 degree angle works well with a short scale guitar. It is still a little more of an angle than the standard off the shelf Martin style bridge. The entire job getting these to this point took about 2 hours.

All strung up......

2007-11-11T17:44:00.000-05:00

Well I got busy this weekend and got the SJ all strung up. It sounds really good! I glued the bridge on Thursday night using hot hide glue, and let it sit until Saturday before putting string tension on it. Really all that was left was to install the tuners, make the nut and saddle, and string it up. I still need to do a setup as the action is miles high but all in all I am very pleased. One thing I was extremely happy about was the intonation at the 12th fret was dead on without any saddle compensation. I still need to do the harmonics for intonation but it looks like there won't be much saddle work needed.

Today I started my next project, a Mahogany and redwood 00-12 fret parlor sized guitar. I have been wanting to build one of these and I figure this is the time to do it. I joined the top (after snapping the first top in 4 pieces! Grrrrr!) and will probably join the back this week. I am going to get back on the twin guitars here shortly so I probably won't get into the 00 until late this year or January. Hunting season starts this weekend so with that, the holidays, and other things I am going to have to work hard to get some shop time. Oh well, it's that time of the year!

Here are a few pictures. When I get a minute I will polish it all up and take some proper pictures. These will do for now though.

Here it is with both E strings set for string spacing positioning.

Once I had the two outer strings located, I could then mark the other four compensating for string thickness.

And here it is all strung up. Sorry it is leaning a little to the left! lol

And the back. I really like this wood and it probably won't be the last time I use it.

SJ neck set....

2007-11-07T19:58:00.000-05:00

Tonight I spent my time getting the neck ready for final gluing and glued it up using hot hide glue. This was the first time I used HHG for a neck set and it really went pretty well. I pre-heated the neck and the neck block with a heat gun, had everything set up and ready to go, and then went to work with the glue. For those who don't know what hot hide glue is, it is a glue made from animal hides which is dissolved in water and then heated. It is applied hot, between 140 and 145 degrees Fahrenheit, and it has a fast set time. Typically I get around 45 seconds to have the glue applied, the piece set, and all clamps on. The glue will gel over after that time and once that happens, it is too late to clamp. Pre-heating the gluing surfaces will give a bit more working time but not a lot. I had about a minute for this neck. It seems like a lot of hassle, but there are some very good reasons to use HHG. First, it is reversible. If a glue-up goes wrong, it can be un-done using heat and steam. That is the main reason furniture restorers like to use it. Of course, they also use it to be historically correct in their repairs. When it comes to guitars, any future repairs or the inevitable neck-reset will be significantly easier because of the use of HHG. Repair people love the stuff. Next it is incredibly strong, stronger than alphaic resin type glues and just a touch less strong than epoxy. Third, it dries rock hard which is a great thing for tone transfer in a musical instrument. Forth, clean up is a breeze. A little bit of warm water completely removes and squeeze out. The final reason I like it is that it makes a very quick 'tack' which holds the glued pieces together while clamping. Regular white glue or Titebond type glues do not do this and trying to clamp some things together can be very frustrating as the pieces want to slip and slide out of position. I just started using HHG on this SJ and so far I have only used it on braces and this neck joint. I am going to also glue the bridge with it. Once I get more comfortable using it, I will try and use it for most of the building process.

Anyways, that is probably a lot more about glue than you ever wanted to know. Here is a picture of the neck clamped up. Not very exciting but it shows that the end is very near for this guitar.

The neck all glued up and clamped down. The bridge will be done tomorrow. Hopefully I will have it all strung up this weekend.

Ready for neck and bridge glue up.....

2007-11-06T20:39:00.000-05:00

I spent some time getting the bridge location exact with locating pins set and re-setting the neck. After all the lacquer work, the neck had shifted a little so I needed to get it reset. It was off to one side, and it had also tilted back a touch. Nothing major, but enough that it needed addressed. I also repaired the small sand through spot on the side and got that sanded down and polished.

I learned a little trick on the OLF site about getting a good looking finish line around the bridge. One of they guys showed one of his bridges that he had routed a very fine rebate around the very edge of the gluing surface of the bridge. What this does is allows the luthier to glue the bridge to the body without having to scribe the finish perfectly around the bridge. When I mask the bridge off, I keep the tape inside the bridge line by about 1/16". I have been scribing around the bride and scraping that last little bit of finish off before gluing. This is a very hard thing to do and make it look good. With this system, the finish now can remain that 1/16" under the bridge without putting stress on the glue joint. It is a very simple solution to the problem that makes me wonder why I never thought of it! I made a little jig to attach to my dremel which turns it into a tiny router station. I used a 1/8" downcut spiral bit poking through less than 1/64" with a dowel that covers about 1/3 of the bit. That gives me a channel a touch wider than 1/16" and as deep as the finish is thick. I ran my bridge through it and tested it on my guitar. It worked great! I am attaching a few pictures so you can understand what I am talking about. If time permits, tomorrow I will set the neck, and possibly will glue the bridge down.

Here is the little bridge jig I spoke of.

Here you can see the bit just poling above the base. It is just a hair above the base because I only want the rebate to be the depth of the finish thickness.

This is the under side of the bridge showing the rebate. The picture makes it look a lot deeper than it is. It is less than the thickness of a piece of paper deep. I took the picture with a shadow so you could see the rebate. I also sanded the bridge to the radius of the top.

Here you can see how the finish slides neatly under the bridge. This doesn't weaken the glue joint at all. If you click the picture, right under my fingers you can see the finish to bare wood line. That is what I typically end up seeing and what I am attempting to avoid.

Here is a picture of my ever growing wood stash. I have 7 back and side sets, 7 tops (2 more on the way), 5 fingerboards, 6 bridge blanks, 2 neck blanks (3 more on the way), 8 rosette blanks, and about 30-35 headstock veneers. I also have a bunch of brace wood not shown, and some heel and neck blocks. The side wood you see on top is the black limba. It is incredible looking wood as is the curly cherry I got at the swap meet. It is beautiful wood.

Back where I started.....

2007-11-03T17:39:00.000-05:00

Well after a lot of sanding and touchup work, I now have the SJ back to the point it was a week ago. I was able to get the neck sand-through repaired to an acceptable level, and the body is now re-sanded through the micromesh levels. I still need to do the swirl remover and polishing but the guitar looks pretty good. I spent a lot of time working very carefully on it so I could get it looking good without sanding through again, and other than one really tiny spot where the first sand-through happened on the body I succeeded. Like I said, I had one very small spot, about the size of a pencil eraser that I barely sanded through. I have hit that spot with my little air-brush so I can touch up that area without bothering the rest of the guitar. I think a buffing machine is in my future. I am convinced that if I hadn't sanded so much with micromesh, I wouldn't have gone through the finish in the first place. It is very disheartening to have a beautiful looking guitar neck get damaged by sand through. No matter how hard I try, once the stain has been sanded through it is nearly impossible to repair the damage invisibly. It really is a bummer to put all that work into something only to have something as stupid as a sandthrough blemish what could have been a beautiful neck. Oh well, such is life. Lots of pictures tonight so hold on, here we go!

First things first. After I made my prototype K-sled, I went ahead and made a real version with a couple of upgrades. The moving and sliding parts are all made of Lexan.

Here is a sample of a strip I ran through it. After some fine tuning, I have it working well. Now I need to make some linings for real!

Here is the back of the SJ after final sanding. The lights are approx. 6' above the guitar.

The top. Note the shine on the tape masking the bridge location!

And the side. Again, you can see the reflection on the front of the rags and stuff. The bridge tape was sprayed and sanded over making it as polished as the top finish. lol

If you look just below and between the light reflections, you can see the small sand through spot.

The peg head with the tuners temporarily installed.

I had someone ask about the 'brass' plate I had on the back of the peghead. Here is a better picture showing that it is ebony. I still need to hit this with swirl remover as you can see some fine scratches in it. It is natural ebony wood that I didn't dye. I kind of like the natural look of ebony with some light grain marks in it. It is a personal preference thing.

The whole guitar front view.

And the back view.

This is an example of the kind of polish that is possible using waterbased finish and micromesh. I am staning about 6' away taking the picture. You can clearly see my reflection in the guitar back. It will really shine when I do the final polishing.

The heel cap and back inlay.

This is my little airbrush I used to touch up the sand through on the side.

This is the repaired sand-through on the neck. Sigh, oh well maybe next time......

Here are the necks for the twins. You might notice the amount of polish I have on them. This is using tru-oil and nothing else. I haven't even started to sand them or polish them. I think I might start using it in the future for my necks. I am very impressed with it.

A couple of pictures.....

2007-10-28T19:08:00.000-05:00

Not much for today. I didn't do any work in the shop, but I was fooling around with my other three guitars, playing all of them and I made some slight changes to the string spacing at the nut on the OM. I had the string spacing a little too close for my taste so I went ahead and re-cut the nut slots to get a spacing I liked. Now that I have the measurements, I will either fill all the slots and re-file them, or just make a new nut. I took a couple of pictures for the blog.

I have never taken a 'group shot' of the three completed guitars. Here they are, the scratch built 000 with an EIR back/sides and ADI spruce top on the left, a mahogany/sitka spruce Stewmac dreadnought in the center, and a Granadillo/Bearclaw sitka top LMI OM on the right.

Here are the current builds, the EIR/sitka OM twins, and the Camatillo/Bearclaw sitka SJ. All three of these are scratch builds. The necks are all sitting there also.

2 steps forward, 1 step back.....

2007-10-27T15:32:00.000-05:00

Did you ever just have one of those days? Today I had one. I got up in the shop to work some more on the SJ and after inspecting the finish, I just wasn't happy. I had some pores that didn't fill right, and they collected the white sanding dust from leveling. I had gotten the back pretty good with the finish sanded down to the pores so it looked good. The sides however didn't. They had a lot more of those little divots with white spots in them. I decided to go ahead and try to re-level sand to try and remove them. I did this on the back and it worked pretty well and I didn't sand through so I figured I could do the same on the sides. I was wrong. I started to re-sand and just when I thought I had gotten them all leveled out, I saw that dreaded dull spot that is a telltale sign of a sandthrough spot. I had sanded through just above the waist on the upper bout a spot about the size of a quarter. So now I had a decision to make. I could just brush the sides with lacquer to fix it or I could rough sand the entire body and spray the entire thing again. Since I was already spraying the other two guitars today, I decided to just go ahead and re-spray it. I had a few small orange peal spots on the top that I didn't like, and I still had a few spots in the back center strip that the pores were showing anyways so I figured that I could most likely get them to fill now with new coats of lacquer. I sanded the entire body down to 400 grit (ouch that hurts after getting it shiny as a mirror!) and leveled out the top spots as well as the few grain spots in the back. I then shot 4 more coats over the body and it is now drying. It does seem to look pretty good. From what I can see, it looks like I got all the pores filled so it should polish up a lot easier now.

While I was in-between spray coats, I decided to try and level out the neck where some pores were also showing through. Yep, you guessed it, I sanded through into the stain! GRRRRR! So after a bunch of stain touchup to try and make it match the rest of the neck I re-shot the neck to fix that spot as well. So, the SJ is basically back to where it was 8 weeks ago. I did get the tuner holes expanded for the tuners, and the peghead is polished and looks great. I didn't re-spray that.

Yesterday I decided to try my hand at making a K-sled to make kerfed linings. I did a rough draft of the machine using stuff I had in my shop and gave it a try. It works pretty well. It holds the strip of wood perpendicular to my bandsaw, limits the depth of the cut, and automatically advances the strip a pre-determined distance for the next cut. All I have to do is put the wood in and slide it back and forth into the saw blade. Now that I know how it works and what kind of adjustments I need to make, I will most likely get some Lexan and make a more finished version of it.

This was the SJ body just before I decided to re-sand the sides. You can see the reflection in the back. It looked pretty good, not perfect but very nice. Hopefully it will look good again!

Here is the neck after sanding with micromesh. I decided to try and get rid of some of the pore spots and ended up sanding through the neck in one spot. This also has been re-sprayed.

This is the prototype of the Ksled I made. I got the plans off of the OLF and the original design was made by Frank Ford I believe.

Here is a scrap piece of mahogany that I tested the Ksled on. You can see different widths between the kerfs. I have an adjustment on the sled that does this.

So here we are, the two twin guitars in the background, and the SJ in the foreground.

An old friend returns and more swap meet stuff....

2007-10-23T19:36:00.002-05:00

Since the finishing of the twins is well underway and other than spraying lacquer and wiping on Tru-oil, there really isn't anything else to do with them. I suppose I can make the bridges but I really don't want to be kicking up all that dust while I am in the process of finishing the parts. So, I decided to dig out the SJ and start the task of level sanding and polishing it. The parts have had the lacquer curing for 2 months now so it is good and hard. I started by wet sanding with 400, 800, 1500, and 2400 grit paper. I then went with dry through all the micromesh grits. After that was done I wasn't happy at all with how it looked. It seems my pore filling wasn't quite as good as I thought it was and I had a lot of pores that telegraphed through the finish. Those little pores accumulated the white slurry from the wet sanding and the shiny finish was covered with white spots. I decided to start over and try and level sand it down to eliminate as many of these pores as possible. I have the back re-sanded through 800 grit and I almost have the pores gone. This is where it gets tricky. I want to sand enough to get rid of all the pores possible, but I don't want to sand through to the wood. So far I haven't sanded through but I still have a few pores that show. I got most of them with the re-sanding but there are still some that show. I now have the decision to make if I want to try and continue sanding down to eliminate more of them with the risk of sand-through, or stop now , polish, and then clean out the pores that have the white stuff in it. I will sleep on it and decide what to do tomorrow. Part of me says I don't want to ruin the finish by sanding through, but the other part wants it to be right and I am willing to risk it even if it means I have to re-finish the back. It wouldn't be the first time!

I received the Englemann top and 3 EIR fingerboards in the mail yesterday that I purchased in the swap meet. I have to say, the top has an incredible tap tone to it and it is very stiff. It has a deep resonance when tapped and it rings forever. Well, maybe not forever but a good 6-7 seconds that I can hear and probably longer. My ears ain't as good as they used to be! Too many years of hammer drills, chipping hammers, and other very loud construction equipment without proper hearing protection has taken it's toll. Of course when I was younger you couldn't convince me too use hearing protection because like all 20 year olds, I was invincible!

I scored a few more deals on the swap meet over the last few days. Below are pictures of what I got. I also ordered the Advanced Voicing DVD from John Mayes as he had a special price at the swap meet so I couldn't pass it up.

First up, a back and side set of Curly Myrtle that I got at the swap meet.

I got two of these 2A redwood soundboards.

And I got this set of head plate veneers.

Remember this guy? Yeah, it has been a while since it has seen the shop!

After a lot of sanding and polishing I got the body nice and shiny but I didn't like the pore divots that collected the white slurry from sanding. I decided to re-sand the back and try to level out the pores. If you look at the full sized image, you will see it is covered with white dots where the pores are. Not good!

This is how it sits tonight. It still has some pores but I got rid of the vast majority of them.

Here is an extreme closeup of what I am talking about. See those white specks, those are pores that didn't fill correctly.

And the finishing has begun.....

2007-10-20T18:55:00.001-05:00

Today I had quite a bit of free time to work in the shop so I set my goal to get the first coats of lacquer on the twins bodies, and the first coat of Tru-oil on the necks. I had quite a bit of clean up sanding to do, I had to locate and mask off the bridge locations, mask off the parts that I didn't want finished and I had to make two sets of holders since the one holder set I have is still on the SJ. I got all that done and got the first 4 coats of lacquer on the two boxes. I did get the first coats of Tru-oil on the necks as well. I decided not to stain the necks as I really liked the way the wood had flaming and striping in it. The strips and flames really pop out when I wet them down with naphtha so I figured that Tru-oil would give them the same effect. I was afraid that stain would dull that look. With the first coat on, I think I made the right decision. The necks really look very interesting and I like it. I also didn't stain the dark body because I figured it was dark enough. I did stain the lighter colored body with a bit of brown and red mixed. I did quite a few different tests on scraps until I got the color I liked. My original plan was to try and get both bodies to look as close to the same color as possible, but I stumbled upon a color combination for the lighter colored one that just knocked me over and I stuck with it. The body has a platinum color to it now which blends in with the koa bindings. It really has a nice bit of sparkle to the color and I love the look.

The two bodies after the first few coats of lacquer.

This is the lighter one that I stained. I used water based stain, was very careful about keeping the coat very light, and then once it was dry I wiped it down with denatured alcohol to pull some of the color back out. It gave this really cool gold/platinum color that actually shines. It is a lot nicer looking that I ever expected it to be.

This is the other body. I didn't stain it because it was dark enough. It also has a nice sparkle to it as you can see in the photo. I really like how the koa contrasts with it. This set has a bit of a purple shade to it. Both of these back and side sets were 'opportunity grade' sets which is another way of saying B grade. They don't have the nicest grain figuring (especially this darker one) but under finish the color really is very nice.

The two necks with the tuner holes drilled and final sanded. They are ready for finish.

This neck goes with the dark body. It has a lot of flaming in the grain which really pops out under finish. It may look like it is mottled in color in this picture, but it looks almost 3 dimensional in person. It is very cool looking!

This neck goes with the lighter body. The picture doesn't really show, but the striping you see in the peg head carries down through the neck. I like the look of this one too. I just wish I didn't have to put that mahogany laminate in there. Oh well.

New Zoot!!!

2007-10-19T10:16:00.001-05:00

Other than a lot of sanding of pore filler, there isn't a whole lot of exciting things happening in the shop. I have one body pore filled and sanded to 320 grit, and the other one is pore filled and still in need of sanding. The peg heads have also been pore filled but they also need sanded. I should have them done by the end of the week.

I mentioned that I have been spending a lot of time on the OLF swap meet. I thought I would post some pictures of the zoot I have purchased so far.....

First up the eye candy. I got this set of Black Limba.

Next, this set of curly Cherry.

And this set of Ambrosia Maple.

I also got two Lutz soundboard sets. I have been wanting to get some of this for a while.

I picked up the first two Goncolo Alves fingerboards in this picture.

I snagged 4 of these EIR bridge blanks.

I got this set of Engleman Spruce top wood.

I got #4, #8, and #12 of these EIR fingerboards.

I also got 2 Mahogany neck blanks but I don't have a picture of them. For reference, I was able to get all of this wood for less than the cost of a kit from LMI, Stewmac, or Martin. The swap meet is a fantastic place to get beautiful wood for a great price.

Oh yeah, this is my guitar building blog isn't it. Here are the two boxes. One is sanded down to 320 grit and the other one is still covered in pore filler in need of sanding.

The two peg heads covered in pore filler.

Update....

2007-10-17T19:45:00.000-05:00

Well, there is a lot of sanding dust in the shop. I spent the last couple of sessions in the shop doing all of the final sanding on the 'twins'. I also got the second neck joint finished and looking good. Tonight I took both guitars out in the sunlight to look for any sanding defects then spent a little more time sanding out the blemishes I found. Tonight I got the first coats of pore filler on, and sanded down. Tomorrow I will get the next coats on and sanded, which hopefully will be the last of the pore filling. I picked up a different filler at Woodcraft today to try out but unfortunately it is a white colored paste. I tested it on some scrap, but it looked terrible so I guess that was $18 wasted. Oh well, live and learn I guess. Fortunately I have some left over from the other guitars so I had enough to do these two. I picked up some Tru-oil to use on the necks of these two guitars. The nice thing about it is that I don't need to pore fill before as it will fill the pores. It is supposed to make for a very fast neck and the scrap Sapele I tested it on looks really nice. I think it will make a great looking neck.

I have been hanging out at the OLF a lot the last few days spending money at the fall swap meet. I have gotten a beautiful Cherry back and side set, a stunning Ambrosia Maple set, some Lutz tops, some fingerboard blanks, neck blanks, and bridge blanks. The swap meet goes through next Wed. so there should still be some great deals to be had. I hope my wallet can hold out!

Sorry, no pictures tonight. Sawdust just doesn't photograph well! lol

Neck sets and edge markers....

2007-10-15T16:03:00.000-05:00

I spent a few hours doing some fine tuning of the two neck joints. I have one done and the other is almost done. It takes a lot of sanding to get the joints tight because of the hardness of the neck wood. I was getting tired of neck joint flossing so I decided to install the fingerboard edge markers. I usually do this when the fingerboards are still off the necks, but I actually forgot to do them. I am glad I remembered before finish went on! Here are pictures of the neck joints. Sorry but no pictures of the heel caps on these ones. Since I have the recipients initials inlayed in them, I don't want to accidentally blow the surprise if they accidentally look at this site! I will show pictures of them when I post the finished guitar pictures after Christmas.

One side of the finished neck joint.

The other side of the same neck. There is a tiny gap just before the heel cap caused by a slight dip in the sides. I don't want to sand anymore off of the neck so I will fill the gap at the finish. It is a very tiny gap that really isn't visible unless you look for it so it should fill fine.

One side of the other neck.

This side still needs a bit of work but it is pretty close. I was just getting tired of doing the joints so I went on to another task. I will finish this one tomorrow.

The necks with the edge dots installed. They are paua abalone 3/32" dots.

Heel caps and soundports....

2007-10-13T17:44:00.001-05:00

Today I spent quite a bit of time getting the neck sets fine tuned so they are about as good as they will get. Both necks joints turned out very nice with virtually no gaps at all. After that I went ahead and cut the heel caps out and glued them on. I decided that I wanted to put sound ports in these two guitars as I have never done them before, and I read that they add a lot to the sound and volume of a guitar. Instead of doing a fancy design, I decided to go with the basic oval shape. I cut out a template to use for a tracing pattern, marked the upper bouts where the side braces were so I didn't cut into them, and marked the ovals. I used my dremel with a down cut spiral bit and router base to cut them out 'freehand'. I was a little nervous about doing them, but really they were pretty easy to do. I sanded the edges to clean them up and they look pretty good. It was interesting to hear the difference in the tap tones of the boxes before and after the ports. It added a bit more sustain, and a lot more volume of the tap. I can't wait to hear what the actual guitars sound like!

The two heel caps glued down and clamped in place.

The two sound ports. This is a first for me!

Two necks set, fingerboards glued.....

2007-10-11T15:04:00.000-05:00

Today I got the second guitar neck set to the correct angle and straight. I still have some fine tuning to get all the gaps out, but at this point I was just wanting to get the angles right, and the joints close. This guitar went much quicker than the other because the neck block was dead on. Note to self, from now on make sure the neck blocks are straight!

Once that was done I went ahead and glued the fingerboards down to the necks. It went pretty easily and since Stewmac sent two big rubber bands in my first kit, I had enough to do both in one session.

Here is the second guitar with the neck set.

One side of the neck joint. You can still see some small gaps but nothing that can't be corrected after the fingerboard is attached.

The other side of the neck joint.

Here are both guitars. Kind of has that assembly line look to it doesn't it!

Both necks with the fingerboards attached. Yeah, I know only one is taped. I forgot to tape the second one and realized it only after I had spread the glue on the neck. Oh well.

Okay, for all you builders out there. Does this look familiar? Yeah, after flossing the neck joints I end up with a big pile of these little strips that tear after a couple of uses. I had a light bulb moment today. See the next picture for my high tech method of correcting this problem.

Yep, just put some strapping tape on the back of the sandpaper and now it is un-tearable. Why on earth didn't I think of this about 5 guitars ago?

Frets and first neck set....

2007-10-09T20:27:00.000-05:00

Today I spent time with the fingerboards getting them ready for gluing to the necks. First I sanded them down and polished them with micromesh. It is a lot easier doing this without the frets installed so I did it first. Once that was done, I cut the frets and installed them. Nothing exciting, just a bunch of hammering! I was going to glue the fingerboards to the necks, but before I did I decided to work on the neck sets. I am glad I waited. I noticed that both bodies have a slight bulge directly under the fingerboard extension locations. My guess is that the A frame bracing is causing the slight bulges. So instead of gluing the fingerboards down, I decided to get the neck sets close to finished so I can use the flat tops of the necks as a guide to sand down the top so the fingerboards can sit flat on the top. If I had glued the fingerboards on, it would be a lot harder to do this.

I decided to start with the most difficult neck first so I could get it over with. This is the one I mentioned last time where the neck block ended up slightly tilted. It took a lot of time but I finally got the neck straight, with a good back angle and a fairly nice joint. The joint will need to be cleaned up as I have a few small gaps in it, but it is good enough for now so I can get top sanded. One thing I have learned about these Sapele necks, the wood is hard, splintery, and the neck joint is very hard to sand. The typical 'flossing' method takes a very long time to remove the smallest amount of wood. I guess this is a good thing, but it took a long time for me to get this neck set. Hopefully the next one will go easier. I have two more Sapele neck blanks on my shelf that I will probably use, but they will probably be the last ones I get for a while.

This is the first guitar with the neck temporarily set. It took a lot of work to get this one lined up and at the correct angle because of the neck block error, and the difficulty of this wood to work with.

The right side of the neck joint. You can see a small gap right at the top. there is also a gap at the tail, but that is getting cut off for the heel cap so I am not worried about it.

The other side of the neck joint. There is a small gap at the tail end here as well.

The fingerboards all shiny with frets installed to the 14th fret.

Here is a closeup of the fingerboard end at the sound hole. I know, a lot of guys like to build the fingerboard so it lines up right along the edge of the sound hole. I personally don't care for that look. I decided to line it up just under the bottom perfling strip so there is still a line of spruce between the dark fingerboard, and the darkness of the sound hole. I did both of the guitars this way.

Just a couple of pictures...

2007-10-07T19:30:00.000-05:00

I really didn't do much today other than take the tape off the fingerboard ends and sand them, as well as sand the peg head inlays to see how the fill turned out. I am very happy with the two fingerboard ends. They turned out quite nice. I am also happy with the inlay fill. The darker one really blends in very well and it almost invisible. The lighter one is good too, but it is a little more visible than the other. Both are a lot better than my previous inlays. It is nice to do something and feel like I am getting better at it.

Here are the two fingerboard ends with the bindings completed.

An extreme close up of the first inlay. If you look closely you can see a few fill spots but they really are almost invisible in real life.

This is the lighter one. If you look just above the nose you can see a fill spot. It is a lot more visible in these pictures than in real life. When I wet it with naphtha, it disappears.

Preliminary neck set, fingerboard end binding, more inlay....

2007-10-06T14:25:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I decided to check to see how my necks fit on the guitars, and how they line up. Well, it was a 50/50 deal. The red guitar net was almost perfect from right to left but the green one was way out of line. The only thing I can think happened is that the neck block must have tilted a little when I glued it up which caused the neck to tilt way off. A straight edge down the center of the neck ended up over an inch off of center at the tail of the guitar. After a lot of trimming on the tenon and mortise, as well as sanding one side of the heel, I was able to get it lined up. I will need to make some thin shims to glue to one side of the mortise and the opposite side of the tenon to tighten up the joint as it is very loose now. The other guitar was right on and needed no adjustment. I still have to do the actual neck set but at least they are straight up and down now. I drilled out the bolt holes in the neck blocks too.

Today I cut the fingerboards to length and curved the bottoms to the same radius as the sound hole. I then bent some bindings and glued them to the bottoms of the fingerboards. After that, I went to work cutting the inlay pockets in the peg heads for the deer head inlay. I am definitely getting better at this inlay stuff. The pockets are much closer to the actual inlay shape than I have previously had. There are still some gaps, but they are quite small. I glued the inlays in and then filled them with epoxy with wood dust mixed in.

Both guitars with the necks installed. They are starting to shape up!

The two inlays glued in ready for epoxy fill.

This is my inlay setup. I have this scroll saw which makes a perfect base for doing this. That is about the only thing I ever use the scroll saw for lol.

These are the bent binding pieces ready to be glued to the fingerboard ends.

Bindings glued and taped down.

This is my hot pipe bender. Nothing fancy but it works.

The two peg head inlays covered in epoxy and sanding dust. I made two separate batches using different colored wood dust. I saved scraps from these two peg head veneers to use for this.

Inlay.....

2007-10-04T19:22:00.001-05:00

I didn't have a lot of time to work in the shop today so I decided to spend what time I had cutting the peg head inlays for the two guitars. As you probably know I have a deer head logo so I made copies of it, glued the pictures to the abalone blanks and cut them out. Although the design has a lot of tiny cuts, it really isn't all that difficult to cut. The hardest part is holding it down solidly enough so the piece doesn't break while I am cutting it. I got both deer head inlays cut out. I am going to cut initial letters to put on the heel caps that are for the first names of the recipients. I will probably cut those out this weekend.

Here is the first one in the process of being cut.

The two inlays cut out. For size reference, a quarter will completely cover each one so they are fairly small. It's funny, with the differences in the color patterns they look like they have a different shape but in reality they are almost identical. I can stack them on each other and except for some very minor differences, they are identically shaped. It must be some sort of an optical illusion.

Bindings ......

2007-10-03T17:06:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I got the bindings and perflings on the two guitars all glued up and the bodies looking like mummy's. The binding went pretty well. The hardest part is trying to keep the three perfling strips lined up along with the binding while trying to glue and tape it down using only two hands!

Today I removed all 29 pounds of tape on the guitars to see how the binding job looked. On the red guitar it looks great. Only a couple of very small gaps to deal with but on the green guitar, there is a section about 4" long where for some reason the binding didn't push all the way down in the binding channel leaving a gap along one edge that is fairly large. I debated on removing the binding and trying to re-glue it, but instead I decided to try and fill the gap using a long sliver of binding material. Once it drys I will sand it down and then try and fill any additional gaps with glue and sanding dust. All in all though, the bindings and perflings turned out great. I really love the color of Koa against other woods. It has a nice brown color but it kind of has a metallic platinum look to it. It is hard to describe, but I love the color. I spent a long time scraping and sanding the bindings to clean them up. Next up, neck work and the time is drawing near when I will get started on the neck sets. I am starting to feel like I am getting close to the home stretch on these two.

I am including a short video of me tapping the two bodies. Unfortunately my camera doesn't do a good job of sound recording as the automatic volume control distorts the initial tap sound. I am going ahead and posting it so you can get an idea of the differences in sounds between the two. Please realize that the sound in the video is pretty crummy, but it at least gives a taste of the sounds. The initial rattle sounds you hear are not in the guitar, they are in the recording.

Here are the two bodies all wrapped up in tape looking like mummy's. Actually under all that tape are glued up bindings and perflings.

The top of #1

The top of #2

Sides showing the binding color.

The backs. Note the tap on the right one is where I have the sliver glued in the binding gap.

The two heel grafts. The bodies are facing top to top. The grafts are a new design which has a tighter arc on the top and a more open curve at the back. These are wet with naphtha.

Fingerboard binding, routing bodys, position markers....

2007-10-02T10:52:00.000-05:00

Sorry I haven't posted for a few days. I have been somewhat pre-occupied and just haven't gotten down to updating. I have however done some work on the twins. I was waffling back and forth about whether or not to bind the fingerboards. I decided to go ahead and bind them for the simple fact that I like the look of clean fret ends, and I think the Koa goes well with the EIR fingerboards. I narrowed the boards down on both edges to accommodate the binding thicknesses and glued them up. After they dried I sanded them down so the bindings matched the radius of the fingerboards. I am glad I bound them. I really like how the wood colors work together. Once that was done I went ahead and installed the position markers using my drill press and Paua Abalone dots.

I decided it was time to perform the scariest part of this entire building process according to a lot of builders, route the binding and perfling ledges. I have shown how I do this in several past builds so I won't get into detail here, but I have to repeat myself again....... I LOVE MY ROUTER STATION! It really makes this job almost foolproof and it does a great job. It isn't perfect and I had to do a little touch up work with a sharp chisel, but I had both bodies routed and ready for binding in less than an hour. My next job will be to glue the bindings in and start the inlays on the necks.

Here is one of the fingerboards with the bindings taped up.

Both necks with the bound fingerboards sitting on them.

Both bodies after the binding and perfling channels have been routed. One thing I noticed, the tap tones on the tops have dramatically changed after routing. I assume this is caused by all of the air gaps now opened up from the routing. The sound should come back after the bindings go on and all of the gaps are re-sealed allowing all of the sound and air pressure to come out of the sound hole instead of a million different places around the body.

Here are the two heel grafts. They should tie into the bindings nicely.

The two fingerboards with the position markers installed.

Tail grafts and necks.....

2007-09-29T18:23:00.000-05:00

Today I got to get a good feel for the guitar bodies and the tapping sounds. I flush routed both bodies to clean up the overhang wood from the tops and backs. I then tapped both to see how they sound. There is a huge difference in sound! The parabolic braced box is much tighter sounding with a higher pitched tap tone and a little less sustain in the tap. The scalloped box however is much deeper sounding and it resonates a lot more than the other. Both vibrate when different sounds from the television play, but the scalloped one seems to vibrate much more than the parabolic braced one. With this info, to me it is looking like the scalloped braced guitar will have a much deeper sound, probably more volume, and longer sustain. I really can't wait to string them up and hear them for the first time.

After I had done all the tapping I cared to do, I decided to get to work. First I designed a tail graft that was a little different than the ones I have used on my other guitars. The graft is a bit larger and the curves are different on both ends. I like the design, but I think I will go a little smaller on the next one. These looked smaller off the guitars than they do on. Hopefully the curves on the top will kind of die into the bindings which will make it all tie together. I hope that will make them look a little smaller too.

Once those were done and glued in, I got the second neck rough shaped and ready for the inlays. My plan is to have these guitars ready for finishing no later than the last week of October. I want to get them sprayed and in the curing stages by the first week of November so they will have a good month to cure before final polishing and setup. That will give me just short of a month to have them finished for Christmas. I can't believe I am sitting here in September worrying about having these things done for Christmas!

The two boxes after the tops and backs have been trimmed. Kinda getting that guitar look aren't they!

Here are the bindings after bending. All 8 pieces bent nicely with no cracks or breaks. They are Koa.

One guitar with the heel graft glued and clamped in place.

Here are both necks rough shaped. Unfortunately the volute on the closest one is a lot smaller than I would like it to be. The wood was very hard to chisel out and it wanted to chip and splinter like crazy around the spot where the laminate piece is. I did get a nice 'V', but it is a lot narrower than the other.

Here is a closeup of one of the koa tail grafts. If I feel up to it, I will route out the binding channels tomorrow and maybe get one bound up.

Tops signed, one neck carved....

2007-09-26T16:52:00.000-05:00

Today was a good day in the shop. I was able to get the tops all finished, signed with a little note to each recipient, and the labels on. I glued the first top to the rims and it is drying int he go bar deck. I did have a bit of difficulty with that little task however. When I notched the kerfed linings I had all three clamps in the body to hold it tightly to the mold. Well when I put the label in and cleaned up the glue squeeze out from the back, I removed the waist clamp. I didn't bother to put it back when I glued to top on. I had set the top on to dry fit it just before I glued it, and since it dropped in place I thought it lined up fine and I didn't give it a second thought. Well that was a mistake. I applied all the glue, set the top on and started to insert the go bars. This is when I realized that the waist clamp being removed had allowed the rim to flex back inwards just enough to keep the braces from lining up perfectly in the notches. Since I have the notches cut tightly there really isn't any room for flex so when I removed the clamp, it knocked the notches out of alignment just a touch. Well it was a mad scramble trying to get the clamp back in, re-apply glue, clean up any runs, and get the top back on before the first glue application started to dry. I got it all done, but I learned a lesson! Make sure that the top and back get glued on in the same way as the rims were when the linings are notched.

Anyways, after that I carved the volutes on the two necks. I think I have mentioned that the sapele necks are very prone to splintering and the wood is very hard. It took quite a while to carve the volutes and I had to sharpen the chisels twice during the process. I got one neck shaped to close to final, and the other neck has the heel carved.

Here is the second back in the go bar deck. I did this yesterday.

Here are the two necks with the heels rough shaped.

Two bodies with the labels ready for tops.

The two tops signed with personal notes to the recipients.

The first box glued up.

One neck is rough shaped and the other neck is still in need of shaping.

Finished top bracing, notched rims, glued one back....

2007-09-24T19:02:00.000-05:00

Today I got quite a bit done. I first spent some time finishing the top brace sanding and cleaning up the tops. Then I was able to get the top and back edges of the rims notched to accept the braces that are to be let into the kerfed linings. I used my dremel with a down cut spiral bit and my router base to get them cut. They turned out pretty good. I took my time to make sure the notches were cut the right size so they will look good through the sound hole when the guitars are complete. After that was done I decided it was time to glue the first back to the rims using my go bar deck. It went well and it is drying now.

As promised, here are recordings for the tap tones of these two tops. You will have to forgive the quality as I used my computer and a headset mic to do the recordings. The recordings don't pick up the sustain very well. After the actual sound is around 1 second longer than I could get in the recordings. It also doesn't get the complexity of the tones I hear. It does give you a good idea of what I hear though and it is the best I can do with what I have available right now.

Parabolic tap tone
The 3rd recorded tap is the closest to what I hear. The mic was able to pick up a little more of the sustain.

Scalloped tap tone
The 4th recorded tap is the closest to what I hear. The mic was able to pick up a little more of the sustain.

This is the parabolic top complete. All that is left is for me to sign and number it.

And this is the scalloped top complete. Again, all that is left is the signing and numbering.

This is the top of the neck block where I had to notch in for the A brace.

Just a picture of a couple of kerfed lining notches for the braces. I have sanded the pencil marks off since the picture.

This is what the notch in the top of the neck block looks like. It had to be opened up into the mortise to allow access to the truss rod.

The back all glued up to the rim in the go bar deck.

Fingerboard slotting and finishing the tops....

2007-09-23T11:40:00.000-05:00

I spent yesterday working on the two tops. I first glued up the bridge plate on top #1 (scalloped) and then I went to work carving the parabolic braces on top #2. It took a while to get them all carved and shaped but I think the time spent was worth it as they turned out pretty good. I then glued the bridge plate on top #2, and re-shaped the scallops on top #1 to a cleaner more peaked shape. Once that was done, and the bridge plates were both dry I was able to tap both tops for the first time. I was very surprised at the big differences in the tap tones. Both have a sustaining ring to them, but top #1 (scalloped) has a 'looser' sound to it with a lot of overtones. Top #2 (parabolic) has a higher pitched tone and is 'tighter' sounding. The odd thing is, the loose sounding top is actually stiffer feeling than the tight sounding top. I will make some recordings of the sounds before I glue them to the rims so you can hear what I am hearing. I am debating on whether to take a little more material of of the parabolic braces to try and get it to loosen up a little or not. It is all a huge learning curve here, so I am not sure what to do, or which one sounds better for that matter!

I also thinned the fingerboard blanks and slotted them.

Top #2 with parabolic bracing. This is after carving with a chisel, but no sanding has been done yet.

Top #1 getting the bridge plate glued on.

The fingerboards after slotting.

Top #1 after final shaping of the scallops.

Another angle of top #1

More bracing....

2007-09-21T17:38:00.000-05:00

I was able to get the remainder of the top braces glued up yesterday for the first top. Today I took it out of the go bar deck and gave it a tap. I was absolutely amazed at the tone I was getting out of a top that had un-carved braces on it. I got a nice ring, like a bell all over the top with a pretty good sustain. Of course it will change with carving but that was very encouraging. I go the braces all cut for the second top and glued up the X braces and tone bars. Today I glued up the A braces, transverse brace and finger braces. I also cut the two bridge plates which need to be glued on yet.

I then turned my attention to carving the braces on the first top. I decided that the first one will be scalloped with rounded tops and peaks, and the second will be parabolic. With the scallops, I decided to try to be a little systematic in where to put the scallops. I know that the sounds radiate out in circles around the center of the guitar. Those circles have a different diameter based on what note is played. So, instead of randomly cutting scallops where they look right, I decided to mark points on each brace that would put the scallops in a pattern so no two scallops will be in the same circle. I hope that makes sense. Anyways, I used the center of the X braces as a pivot point, then took a string and marked a scallop at the farthest spot out, then shortened the string about 1" and marked the second scallop on a different brace. I did this over and over again until I had every scallop marked on a the braces. I carved them out with a chisel and then sanded them down. I am getting a really nice tap tone which is about the same note as the original tap, but the sustain is much longer, and there are deep overtones. I don't know if this will do anything, but both of these guitars are somewhat experimental so I am interested in seeing how it sounds.

I then drilled out the top of the A brace for the truss rod wrench access by starting with a tiny bit and then upping the bit sizes until I had the size I wanted. I was a little worried about drilling this hole as I was drilling down the center of a mitre joint. I was afraid that the joint would split right down the middle but it didn't. One down, one to go!

This is the first top (red and bubinga rosette) in the go bar deck with the remainder of the braces glued up.

The first top with the ends of the braces carved down to the top wood.

Here you can see "X"s on the tone bars and cross braces. All of these are in a different circle radius from the center of the X brace. I marked the finger braces after I took this picture.

The braces after rough shaping with a chisel. I know, the scallops mostly look like they line up, but trust me, none of them are the same distance from the X brace center. I measured all of them and recorded the measurements on my plan for future reference.

Here you can see the truss rod access holes. The one through the transverse brace was no big deal, but the one at the top of the A braces was the one that had me worried.

Here is the top braces after being sanded down to 100 grit. I am going to work on the scallop peaks a little to get them a little more 'pointed' but the braces are pretty much to their final shape.

Just another shot of the hole through the a brace intersection. I can see in this picture that I need to clean up the top edges of these braces!

A side shot of the braces.

This is the second top (green and spalted maple rosette) in the go bar deck with the last braces being glued up. Neither of the bridge plates are glued in yet. Speaking of bridge plates, I decided not to tuck them under the cross braces this time. There is a lot of discussion in the OLF forums regarding this and I decide to try and keep the contact between the bridge plate and cross braces to a minimum. Again, more experimentation.

Top bracing started and some clips....

2007-09-18T20:01:00.000-05:00

Today I spent my time getting the first set of top braces ready for glue up and glued the X braces and tone bars down. I will get the A frame, transverse and finger braces glued down tomorrow. I had a big jump in my progression today. I actually remembered to drill the hole through the transverse brace for truss rod adjustment access. Hey, I am starting to learn from my mistakes. You can't fool me 5 times in a row, I'm just too smart for that! lol

Here are a couple of clips of my playing. It is still full of mistakes and dud notes, and my transitions in some parts of these songs is very choppy, but I am seeing some improvement. You would think playing the same song over about a thousand times would be enough for me to have it perfected, but that just isn't how it is going for me. I seem to make the same mistakes over and over again. Oh well, progress is still progress no matter how small it seems. And after all, I'm having fun and that is what it's all about anyway. (Yeah, I know I'm not smiling but really it is fun! I just can't do two things at once so it's either playing or smiling...)

The first top with half the braces glued up in the go bar deck.

This song is called Windows. It is in the fingerstyle book I am using for my lessons. It sounds okay, there are mistakes, and some dead strings but this is the song I am having the most improvement on. I started to learn this song about 2 weeks ago.

This is Canyon Canon that I played in the last video clip. There are still several mistakes, but it is a little better then it was last week. There is one section that I am having a tough time getting my fretting quickly and cleanly. You should easily be able to figure out which part it is. :)

Rosette redux and top bracing.....

2007-09-17T17:12:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I sanded the two rosettes flush to the top and took a good look at them. I just wasn't happy with how they looked, and the edges of the wood against the colored strips. The edges of the rosettes just didn't have a good clean edge, even though I sanded them. There were a lot of tiny little gaps that I didn't like. So I decided to re-do them. I routed the colored strips out from around the wood rosettes using my dremel, a down cut bit, and my circle cutter. I adjusted the bit so it cut just inside the colored strips and overlapped the wood just a touch. That way it would remove the colored strips, and trim the edges of the solid wood rosette part. It worked very well. I got nice clean edges on both rosettes and a channel that would accept three strips of colored lines. I re-glued the colored strips in and let them dry. Today I sanded them flat and they look a lot better. I am very happy with the look and now I can continue on. I cut the sound holes out sanded the soundboards down to the almost final thickness so they are currently .100" thick. My goal after final sanding is to have them around .95". I then cut the X-brace intersection on one top. You may recall that I am going to use an 'A' frame support under the fingerboard extension instead of the popsicle brace that I have used on my other guitars. This is supposed to be a much better brace which is stronger and less prone to failure. However, it also entails a fair amount of additional work as the X braces need to be notched to accept the ends of them, the transverse brace needs notches to accept them, and the top needs to be mitred. The neck block also needs to be notched to accept these braces. I got one completed but didn't start on the second one. I will get to that one tomorrow after I get the first one glued up in the go bar deck. You may have noticed that I am not pre-shaping the braces this time either. I want to carve them after they are glued to assist me in my attempts at tap tuning.

The first rosette after re-doing it. The lines are red/black/red.

The other rosette. These stripes are green/black/green. If you look you can see a small nick in the rosette at the top inside just to the right of center. This spalted maple is very fragile stuff and it is a piece that fell out during the routing process. I oriented it so that spot will be under the fingerboard extension.

The A brace.

Here you can see the required notching for this. It is a little tedious but it was also kind of fun.

Rosettes and pegheads...

2007-09-15T22:14:00.000-05:00

Sorry I haven't updated for a couple of days. It has been pretty busy around here. I managed to get the peg heads cut on the two necks, and I also got the rosettes made and glued in. I did have a couple of issues to deal with however. First, when I was shaping the second peg head using my router and a template, I found out that sapele is very splintery wood. The bit wanted to chip the edges of the peg head like crazy as I was cutting it. I was able to go slowly and carefully however just as I was finishing up, the bit caught the corner of one of the top cutouts and chipped a fairly large chunk out of the edge. The piece flew across the shop and I had no luck finding it. So, I ended up having to reshape the top of one peg head to accommodate the chip. I wasn't too happy with it, but there really isn't much I can do about it. Stuff happens. Today when I was thickness sanding my tops, one top had a hidden knot right in the middle of the board. Fortunately both sides were nice so I will just use the good side, and put the knot inside. If this had been an expensive top however, I would not have been very happy about it. I have both tops sanded down to .115" and once I have the rosettes sanded flush, I will take them down to .105". My rosettes turned out fairly nice. One is spalted maple with a black and green trim around both the inside and outside, and the other is curly bubinga with black and red trim. Both pieces of wood are very nice looking but they were pretty difficult to cut. I sanded the maple one flush with the top and the edges have some gaps because of the rough edges I got. I sanded them, but the maple in particular has a lot of gaps and pores which gives the edges a rough look. I am not sure if I want to attempt to re-route around the edges to try and clean them up or not. I will sleep on it before deciding what to do.

The two peg heads. The one on the left is the one that had a chip blow out. I ended up sanding the edges and rounding the top a bit to fix the problem. They look close but they are different.

The two tops after thickness sanding. You can see the dark spot in the middle of the right top. That is a knot that was hidden until I sanded into it.

A close up of the knot.

Here is the spalted maple rosette.

Here is the curly bubinga rosette. The curl doesn't show very well in pictures, but it really has a very deep 3D appearance in person. Oh, that is a pencil line down the center of the top, not the joint line.

Neck tenoning....

2007-09-11T19:45:00.001-05:00

Well the neck disaster seems to have been diverted. I glued in the laminate piece of mahogany the day the router tore up the neck, and yesterday I unclamped and checked it. The neck seems to be as stiff as it was previously. I planed and sanded it all flat and it looks okay. I went ahead and re-routed the truss rod channel (after checking the collett again!) I glued the heel blocks to the necks and let them dry. Today I planed the blocks to get them flush to the necks. I layed out the tenons and cut them on my table saw using my tenoning jig. After that, I realized that I forgot to install the brass inserts before cutting the tenons. I like to do the inserts first because the sides of the tenon want to bulge out if I do the inserts after the tenons are cut. Not a big deal though, I just clamped pieces of wood on three sides of the tenon to act as a support, then drilled the holes and epoxied the inserts in. It went fine and there were no blow-outs in the tenons.

The neck laminate after I removed the clamps. I think it will look fine under finish after it is stained.

Both necks with the truss rods.

The heel blocks glued and clamped.

The tenons are all marked and ready to be cut. Those spots on the top of the neck to the left are clamp marks. The rubber pads on the clamps cause these marks. I wasn't concerned as this will be under the fingerboard so I didn't use any cauls.

The tenons all cut. Notice anything missing? Yep, no inserts.

Here are the inserts all epoxied in. Here you can see the cauls I clamped on the tenon to keep the sides from blowing out. I had to do this on my 000 as I forgot to do the inserts on it too. I guess I need to write a chart of what gets done in what order so I don't miss things like this.

Awwww @!#$%$(* !!!!!

2007-09-09T15:06:00.000-05:00

Okay, I don't swear but today I really felt like it! Instead I will use the cartoon method of expressing myself!

Stupid stinking rotten lousy router! I decided to go up to the shop and route the truss rod channels in the necks. Easy enough you say right..... well it is an easy job. First I layed out the center lines on the necks, installed the bit in my router, set the height and ran the first blank. At the end of the cut I started to back it out like I have done other times when it started to wander. I thought that was strange so I shut the router off and lifted the neck. That is when I realized the stinking collet loosened up and allowed the bit to rise causing the peg head end of the slot to be way too deep. At first I just figured I would fill it and re-route but then I realized that the depth of the channel is now deeper than the thickness of the final neck. Crud! Anyone need a hockey stick piece of expensive scrap wood? I did get the other neck routed as I did it before realizing that the first neck was trash. If I had figured that beforehand, I would have turned off the lights and went back in the house. As it was, that is exactly what I did after cutting the second slot (which went fine). This is the second time that I have had the bit do this in my router. The last time was on the back binding on my 000. The maddening thing is, I cleaned the collet out from dust this time when I put the bit in and made sure it was very tight. I don't know if I will keep this router or not. I can't have this thing doing this and I don't want to always be questioning if the bit will slide up the collet every time I use it.

Needless to say, this was a lousy day in the shop. I'm off to the LMI site to order another blank.

Update: Of course, as my luck would have it LMI is out of stock with these blanks. I guess I won't be buying any lottery tickets today!

Both neck blanks side by side. The one on the right is fine, the one on the left is ruined.

Here you can see the last couple of inches where the bit rose up around 10mm.

The depth of the slot at the nut end. It is about 22mm deep.

Here you can see the overall depth of the slot compared to the neck thickness.

Update #2. Okay, now that I have cooled off and took some time to thing about my options, I decided to try and laminate a piece of mahogany in the center of the blank from peg head to the heel. I figured that since the neck was ruined anyway, it wouldn't do any damage to try. I ripped two slots through the neck, one on either side of the ruined truss rod slot. I then chiseled out the piece and squared up the end. I ripped a piece of mahogany to snugly fit the slot, glued it up and clamped the entire neck tightly. Tomorrow I will plane both sides flat and then try the truss rod again. I am pretty sure the strength will be fine as other builders make laminated necks all the time. The only difference is that they do the gluing as 3 separate pieces instead of trying to glue a piece in a slot. It should look okay as I am planning on staining them anyways. They only part that might look a little odd is that I am not going to laminate the heel block so the strip will only be in the neck itself. It will also stop at the peg head. Hopefully I will be able to stain it so it doesn't look to out of place. I did order a couple more neck blanks anyway so I have them for future builds. LMI shows them out of stock until tomorrow so I am guessing they will ship sometime this week.

Back bracing and neck work....

2007-09-08T21:16:00.000-05:00

I was able to get quite a few things done last night and today. First I got the back center braces glued down and cut for the back braces. I then got all of the back braces glued up. This was a little time consuming as I only have one go bar deck so I had to do one task at a time, but I got them done. I used hot hide glue again on this one, and I am really liking working with it. It cleans up nicely and dries good and hard. It also grabs a fairly good tack within a minute which holds the braces in place without them slipping around. Of course, I have to work very quickly but it isn't too hard as long as I am prepared. With that being done, I started working on the necks. I first cut a straight edge on the blanks so they can sit flat on the table saw in the scarf cut jig. I then layed out the scarf cuts, then proceeded to cut the scarfs. That is when I realized that I messed up one of them by accidentally using the wrong layout line on my jig. I ended up cutting one end too short. Fortunately, I purchased 30" blanks which gave me some additional length to work with. I was able to cut another scarf cut and with a bit of fudging with the glue up, I had enough length to get it done. Tonight I cut the peg head end to 13mm thick using my scarf joint jig again. All in all it was a good day.

Oh, I almost forgot..... I got my package from RC Tonewoods today with the rosette blanks I ordered. They are beautiful and very highly figured pieces of wood. Now I have to decide which ones I am going to use on these. I have plenty to choose from.

One back center strip glued down.

And the other one in the go bar deck.

Before gluing the back braces, I took a good look at them. I noticed two had some problematic runout in them so I trashed them and re-made two new ones. They probably would have been fine but I didn't want to risk it. They were very stiff and I couldn't snap them so I am probably being a little over cautious but better safe than sorry!

One back in the go bar deck having the braces glued down. The other was done today so both are finished now.

Here you can see my scarf cut mistake. The bottom one had the cut too high.

Just a picture of the jig I use to cut these joints.

Here you can see how I had to shift the new scarf joint so I would have enough wood for the neck. If I would have glued it like normal, the neck would have been too short. Since this ends up getting thinned to 13mm, it really didn't matter and the glue line is the same length after it is thinned.

Both necks glued and clamped. It kind of has that assembly line look to it doesn't it!

I got my package of rosette blanks in the mail today. These are some really great looking blanks and I should get some beautiful rosettes out of them.

I came up with a much safer way to cut the excess off of the peg head using my table saw. Before, I would freehand cut it sliding the neck along the fence. It was a very scary process and I knew it was just a matter of time before I destroyed a neck doing it that way. I realized I could clamp the neck back in the scarf cutting jig and slide the neck through the blade. It held the necks very securely and it felt much safer.

Both necks after the peg head has been thinned. They are perfectly parallel and nest together like I actually knew what I was doing!

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

2007-09-06T12:59:00.000-05:00

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....!

A productive weekend.......

2007-09-03T16:10:00.000-05:00

Well I pretty much got to the point I wanted to be this weekend. All of the plates are joined, the rims are trimmed down to the body thickness and radiused to 30' on the top, and 15' on the back, the side braces are in, and the kerfed linings are glued on the back edges of the sides. I also was able to get the braces ripped for the tops and backs. I changed the dimensions on all of the braces with the exception of the transverse braces to taller and narrower. I want to really lighten up the bracing on these guitars to see how that affects the tone. I also am making a change to the top bracing. I am going to try and do an "A-frame" brace at the neck instead of using the standard Popsicle brace design. This design is supposed to strengthen the top under the fretboard extension significantly over the old design which will help lessen the need of a neck reset down the road. It doesn't look like it will be too difficult, but it will add a little work to the bracing as these braces need to be notched into the neck block, and the transverse brace.

I decided to go ahead and cut the two tops to remove the pin knots in the middle of the soundboard. I kind of liked the look of the knots, but I was concerned that it could possibly weaken the top right next to the glue line. I didn't want to risk that so I cut them out. I did cut right up to the knots however to keep the discoloration lines. Call me crazy, but I really like the look of the grain lines and natural discoloration in top woods. I am not all that excited in 'master grade' top wood because it just looks too dull to me. Give me some character in a top! After all, it is wood and I want it to look like wood, not a piece of tan poster board! One thing I figured out, after spending a lot of time with shooting boards, sanding boards, and planes trying to get tops and backs perfect for joining, the best tool I have for the job is my table saw. As long as the plates are relatively square I can get a dead straight edge on them that are ready for gluing straight off the saw. It does take a good saw that is set up perfectly and a good blade, but it is the easiest and surest way I have found to do this. The hardest part of the job is making sure the blade is perfectly square to the table and parallel to the fence. I cut both plates at the same time and it works wonderfully. I have been able to get the plates ready in less than 10 minutes this way and every joint is so clean and tight that there is no light that shows through when they are held together prior to gluing. One day I will make a sled that will hold odd shaped tops and backs so the joining edge is parallel to the blade. This will make joining plates that aren't parallel a simple job.

I ordered some different rosette blanks from Bob at RC Tonewoods this weekend. I have a couple of different blanks here, but I would like some different ones to pick from. I asked him to try and pick some colorful blanks to include in my order. Hopefully I will get some good options to choose from.

The last top glued and joined. You have probably noticed the green box and the tenoning jig sitting on the plates and wondered why they are there. They are there to hold down the centers of the two plate halves and keep them from buckling up under the pressure of the two clamps pulling the plates together. My first attempt at plate joining, I didn't do this and I found my top buckled at both sides. Fortunately it didn't break but it easily could have. Lesson learned!

Here is the first top. You can see the dark grain lines in the center. I know, a lot of people would hate this, but I really like it. You can see by what's left of the guitar outline, I had plenty of extra that I could cut out, but I really wanted the natural grain line look.

Here are the kerfed linings out of the bender.

The sides with linings, side brace strips, and all sanded to radius.

2nd plate joined, rims sanded

2007-09-01T20:21:00.000-05:00

I didn't have a lot of time today (isn't that how it always is on a weekend!) to work on the twins, but I did get the second set of back plates joined and glued up. I also got the rims sanded for the top radius of 30'. I still need to trim the rims down to the correct thickness, that is why I didn't sand them on the 15' side. I also ran the glued up back through the thickness sander to check my glue joint and it looks great. I can't see the joint line at all and if it weren't for the change in grain direction, it would be invisible.

The first back after joining. I think it will look pretty good after staining and finish goes on. Right now though, the coloring is pretty 'muddy' if that makes any sense.

The second back glued up and in the joining jig.

Jointing and blocks.....

2007-08-31T22:07:00.000-05:00

This post is for the last couple of days. Yesterday I cut the neck and tail blocks and glued the tail blocks to the sides. Today I routed the mortises in the neck blocks, glued them in place, and then set to the task of jointing a set of back plates. Since I only have one jig for plate jointing, I will have to do one each time I am in the shop until all 4 are finished. I had a bit of trouble getting a good tight joint this time. I have joined 4 plates so far, and those have been pretty easy to get a good tight joint on. This one for some reason gave me quite a bit of difficulty. First I would have the center tight and one end showing light. Then I would try and fix it some more and would get another spot with light showing through, but the first problem area tight. I finally tried something different, I used my table saw to just shave the finest edge off of the two plates at the same time. As hard as it was to believe, I got a perfect joint straight off the table saw! I got it in the jig, glued and clamped up.

My order from LMI arrived today with two new neck blanks, 4 pieces of kerfing, and some black and white strips for bindings. This weekend I will try and get the kerfing all glued in, and get all of the plated glued up. I also want to get the braces roughed out of the billets if I have the time.

Here they are with the tail blocks glued in and clamped. This was yesterdays work.

Here are the two neck blocks glued in. This was today.

The first back joined and glued up in the jig.

The twins have begun......

2007-08-29T20:30:00.000-05:00

Today I officially started work on the twin build. The first thing I did was to rip a 1/4" strip from the edge of each of the side pieces to use as future binding material. I figure that the sides are plenty wide for the guitar and this is a way to get some free EIR binding wood. Once that was done, I trimmed the side pieces to get a straight edge on each side, then thickness sanded all 4 pieces to .08" thick. I then dug out my OM bending mold, wiped the dust and spider webs off of it and got the bender ready for use. I bent all 4 sides easily using a misting of water and wrapping them in kraft paper. I cut the ends to fit in the molds and clamped them in. So, the twins are under way.

I won't be posting in as much detail on these builds as I have gone into a lot of detail in other build journals. I will be posting my daily progress pictures as well as anything that is different, unusual, or interesting along the way. This will be more a record of the method I use to build two mostly identical guitars at the same time, with the only differences being bracing methods, and some cosmetic differences. I also spoke with LMI on Monday about my neck blanks and they are sending me two new ones that are at least 3" wide. I sent the other ones back to them. They were great about it, and were very willing to do whatever was necessary to make me happy. I am quite pleased with the quality of their customer service.

Two sets of sides.

Number 1.....

...and number 2. You will notice there is a significant difference of color in these two sets of EIR. One is very dark like the normal EIR I have used, and the other is very light with a lot of wide stripes in it. With this being "opportunity grade' wood, it is not considered to be cosmetically high quality wood, but it is structurally sound and it has a very nice ring to it when tapped. I will be staining both guitars to try and get them similar in color.