Today I decided to start working on the guitar nut. I first needed to adjust the space between the peghead veneer and the end of the fingerboard by just a smidge. I clamped a piece of MDF cut at a 15 deg. angle to act as a saw guide and cut the veneer. It only needed less than a half MM removed so it was a little difficult to keep the saw from falling off the edge of the veneer but I was able to get it cut. After a little chisel work to clean up the area the nut blank fits nicely. The nut was about 1/4" too long so I cut that off with my bandsaw. I wanted the ends of the nut to arch from the back of the neck to the width of the fingerboard, as well as the normal curve back. The reason for this is that the back of the neck is narrower than the top of the fingerboard by about 1mm on each side. I could narrow the fingerboard a bit, but I wanted a 1.75" nut instead of the 1.6" nut shown on the plans. The wider nut gives just a little bit more space between the strings for people who have fat fingers like me! lol. After a bit of dremel grinding and sanding I have a nut that looks pretty good and does exactly what I want it to do. After I do the final shaping on the top, and get the string slots cut it, I will spend some time fine sanding and polishing it.
Speaking of sanding, After the nut was done I turned my attention to sanding the guitar to 220 grit. One thing I haven't mentioned before is the Granadillo that LMI provided had a lot of machine marks on it. It looks like they used a planer to thickness it instead of a sander. I have not been looking forward to trying to sand these marks out because the wood is pretty hard. It takes a lot of sanding to remove even a little bit of material. I first started by hand sanding using a block and 150 grit paper but I quickly realized that at the rate I was going, I would probably still be sanding sometime in June! I turned to my random orbit sander with 220 grit paper. Even with this, it took me around 3 hours of constant sanding to get the machine marks out of the wood. It looks a lot better now and the fine 320grit sanding will go pretty quickly. I did a lot of wetting with naphtha and shining a bright light on it to look for scratches. Now that it is sanded pretty close to finish smoothness, I have a few very small spots in the binding that I will need to fill with sanding dust and superglue. No big deal and I will get it done next time out. With the dark wood, there are a few spots where the light colored glue shows between the binding and the sides. I will pick out a little of the glue and fill so it matches. It is purely a cosmetic thing. The glue is lighter than the Granadillo, and darker than the maple so it shows.
I am going to check the weather channel to see what the temps over the beginning of the week will be and if it will be above freezing, I will place my finish order from Stewmac. I am going with the waterbased Colortone lacquer and clear pore filler. I used the same stuff on my Dreadnaught except I used brown pore filler. After I got a feel for how it works, I liked it so I will try it again on this one. The only problem I have is that I will have to come up with a way to apply the finish and keep the shop warm enough. It is still below freezing around here and will stay that way for at least another month. I also spoke with my wife about ordering my next guitar and she was all in favor of me getting it ordered so I have it to work on during the curing time of this one. I am excited and ready to get it ordered! Oh , I decided to go with rosewood on the peghead and bridge on it. I think the bloodwood would be too much red and I really only want the red as an accent color, not a main color.
Enough rambling, here are some pictures:
This is the little guide I used to help cut the end of the rosewood peghead veneer. It is hard to tell, but the edge of the guide is cut at a 15 degree angle to match the end of the fingerboard.
The nut blank sitting in the slot. The cut turned out pretty well. Definately better than my Dreadnaught!
The nut rough shaped. You can see that it is wider at the top than at the bottom. The picture doesn't actually look right. It doesn't bow out in the center like it looks here, it goes in at a constant angle.
Here you can see that the nut is narrower at the base than at the top. The fingerboard is 1.75" wide and the nut is that width also.
Here you can see the machine marks I was talking about. The sides and back are covered from end to end with these diagonal scratches. They were fairly deep too, like it was sanded with 60 grit paper. It took a lot of work to get these marks out.
A couple of poser pictures here. Nothing exciting, just pictures of the assembled guitar.
And the back. I really do like the center pattern the grain made. Even though the neck looks like light maple, it is mahogany. It is just a very light piece of mahogany. I think I am going to keep it this color as it looks good against the dark red Granadillo.
No comments:
Post a Comment