Humidity spike.....

DAY 46

Today was a no build day. We have had nice warm temps for the last two days, and rain today. Although it is nice to have it warm (in the low 60's) it has one drawback. Because of all the snow we have had, these warm temps caused a lot of very rapid melting. With the melting comes a lot of standing water, mud, and full drainage ditches. Also along with this comes a spike in humidity. Monday we were at 30%. Tuesday, 40%. Today we are at 80% and rising. I have the dehumidifier running full blast, but it is just too humid for me to attempt to do much building. I did get the joined back out of the jig and got the top glued up and into the jig to dry. The back looks great after I scraped and sanded the excess glue off of it. The joint is almost impossible to see other than grain direction change. I hope the top comes out as nicely. Other than that, the building has come to a grinding halt until the humidity stabilized a little bit.

I took the time today to take my Dreadnought out and adjust the saddle and lower the action a bit. I did a bit of reading on Frets.com about action and typical action height and I realized mine was very high. I lowered the action by 3/64" at the 12th fret per Frank's instructions which meant lowering the saddle by 3/32". It went pretty smoothly (other than breaking the high E string cringe!) with one exception. When I took the saddle out, I noticed a hairline crack in the saddle running along where the edge of the bridge was. I filled the crack with glue, but I will need to make a new saddle. My thinking is that since I had the bridge way too high, the stress caused by string tension was too much for the saddle to handle. It didn't break in half, and the crack only goes part way down the saddle but I don't want to keep it in there like that. I will add a saddle blank with my next LMI or Stewmac order. I now have the action set at 7/64ths at the 12th fret and it definitely feels better trying to press the strings to the frets. I have been fiddling around trying to do some lessons using online videos and it was pretty obvious that the action was way too high because it was very difficult to press the strings. Now hopefully it will make my learning a bit easier.

I also checked my OM body again with the re-humidification project I have going. I am happy to say that I now have the back bow to almost 100%. It is 100% from side to side, and about 95% from top to bottom. I am just thrilled that I was able to get this done so easily.