Lots and lots of sanding.....

Despite the beautiful weekend weather, and all the outside work that needs done, I spent some time in the shop last night and this afternoon getting the guitar ready for pore filling. I spent a lot of time sanding, wetting with naphtha, re-sanding, rinse.... repeat. One thing I noticed is that my shop got a bit dry again, right around 35% RH and the body has flattened out a bit. It still has a radius on both the top and back but not the 25' and 15' radius's that I built it with. I also noticed that the center joint of the back opened up a little bit in a couple of spots so I masked it off and forced some LMI white glue into the seam to re-glue it. Other than that, everything is going well with the final sanding. I have a couple of small dings in the top I need to deal with. I tried wetting them and heating the spots with a heat gun but it didn't lift the dings all the way up. I have some repair filler that I used on my Dreadnought for this purpose and I will use it again on this to fix these two spots. Neither will be visible once it is finished.

One thing I have noticed is that since all the sanding, the top really has a fantastic tap tone to it. I have no idea what note it is, but it has a nice clear sound when tapped, and it 'rings' for a very long time after the tap. It holds a tone significantly longer than the OM did when I was tapping it. I had this sustain when I braced it, but it kind of went away after gluing it to the body. Now that I have been sanding and thinning the top, it keeps getting better and better. I am very excited to hear the sound of the finished guitar. If this tap sound is any indication of the final sound, I believe this is going to be an amazing sounding guitar.

Now I am kicking myself that I didn't take good notes of the exact dimensions and weight of the bracing, or the weight of the top. Oh well, I do have pictures, and I know what the measurements were of the blanks before shaping.

Sorry, no pictures today. I guess I could have taken pictures of all the sanding dust but that really would have been boring to look at!