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8 string acoustic


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Me too Mike. The box on the first one is making all the right noises when tapped so fingers crossed. 

I weakened and capped the lattice. Maple and off cuts of rosewood from another build. radiused on both sides to 25'. I'll take some sandpaper to the glue stains once in situ on the back.

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Well its bank holiday and I couldn't help myself so on with the backstrip. Made of offcuts from the top, it's forced into submission on the go deck and sanded to a nice polite round.

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Once dry channels were cut to accept the braces. This time I cut first with a dainty Japanese saw and then went at it with chisels. Much less tearing than the first time, but still not my favourite job - hence the lack of pictures. Heads down to the finish.

After about an hour of messing around getting the braces to fit, onto the go deck it went. Still tight enough to need a shove into place before the go bars go on.  

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Amusingly as soon as the glue went on Mrs 1038rings the dinner gong. No tea for Mr 1038 until this is done. Less amusingly the humidity shot through the roof as soon as I finished getting the bars on, Also one of them went on a bit off centre and split one of the longer braces. No biggie it'll glue back fine. One tip though. don't add bars from front to back. 

This is what we have now. My Mkii potato camera hides a multitude of sins, but its looking ok. 

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Matt

 

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thanks. Number 2 is going together a lot easier than number 1, but i guess thats how it should be. The dish is bought in. At the time it seemed like less hassle, but as time goes on, I like the idea of being about to make my own - especially as id like a pair of dished gluing fails.

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  • 4 weeks later...

Howdy. Finally getting some bench time in in a relaxed kind of way. 

I'm making me a bending jig - not a full fox style bender. Here are the sides

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The sides will be spaced by about 150mm to accept forms. Threaded rods will come out of the holes on the outside edge so enable a waist caul to be screwed down. I've also added holes at the from so that cutaways can be bend with a second caul. 

I'm also making a fretboard radiusing jig for my laminate trimmer (design shamelessly pinched from a build here I think). I like to think that I've radiused my last board fully by hand. 

WP_20170613_14_59_56_Pro.thumb.jpg.20f15b71da64fbbfeb9865a9e6ddbf1c.jpgThis will give a 20 inch radius and I may make one for a 10 inch board. Ive yet to build the base and sled.

Seeing as it is a bit cooler in the pit today (29 degrees.....) I thought I'd get round to fretting the first acoustic. I'm done grain filling and have knocked back the resin somewhat so this seemed like the last brute force thing left to do ignoring the bridge. I've gone big n chunky up to the body, then tall and thinner on the extension - not that anyone should be silly enough to go up there.

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Fretting this was a joy. I think Ive learned a few lessons - 1) cut your slots deep enough and prep you board well 2) there is only room for a fret in a fret slot. no dust or glue, none of last nights biryani or jungle soldiers still fighting the war 3) file off the remains of the trimmed fret tangs and do it well. This all may be basic, but this is the first time I haven't scimped on these things and the first time that everything's glided into place. Should have realised earlier that there's a reason that fret hammers aren't 5kg.

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Man, I can feel the weight of that mould from here....you could probably use its weight to bend things!

Definitely on the mark with fret slots. The better you take care of these, the better your fretwork. A light bevel in the slot also allows fretwire to seat flatter to the board if the wire isn't perfectly sharp on the internal corner where the tang meets the crown. Lots of things like that. Debris? Yeah, the things you find. Bits of Shergar, Lord Lucan's sleeping bag, Nazi gold, etc.

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So I started on the bridge. Nerves thoroughly wracked and yes, the ghetto jig is screwed to the worktop. Not taking any chances with this blank. Here are the nut slot and rebates on the tie block for the bone inlay. I've also thinned down the wings a bit here. Everything is nicely on the slant due to the multiscales.WP_20170622_18_11_22_Pro.thumb.jpg.e0c22e349aaca8d8119dfeae8d5506f5.jpg...and here is me marking out the holes on the tie block. Each precisely 12.357142mm apart give or take a mm.

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my thinking exactly.

Thankfully I've just done the last of the routing on the bridge.

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White knuckle ride over, the rest is all hand tool work. The next difficult job on is to find someone willing to sell me a cow bone. The plan is to cook, degrease and cut my own unless I can find a source of cheap large blanks.  The postie just dropped off a bag of shellac, so I'll be looking at that too

Provided there aren't any further screw ups, this is what we'll end up with.WP_20170623_10_10_35_Pro.thumb.jpg.788fcb5ce4e4968f9d776b792da33e9a.jpg

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I've put the bridge aside for now and have started French polishing and am really enjoying the process. Slow yes, but zen, very zen. I'm using blonde shellac which even though is fairly neutral in colour, seems to tie everything together nicely. I'm sold, but it does highlight every bit of sloppy finish sanding - had to resand the back after the first session due to blotchiness caused by not knocking back all the grain filling equally. This is after a couple of sessions on the body, yet to do the neck.

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my fault entirely. Id left a few patches of epoxy sitting on the surface. Didnt think it would be as visible as it was - totally differnt colour under shellac, not bad in itself, but totally distinguishable from the areas that had been sanded back. There are also a couple of scratches left on the top which im leaving there. My eyesight cleaely aint what it used to be.

cruel it may be, but its real purdy and i found a joy to apply. cant see me ever trying to spray acoustics.

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Righty ho, bridge mostly done. Just a bit of fiddling and fettling to do. The top has quite a subtle dome at 25' so fitting was easier than anticipated. Annoyingly having finished up for the day yesterday I dropped the perishing thing and chipped one of the corners so we now have rounded corners. All told, we ended up at 20g which I'm a bit surprised at considering the length of the tie block and saddle housing.

 

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That being done I'm paying attention to one of the fret ends which was a bit reluctant to sit flat. Glue, clamp and we're done. I think I'm going to use the epoxy to finish the whole neck, knocking back the gloss on the back to a satiny finish. 

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The next few days will be polish, polish and polish. 

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Not sure how, but I seem to have missed the recent progress on this !

Wow - there's some good stuff going on here :thumb:

In terms of your go-bar deck, what thickness of what wood are you using for your bars?  I use fibreglass rods which are a bit too bendy and dowels which are a bit too stiff.  Yours look pretty much fit for purpose....

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Hi Andy

Progress seems to be slow and mostly dent making at the moment. I've noticed that I get a bit impatient at the end of a build and need to force myself to take things easy.

The go bars come from the slats of an old bed that we were throwing out. Most are 5mm thick or thereabouts. I think the width makes them a bit easier to place than round bars would be, though ironically I was thinking of trying out fibreglass. I've ended up being too tight to buy a set.......

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I've never tried go-bars before, but I understand the idea and have thought about it more than once....I always figured that there would be an optimum amount of allowable flex (before the bars could potentially "push" the glue lubricated workpiece out to one side from underneath them?) versus downpressure. I imagined that having the top and lower platens separated using threaded rod, or at least having the top plate able to be adjusted upwards/downwards on four sections of threaded rod might allow one to place bars with just enough pressure to "place", then wind down the upper platen to add in more pressure. Not sure if this has been tried before or has problems built-in. Thought I'd see what you guys think whilst it's sort of part of the conversation....

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You know I haven't had any creep issues, though I did spend a lot of time working out (read as trial and error) the right length and thickness/flex needed in the bars. I've found if you're diligent with the amount of glue you're using and hold your gluee to your glueor together with the bar in one hand and nudge it into tension with the other then no slip. If you flood with glue and throw the bars in, yeah, different story. 

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It makes a world of difference, definitely. I've always had excellent results with using only as much glue as is required to wet both surfaces and nothing more. Even wiping one with a little water and applying glue to the other is fantastic. Minimal squeezeout and nice tidy gluelines.

I think that the false conflation of "squeezeout = good" is the poor habit that causes people to flood their work with glue. Even if the excess is squeezed out, there's the skating from hydrostatic pressure and other difficulties to contend with. No thanks. I have squeegees and toothed spreaders dotted around the place to save myself the stress!

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7 hours ago, 103801061982 said:

Hi Andy

Progress seems to be slow and mostly dent making at the moment. I've noticed that I get a bit impatient at the end of a build and need to force myself to take things easy.

The go bars come from the slats of an old bed that we were throwing out. Most are 5mm thick or thereabouts. I think the width makes them a bit easier to place than round bars would be, though ironically I was thinking of trying out fibreglass. I've ended up being too tight to buy a set.......

The fibreglass rods I went for were for kite-fliers.  Cheap as chips, to be honest and they do work well - I'm just not sure I went for ones that were quite thick enough so there's quite a bit of flex:

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I've use dowels too where I needed a bit more oomph (centre of the cross brace and the middle of the top spar.  It's interesting because although they do look quite flimsy, they create enough force to bow the 12mm chipboard top quite markedly!

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