Double-cutaway Archtop

[idmicheal]

Hello everyone! After reading here for more than a year I'm finally starting my first build!

I'm going to do a double-cutaway archtop. I took drawings from the cutaway side of my Gretsch and modified them for a 17th fret neck join.

I took over the kitchen table for the better part of a week while drawing up plans

And today I started making some templates from hardboard, which will then be transferred onto MDF.

And filing down after band sawing.

Hopefully I'll be able to get started on the actual wood before the end of the week! Needless to say I'm really excited to finally be starting my first build! I'd love and appreciate comments, tips, and criticism!

-IDM

p.s. Thanks to John Abbet for answering some questions in the awesome Archtop build over in the Acoustic & Archtop section!

- Edited to change pictures sizes to conform to forum rules -

Edited July 29, 2011 by idmicheal

[idmicheal]

Haven't gotten as much done this week as I'd hoped, due to needing to use a friend's jointer, needing a new belt for my sander, and messing up the tracking on my bandsaw. I did get the neck rough-cut out and started on the body mold, but that is where I noticed the tracking issue on my bandsaw.

Hard maple neck blank.

I had some burning because the maple is so hard, and the billet is almost 3" thick.

I'm hoping to use my friend's jointer on Thursday, and get my bandsaw tracking properly, and then I'll really make some progress!

Edit: had some photo trouble.

Edited August 9, 2011 by idmicheal

[idmicheal]

So, I was tinkering with my bandsaw yesterday, trying to figure out why it wouldn't track properly, and it turns out that this was the problem:

Needless to say, I am pretty upset that the wheel hinge support was cast that poorly! What really gets me is that I was cutting under the recommended tension for the blade size I was using! That has significantly slowed down my progress, and I'm waiting to hear back from Rigid about it.

But I did cut the truss rod rod channel and slot the fingerboard.

It looks like until I get my bandsaw fixed and running so I can finish my body forms, that I'll be working mostly on the neck.

[Campylobacter]

Nice to see fellow first timers also have problems with their equipment. But on a serious note it's looking good, idmichael!

[xadioriderx]

who needs a bandsaw, do it the old fashioned way!

sometimes you gotta work with what you have! i have a pretty nice router, but i dont route my pup cavities because i have no templates, so i use an Xacto knife (semihollow guitar so its just a 1/4" top) but it takes a lot longer! lol

looking forward to progress!

oh and yeah, belt sanders will definitely burn things! i burned my neck constantly when shaping it, just make sure you leave justttt enough extra wood to sand off the burning by hand, it cant be a bit tough to sand off sometimes!

Edited August 27, 2011 by xadioriderx

[idmicheal]

who needs a bandsaw, do it the old fashioned way!

sometimes you gotta work with what you have! i have a pretty nice router, but i dont route my pup cavities because i have no templates, so i use an Xacto knife (semihollow guitar so its just a 1/4" top) but it takes a lot longer! lol

looking forward to progress!

oh and yeah, belt sanders will definitely burn things! i burned my neck constantly when shaping it, just make sure you leave justttt enough extra wood to sand off the burning by hand, it cant be a bit tough to sand off sometimes!

Yeah, I actually got impatient and did a lot of work on my body mold with a drill press, coping saw and sanding sticks!

But I the part I needed for the saw, so that allowed me to finish my body mold and make my carving cradles/clamping cauls.

Body mold.

Carving cradle gluing up.

Both cradles.

[idmicheal]

I also got my spruce top glued up, but I'm having a lot of trouble getting a good joint on the maple back. I ran it through my friend's jointer and it had a good joint right after, but I didn't get back to it to glue it up until a day or two after, and by then the boards had warped and no longer had a good joint.

Top gluing.

Gap in the maple joint. In the second photo you can see light through the joint.

So I tried this, along with a using a block plane and scrapers, but the sole on my plane is too short to insure uniform flatness across the whole joint.

I'll be able to use my friend's jointer again next weekend (if I can find time to do so after dove hunting ), so I think I'll just let it be until then, and work on other things in the meantime. I need to taper the neck and thickness the side, etc. I suppose with those cradles done I could start carving the top, but I'm a bit intimidated

But I'm going to try to get some work done today; might make another post tonight.

[xadioriderx]

on my page in my sig is the simple solution i had to bookmatch seams. it worked well for me albeit a little primitive.

i tried several ways prior to that that didnt work too!

edit - looks like that IS what you tried, hmm. those are pretty big pieces so it would take a long time that way.

if your boards are warping after a day or two, they may not be stable enough to be using on a guitar yet. i dont know about moisture contents and such, but they should be pretty stable...

were they warping so that the edge is still straight but bowed up a little? meaning you could clamp it down flat on a table and still have a good seam

Edited August 27, 2011 by xadioriderx

[idmicheal]

Yeah, I really don't know what the deal is with that maple. The moisture content is down around 6-7%, so I know that it's dry. I'm just going to use my friend's jointer again and clamp it right away. I'm considering buying a long-sole hand plane before I start another build, because the 7 or so inch sole on my block plane just can't keep that long of an edge flat. But I added your website to my favorites You've got some cool stuff there!

So today I did the neck taper with a Safe-T-Planer. The taper is 1/8th" from the first to the thirteenth fret. I made up a shim for the taper.

I cut the dovetail, which I was more than a bit nervous about, being only my second dovetail (I cut the first as practice just before doing the real thing ). It required a bit of cleanup, but it's pretty accurate.

Glued an ear onto the headstock to accommodate my shape.

And, finally, I cut the joint for the fingerboard extension. If you look really closely, you can see that it isn't quite square with the dovetail, but it is only slightly off, and in the end it shouldn't matter, due to the fingerboard extension being shaped like the fingerboard anyway.

I also cut a Gibson-style truss rod to the length I need and re-threaded it, but that isn't exciting, so I didn't take pictures

Well... I'm calling it a day.

[xadioriderx]

oh man, i took the day off, didnt feel up to the work today spent the morning wakeboarding instead, then did some shopping at goodwill, got a book of sudoku

now i wish i had worked though

glad you liked my page! some of its not all that fantastic, but the more recent stuff is a bit more helpful. im still working on a few of the pages.

actually i have a guy on another board who spent today trying to redesign the menu and such, because its getting a bit excessive for being in a table like it is lol

necks looking good so far! that was probably the most nerve racking part of this build (first time ive done a neck). i was nervous about getting the heel right. screw a dovetail i know id mess that up!

whats the little stick in the first picture?

[idmicheal]

That is a 1/8th" shim I glued at the first fret for the neck taper. I put it on the fingerboard side, which I know is flat, and then I planed the back of the neck. So by planing the back of the neck and making it flat, that shim makes it thinner toward the nut. Benedetto recommends a 3/32" taper from the first fret to the tenth, because he stopped planing the back of the neck at the tenth fret, so since I'm joining the neck at the seventeenth instead of the fourteenth, I planed farther up the neck, so I just took that same taper and found that it was 1/8" at the thirteenth.

[xadioriderx]

ohhh gotcha! very cool!

[idmicheal]

oh man, i took the day off, didnt feel up to the work today spent the morning wakeboarding instead, then did some shopping at goodwill, got a book of sudoku

now i wish i had worked though

I tried wake boarding once; couldn't ever get up though. Skiing was slightly better.

Today at my "real" job I was looking forward to being able to work on this tomorrow... but then I realized I have a week's worth of homework to do before Tuesday so... Maybe I'll try to squeeze the homework in while something is gluing

[idmicheal]

I haven't posted for a while, but I've been somewhat productive.

I glued the neck extension and made both it and the 1/4" piece that fit into the truss rod channel flush with the neck.

Then I cut the abalone for the inlay and inlayed the fretboard.

And here is the oversized fingerboard stop.

[idmicheal]

When I was gluing the fingerboard on, I had just gotten all of my clamps in place, when I noticed that one of them had pulled the fingerboard off center, even though I had clamped some pieces of wood on either side to keep the fingerboard on the centerline. Luckily I saw it and was able to pop it off and re-center it.

Gluing the headstock face veneer. I had a small dilemma with this; on the back I used a standard ebony veneer, but when I went to do the same on the front, I saw that the thinness of the veneer would make it impossible to have a smooth transition in the binding from the neck to the headstock. Benedetto accounts for this by placing the nut end of the fingerboard about 3/8" away from where the headstock angle begins and using the fingerboard stop to continue the headstock angle onto the neck, thereby facilitating a clean binding line. But I didn't really understand that until I'd already gone too far to do anything about it. It was kinda one of those things you don't completely understand on paper, only to have it seem quite obvious in real life. But luckily for me I had a piece of ebony a bit less that 1/4", so by using that as a veneer, I'll be able to have a good binding transition, with the sacrifice of a thinner, more aesthetically-pleasing headstock. Lesson learned.

I had some tearout while I was routing the headstock shape, but I managed to find the piece and glue it back in. I haven't messed with it since then out of frustration, but hopefully it worked. You can also see on the left side of the photo, that there is a place where the bit rode in too far (I don't know how that sort of thing happens when using a template and flush-cut bit, but apparently it does). I'm a bit intimidated by the router at the moment, so I think I'll finish up the shaping with the bandsaw and rasps

I started carving the top the other day, which is probably what I was most looking forward to and is proving to be quite fun, if labor intensive. It is pretty slow going with my finger plane; I've put about 9 hours into at this stage, and that is just having gotten the perimeter to approximately 1/4", without doing much in the way of accurate profiling. I got a pretty nasty blister on my thumb, and by the time I'm through I think my hands will be strong enough to crush a man's skull, but I think I'll hold off buying a palm plane to hog off more wood until later. We'll see if I still feel that way after I start on the hard maple back

I recently made a trip out to use my friend's jointer, and got the maple back joined and glued. It had some inclusions on both edges, so I had to cut off about 1" from both sides and add on two pieces from farther up the blank where the upper bout would be located to accommodate the width of the lower bout. So it ended up being a four-piece back. I'm swamped with homework again, but I'd like to have this done before the end of the month so I can spray lacquer before it starts to freeze.

[xadioriderx]

yeahhh i started wearing leather gloves when i used the little block plane to shape my neck! it gets painful!

you did route for the pups and get the bridge drilled out before carving right? pleaseee say yes? itd be very tough to route once its rounded over!

i hate getting tearout, it can be the most depressing thing. and whats worse for me is sometimes i get frustrated and decide i just want to get through it so i rush and make it worse =/ i hate that feeling though. i use a router to do the tuning machine holes - i start it then let it drop down the depth guide and through the headstock. well recently i had it too low when i flipped it on and it was touching the wood. skipped and took a nice mark on the face of my headstock =( luckily i planned to paint it, but i had no choice after that happened. did it come out okay when you glued it back on? definitely take some time off ont hat part and come back with a clear mind, youll figure out a fix for it then, never with fresh frustration though!

and yep you have to be super careful gluing fretboards and scarf joints. that much glue makes it easy to slide back and forth when clamping, no matter what you do! i make a little mark that i know ill be able to see even if glue seeps over it, so i can line it up while gluing

anyways, keep it up! and post more pictures, dont leave a month in between!

[idmicheal]

you did route for the pups and get the bridge drilled out before carving right? pleaseee say yes? itd be very tough to route once its rounded over!

It is actually going to be fully hollow with a floating ebony bridge, so I have to wait until the top is completely lacquered and finished so I can fit the base of the bridge precisely to the curvature. I'll be doing the pickup holes and f-holes with a coping saw, which shouldn't be too hard due to the finished thickness being only 1/4"-3/16".

definitely take some time off ont hat part and come back with a clear mind, youll figure out a fix for it then, never with fresh frustration though!

Yeah, after gluing the torn-out piece back in (which still has a lot of excess wood on it), I just set the neck down for a while. Doing the top is definitely giving me a better outlook so that I'll have patience to deal with the headstock when I'm through. But I haven't taken the excess off of the torn- out piece, so I'm not sure how well it worked. I'll post pictures when I get back to it though. That darned school and work has all of my time tied up

[idmicheal]

Alright, it's been a few months, but I had to take a break because there was a suspicious correlation between working on the guitar and my grades lowering. But once the fall semester was over I really got back to work, and as it stands build #1 is just waiting to be finish sanded and sprayed, and build #2 is underway (new thread to come).

I'm about to post all of my pictures since September, so hopefully I'll get it done either today or tomorrow!

So after carving away at the top for a while, I took the edge down to ~1/4" with the Safe-T-Planer.

And then finished the hand carving and scraped it clean.

[idmicheal]

So after a while of handling it and looking at pictures of other archtops, I came to the conclusion that my arch is too steep in two ways: I went off of Benedetto's specifications of a 1" thick starting blank, but his guitars are 17", while mine is 16", so on the next guitar I planed the blanks to 7/8" before starting to carve. The arch is also much too steep and abrupt in the cutaway. It is hard to explain, but I should've carved the upper bout much more shallowly and gradually, and less of a "hump".

But I made this pin to fit onto my drill press table. When used in conjunction with the depth stop, it allows one to to get a uniform depth (in this case 1/4") while still conforming to the outside arch.

At first it was just a bare dowel, but it did this, so I added the eraser, but it ended up just squishing into oblivion and denting everything up anyway Guess I should've waited to drill before scraping...

So this is what I ended up with.

[idmicheal]

I figured out something very important while removing all of the excess wood with my finger plane, and that is not to get overly zealous when drilling the holes, as if you drill two or more holes touching it creates a crater that absolutely swallows that tiny little plane, resulting in very smashed fingers

The intended dimensions on the top were 1/4" from neck block to tail block, tapering down to 3/16" at the f-holes, and further to 1/8" outside of the f-holes at the re-curve, but as it was my first top, I was too hesitant and left it quite a bit too thick, as I found our when butting the f-holes and pickup holes.

So I pretty much repeated that whole carving-planing-drilling thing on the back. This is carved to a uniform 3/16".

[idmicheal]

Then I proceeded to fit the braces, which was a bit tedious due to having to chalk the top and shave down the high spots on the braces until they fit flush across their whole length.

I did an x-brace pattern, which requires a box joint...

Which just so happened to be precisely at the location of my bridge pickup... *facepalm*

So...

After gluing to braces on I had to put my bridge pickup in by bending the metal ears that the height screws go though in order to get it into the hole from the top. I'm just glad I realized that before I glued the back on, or I'd be done for. So I went ahead and soldered all of my wiring and drilled the holes for knobs, switches, and jacks, along with gluing in the neck and tail blocks.

I also steam-bent the sides using a ghetto DIY heating iron that I rigged up from some galvanized duct steel and a 200W bulb on a fader.

Here are the linings gluing up.

[idmicheal]

Here's a close-up of my inlay.

I got kinda lazy when I was leveling off the neck extension with the rest of the neck, and I life the neck extension a few thousandths of an inch proud, which was hardly noticeable until the fretboard was glued on and I started to radius/level it on my belt sander, whereupon that few thousandths translated into a noticeably thinner fretboard and binding above the 17th fret. And the binding had weird pits in it that became really visible once they filled in with ebony dust. They must have been from air bubbles in the binding from the manufacturing process, but they're darned annoying. I tried filling them in with binding shavings melted in acetone, but it didn't really work, and just made the whole area look dirty.

Neck carving. Made some templates off of my Kramer, so it had a thinner-feeling neck than an archtop typically would. But hey... it's mine...

Requisite "no hands" picture

I cut the body mortise by hand with a dovetail saw and chisels, but I'll make up a router jig next time for sure. This is one area where consistency really counts.

Neck gluing up.

[idmicheal]

I'll throw up the last of my pictures before I get to bed.

Scraping the re-curve in the top.

Hollowing out the underside of the ebony tailpiece to reduce weight.

Blended headstock veneer.

Frets pre-leveling.

You can see that I had to just mount that pickup in there and tape it off so that I can spray lacquer over it. There it'll stay for eternity. Can't even adjust the height... I need to figure out a better way to do that next time. I may make up some single-coil pickup rings or something.

[idmicheal]

Doing some fret work with a cuppa

And here it is as I've got it now. Just waiting for the weather to warm up a bit so I can spray lacquer outside.

Build #2 is well under way, but I'll start a thread some other time. I'll try to be better about updating this time.

I'm goin to bed. Night all.

[Bmth Builder]

Great build so far!

Yeah you want some homemade pickup rings out of sexy woods, Myka is the king of stuff like that,

http://www.mykaguitars.com/instruments/059/default.htm