Jam's DC

[Akula]

About three months ago, I visited a music store to buy cables and strings. I could've walked in, made the purchase, and walked out again, but we all know that's not what happens when you walk into a room filled with hundreds of guitars hanging on the walls. I picked up a few different instruments, all makes and models, just for fun and to see how they feel and how they're put together. My friend pointed out a PRS, and I initially declined - "If I pick that thing up, I'm gonna have to buy it."

 

Well, I picked it up, loved it, and was very tempted to make the call. But I went home instead, looked at heaps of pictures on the internet, and just like a coke addict with the possibility of a score, I started drawing my designs to build something just like it.

 

Like the few guitars I've built in likeness of others, this will not be an exact copy. I have no time for searching out exact dimensions of existing guitars, my drawings were done by hand sketching while looking at pictures. I simply do not care if I don't get the exact thickness Mr. Smith used on his guitars. I want something more personal, but obviously pulling influence from that guitar I picked up at Manny's that morning.

 

Specs:

• Figured Tasmanian Blackwood top
• Walnut wings
• Abalone binding

 

• 4-piece Maple neck with Black Bean veneer accent stripes
• 660mm scale length
• Reverse headstock
• Ironbark fretboard
• Stainless steel frets
• Aluminium side dots, aluminium and abalone inlays
• Abalone binding on fretboard

 

• EMG 81/60 pair, direct mount
• Volume, tone, 3-way switch
• 18v double battery
• Recessed controls
• Black metal knurled knobs with abalone inlay

 

• Hipshot-style hardtail bridge
• String-through with ferrules inset on back
• Graphtec nut
• Gotoh locking tuners
• Timber electronics cavity with magnets

 

This is a build for myself, and my job sometimes dictates insane weeks with no sleep followed by days of boredom, so it shall be slow and steady. Fellow Sydneysiders will also know of the wild weather we're experiencing - a summer of humidity, an autumn of rain, followed by a crisp, cold, and now wet and windy winter. Not ideal build conditions. Moreover, I make no claim to be an "experienced" luthier, so there shall be mistakes, errors, and questions to the hive-mind along the way. Which is exactly why I take the time to capture photographs and write up the build on this forum - you guys are my education; you share both the humour and the exasperations of a budding guitar maker.

 

Let's do it 

[Akula]

Ok, timber shots!

I regularly keep a notepad on my person at work, and it proved invaluable in the planning of this build. I have full-scale drawings at home, but I'll write down numbers and draw ideas in my down-time on the job, and after three months I finally got a break long enough to shoot off an email to my local timber yard with some board dimensions. The guys at Anagote are great, they had some decent sticks lined up when I arrived one afternoon, yet they offered me to look through all their stock for the stuff I needed. That included a fine piece of Tasmanian Blackwood with some hella nice figure. Ben bookmatched it for me with great skill.

 

In the background there, you can see the walnut I'll be using for the wings. A more expensive timber, being that it's imported into Australia as opposed to being grown here, but I've always had an affinity for that particular species' tone and look.

 

I got a single board of maple cut down to four pieces, so I can reverse grain and laminate into the tightest anti-warp structure I can fortify. I ebay'ed some veneer sheets of Black Bean, which I believe the rest of the world calls Moreton Bay Chestnut. That's purely for the stripes, there's no tonality-based decision there. Cut that down with a good blade. 

 

Here's the neck blank just clamped together for a few days with the veneers sandwiched. Nothing's glued yet, because we've got torrential downpours and high humidity here, but I couldn't resist a taste of how it's going to look. And it stops the veneer curling up and splitting on me before I get time to get it glued.

 

Here's my fretboard blank. Last year, my neighbour (who likes to destroy old houses for a living) chucked me a bit of Ironbark over the fence. It's dense as all hell, solid and hard. I resawed a slice off on the bandsaw and liked what came out. This bit must be over a hundred years old.

 

It does have a pinhole or two. I'm guessing this came from some long-dead parasite, and my plan is to fill with epoxy and dust when the time comes. If anybody has profound advice or warnings on this, I'd love to hear it!

 

Drew up the plans onto acrylic at 1am yesterday morning after getting home. I'm a far way off from digging out the flush-cutting router bits, but I like to see what the outcome is going to be a time before shaping, because it allows me time to identify problems and make changes to plans that you wouldn't be able to "feel" on paper.

 

And, a new addition to the workshop - I got a Stanley No. 4 second hand for a very reasonable price from a refurbisher today. The blade is already much sharper than it would be from a store-bought plane, and it seems to be in very good nick from the get-go.

 

If this demonic rainstorm would kindly bugger off by tomorrow morning, I'll be setting all the maple faces true and gluing up the neck blank by brunch-time!

 

 - Jam.

[Bizman62]

1 hour ago, Akula said:

when you walk into a room filled with hundreds of guitars hanging on the walls

You lucky bus-turd! I've never seen more than a couple dozen guitars in one shop! And most of them were the €100 ones including an amp, a gig bag and a cable... "They come from the same manufacturer as <brand>, only unbranded so they're basically the same".

1 hour ago, Akula said:

this will not be an exact copy. I have no time for searching out exact dimensions of existing guitars, my drawings were done by hand sketching while looking at pictures. I simply do not care if I don't get the exact thickness Mr. Smith used on his guitars. I want something more personal, but obviously pulling influence from that guitar I picked up at Manny's that morning.

That's what I really, really like! "Influenced by" and tailored to your liking rather than meticulously copying is IMHO the essence of building by yourself. If you want a carbon copy, there's dozens of Far-East builders who make more or less exact copies of well known models for a ridiculously cheap price.

1 hour ago, Akula said:

Nothing's glued yet, because we've got torrential downpours and high humidity here, but I couldn't resist a taste of how it's going to look. And it stops the veneer curling up and splitting on me before I get time to get it glued.

That's a very good idea!

1 hour ago, Akula said:

email to my local timber yard with some board dimensions. The guys at Anagote are great, they had some decent sticks lined up when I arrived one afternoon, yet they offered me to look through all their stock for the stuff I needed. That included a fine piece of Tasmanian Blackwood with some hella nice figure.

My local timber yard would take me to a pile fo pine.

[mistermikev]

5 hours ago, Akula said:

Ok, timber shots!

I regularly keep a notepad on my person at work, and it proved invaluable in the planning of this build. I have full-scale drawings at home, but I'll write down numbers and draw ideas in my down-time on the job, and after three months I finally got a break long enough to shoot off an email to my local timber yard with some board dimensions. The guys at Anagote are great, they had some decent sticks lined up when I arrived one afternoon, yet they offered me to look through all their stock for the stuff I needed. That included a fine piece of Tasmanian Blackwood with some hella nice figure. Ben bookmatched it for me with great skill.

- Jam.

so nice to have a lumber place where you can just go looking through the stacks.  I have a local spot that used to let me do that... but they recently have gone through some changes and no such luck anymore.  really is therapy to just dig through some boards sometimes - enjoy that!

[Akula]

It too me almost eight years of living in Sydney to finally find a good timber supplier. I do not take them for granted! If you do a search for "hardwood timber Sydney" you'll find a dozen places selling tongue-and-groove flooring panels made of particle board with veneers poorly dashed across them. Anagote took some time to find, but now I've found them I'll recommend them to anybody in town looking for good stuff. I'm sure they would sell international, too, if anybody's strange enough to be searching for Australian timbers.

 

 

This new plane glides nicely. The boards I had were pretty flat from the yard, so all I had to do was take off the machining artefacts and smooth out some high spots. I used to do this with a router sled and sandpaper, I had a cheap electric planer, I had some terrible cheap hand planes. So much easier with the right tools for the job. This plane will end up being one of the best investments I've made, and it'll be around for far longer than I will be.

 

The veneers needed a bit of love. Like all ebay veneer purchases, they came rolled up in a tight ball, which is why I had them dry-clamped for a few days between the maple before getting to the glue stage. Also, they're raw slices. I didn't want any surprises of getting my veneer and finding some horrible adhesive cloth stuck to the back, so I went for "raw timber veneer" - and they are raw.  The grain was so rough. I know the age-old argument against sanding a surface for gluing, but these are 0.6mm veneers and I can't exactly plane them. I decided to go for 300 grit, and got them smooth to the touch. Cabinet scraper took the last few curls off, carefully.

 

 

Four boards of maple, five bits of veneer. The outside stripes are paired, and the middle one is a single, due to me breaking a veneer by accident during sanding. I'm aware that making, essentially, a 9-piece neck just creates 8 potential points of failure during the gluing-up process, so I took time to get everything spread evenly and clamped appropriately.

 

Looking back, it would have been easier to cut the veneer to exact size (52x1050mm) before laminating. But, at the time, I thought it would be fine to have the veneer oversized in width and trim back later. Then I started the glue up, and realised it could throw the alignment of maple boards out by a few millimetres due to glue slip. I placed some known-thickness pieces of scrap under each of the four boards and hammered the tops until they were down pat, showing the veneer proud on the top surface and flush on the bottom surface. Now I only have to cut excess off from one plane, and the bottom plane should be dead true. If the pieces slipped, I may have to lose a fraction of thickness - but we'll find out tomorrow when I sand back the faces and plane them true.

 

 - Jam

[Bizman62]

2 hours ago, Akula said:

I'm sure they would sell international, too, if anybody's strange enough to be searching for Australian timbers.

I've got nothing against Australian timbers, there's some very nice wood over there! There's one issue, though: Mail and customs.

My wife's goddaughter married an Australian. Sending her gifts of nominal value can be ridiculously expensive.

[Akula]

Had a very nice day today, despite the continuing downpour of rain here. I'm enjoying having a quiet week at work - I was home by midday today - so I'm trying to make as much headway as possible before I go abroad later this month. If everything works in my favour, I can have the major geometry completed before I go, so it can rest for a good month before tidying up, fretwork, and finishing.

 

Those boards definitely slipped during glue-up. The revelation about the oversized veneers came too late, I'd already started the process, so I had a lot of cleaning up and dressing to do. I hit it hard with the electric planer to get both faces flush, then got the Stanley out for fine-tuning to get everything square again. Started out with 51mm thickness stock, and ended up with a bee's over 48mm. But the veneer stripes came out stark and bold, just as intended!

 

Got out the paper plans and transferred everything onto markings on timber. There is a point in every guitar build where you step away from paper plans and start measuring and designing on wood, and that switch takes place now. The simple act of drawing lines square around all four edges and marking it "B" is cathartic - that line is now sacrament, for it marks the absolute position of the bridge, which holds all other measurements in relativity.

 

 

Today's main operations will concern the neck geometry, so I paid special attention to the truss rod, neck thickness and profile, headstock, and volute. I'm modelling the neck dimensions from my favourite guitar of all time, my main touring guitar for the last four years. The loss of 3mm of stock thickness means I can achieve a 9 degree break angle. Drawing out the fretboard, nut, tuners and thus string lines shows me a decent real string break angle, and I'm still toying with the idea of a string tee for the bass strings. This is going off a 14mm headstock thickness, to which I may add a slice of my Tassie Blackwood if I can successfully cut a thin piece on the bandsaw. 

 

Been using this jig for years. I'm thinking of improving it with thumbwheels and threaded inserts, but it works just great as is. The truss rod is a 440mm dual-action, with the socket placed directly behind the nut and the end of the rod dictating where the neck profile transitions into the heel. I've always done truss rod routing and access in a fairly simple and somewhat rough manner - I mean, it's all hidden by the fretboard, right? Well this time I'm going to try out a few more professional touches.

 

I've had a 10" bandsaw in my possession since my friendly neighbour handed off his old one to me back in the winter of 2020, but I must admit that it's been left quite alone until now. For rough body shaping I've previously been handy with a jigsaw, and for removing large amounts of material such as the underside of a neck I've normally gone with a router-on-rails. But a few months ago I bought a new blade for the big machine and learned a little about setting up and tuning. I know it's only a 10" bandsaw with a 1/2hp motor, which I guess puts it in the hobby class, but I discovered it can easily plow through two inches of hardwood, so long as you treat her well and tell her nice things. 

 

Now I've tasted the sweet taste of large-calibre power tools, I can't imagine going back to my old methods of routers and layers of dust everywhere. I think the reason why I've shied away from the bandsaw for so long was fear, to be honest. Just like how I was afraid of the router when I started using one at the age of 16. With experience, that fear is replaced by respect, and it is my belief that this transformation from fear to respect is actually what creates safety. 

 

Fancy footwork with the truss rod access. I took this photo at a very rough stage - this will get cleaned up. The comparatively low headstock angle makes for a tight fit with the allen key, so I'm thinking about routing a T-shape to facilitate some left-right swinging room. It'd have to be wide and deep enough to make a difference, but skinny and shallow enough to fit underneath the truss rod cover and not wreck the strength of the area.

 

Glued on some ears. I took the offcut from above the headstock face, made it into two offcuts of maple, and glued them back on with the same grain orientation as the original piece. Revisiting past builds, I remember using the smallest offcuts to glue on to create real estate on the headstock, and usually that meant triangle-shaped bits that were a mother-pain in the orifice to glue without slip. This time round, I went for some oversized rectangles far larger than the requirement. I will be shaping to a template, so I'm keen for the extra stability under the router base. 

 

Tomorrow I'll be tapering the neck, making templates for body and head, and hopefully trueing and gluing wings and jointing the top.

 

 - Jam

[Bizman62]

1 hour ago, Akula said:

transformation from fear to respect is actually what creates safety.

That should be cross stitched and hung on the wall in every workshop!

[Bizman62]

On 7/4/2022 at 5:15 PM, Akula said:

the continuing downpour of rain here.

Hopefully you're living on a hill! The Sydney downpour made it into the news here. Looks kinda moist.

[mwez219]

On 7/4/2022 at 3:15 PM, Akula said:

Had a very nice day today, despite the continuing downpour of rain here. I'm enjoying having a quiet week at work - I was home by midday today - so I'm trying to make as much headway as possible before I go abroad later this month. If everything works in my favour, I can have the major geometry completed before I go, so it can rest for a good month before tidying up, fretwork, and finishing.

 

Those boards definitely slipped during glue-up. The revelation about the oversized veneers came too late, I'd already started the process, so I had a lot of cleaning up and dressing to do. I hit it hard with the electric planer to get both faces flush, then got the Stanley out for fine-tuning to get everything square again. Started out with 51mm thickness stock, and ended up with a bee's over 48mm. But the veneer stripes came out stark and bold, just as intended!

 

Got out the paper plans and transferred everything onto markings on timber. There is a point in every guitar build where you step away from paper plans and start measuring and designing on wood, and that switch takes place now. The simple act of drawing lines square around all four edges and marking it "B" is cathartic - that line is now sacrament, for it marks the absolute position of the bridge, which holds all other measurements in relativity.

 

 

Today's main operations will concern the neck geometry, so I paid special attention to the truss rod, neck thickness and profile, headstock, and volute. I'm modelling the neck dimensions from my favourite guitar of all time, my main touring guitar for the last four years. The loss of 3mm of stock thickness means I can achieve a 9 degree break angle. Drawing out the fretboard, nut, tuners and thus string lines shows me a decent real string break angle, and I'm still toying with the idea of a string tee for the bass strings. This is going off a 14mm headstock thickness, to which I may add a slice of my Tassie Blackwood if I can successfully cut a thin piece on the bandsaw. 

 

Been using this jig for years. I'm thinking of improving it with thumbwheels and threaded inserts, but it works just great as is. The truss rod is a 440mm dual-action, with the socket placed directly behind the nut and the end of the rod dictating where the neck profile transitions into the heel. I've always done truss rod routing and access in a fairly simple and somewhat rough manner - I mean, it's all hidden by the fretboard, right? Well this time I'm going to try out a few more professional touches.

 

I've had a 10" bandsaw in my possession since my friendly neighbour handed off his old one to me back in the winter of 2020, but I must admit that it's been left quite alone until now. For rough body shaping I've previously been handy with a jigsaw, and for removing large amounts of material such as the underside of a neck I've normally gone with a router-on-rails. But a few months ago I bought a new blade for the big machine and learned a little about setting up and tuning. I know it's only a 10" bandsaw with a 1/2hp motor, which I guess puts it in the hobby class, but I discovered it can easily plow through two inches of hardwood, so long as you treat her well and tell her nice things. 

 

Now I've tasted the sweet taste of large-calibre power tools, I can't imagine going back to my old methods of routers and layers of dust everywhere. I think the reason why I've shied away from the bandsaw for so long was fear, to be honest. Just like how I was afraid of the router when I started using one at the age of 16. With experience, that fear is replaced by respect, and it is my belief that this transformation from fear to respect is actually what creates safety. 

 

Fancy footwork with the truss rod access. I took this photo at a very rough stage - this will get cleaned up. The comparatively low headstock angle makes for a tight fit with the allen key, so I'm thinking about routing a T-shape to facilitate some left-right swinging room. It'd have to be wide and deep enough to make a difference, but skinny and shallow enough to fit underneath the truss rod cover and not wreck the strength of the area.

 

Glued on some ears. I took the offcut from above the headstock face, made it into two offcuts of maple, and glued them back on with the same grain orientation as the original piece. Revisiting past builds, I remember using the smallest offcuts to glue on to create real estate on the headstock, and usually that meant triangle-shaped bits that were a mother-pain in the orifice to glue without slip. This time round, I went for some oversized rectangles far larger than the requirement. I will be shaping to a template, so I'm keen for the extra stability under the router base. 

 

Tomorrow I'll be tapering the neck, making templates for body and head, and hopefully trueing and gluing wings and jointing the top.

 

 - Jam

 

On 7/4/2022 at 3:15 PM, Akula said:

Had a very nice day today, despite the continuing downpour of rain here. I'm enjoying having a quiet week at work - I was home by midday today - so I'm trying to make as much headway as possible before I go abroad later this month. If everything works in my favour, I can have the major geometry completed before I go, so it can rest for a good month before tidying up, fretwork, and finishing.

 

Those boards definitely slipped during glue-up. The revelation about the oversized veneers came too late, I'd already started the process, so I had a lot of cleaning up and dressing to do. I hit it hard with the electric planer to get both faces flush, then got the Stanley out for fine-tuning to get everything square again. Started out with 51mm thickness stock, and ended up with a bee's over 48mm. But the veneer stripes came out stark and bold, just as intended!

 

Got out the paper plans and transferred everything onto markings on timber. There is a point in every guitar build where you step away from paper plans and start measuring and designing on wood, and that switch takes place now. The simple act of drawing lines square around all four edges and marking it "B" is cathartic - that line is now sacrament, for it marks the absolute position of the bridge, which holds all other measurements in relativity.

 

 

Today's main operations will concern the neck geometry, so I paid special attention to the truss rod, neck thickness and profile, headstock, and volute. I'm modelling the neck dimensions from my favourite guitar of all time, my main touring guitar for the last four years. The loss of 3mm of stock thickness means I can achieve a 9 degree break angle. Drawing out the fretboard, nut, tuners and thus string lines shows me a decent real string break angle, and I'm still toying with the idea of a string tee for the bass strings. This is going off a 14mm headstock thickness, to which I may add a slice of my Tassie Blackwood if I can successfully cut a thin piece on the bandsaw. 

 

Been using this jig for years. I'm thinking of improving it with thumbwheels and threaded inserts, but it works just great as is. The truss rod is a 440mm dual-action, with the socket placed directly behind the nut and the end of the rod dictating where the neck profile transitions into the heel. I've always done truss rod routing and access in a fairly simple and somewhat rough manner - I mean, it's all hidden by the fretboard, right? Well this time I'm going to try out a few more professional touches.

 

I've had a 10" bandsaw in my possession since my friendly neighbour handed off his old one to me back in the winter of 2020, but I must admit that it's been left quite alone until now. For rough body shaping I've previously been handy with a jigsaw, and for removing large amounts of material such as the underside of a neck I've normally gone with a router-on-rails. But a few months ago I bought a new blade for the big machine and learned a little about setting up and tuning. I know it's only a 10" bandsaw with a 1/2hp motor, which I guess puts it in the hobby class, but I discovered it can easily plow through two inches of hardwood, so long as you treat her well and tell her nice things. 

 

Now I've tasted the sweet taste of large-calibre power tools, I can't imagine going back to my old methods of routers and layers of dust everywhere. I think the reason why I've shied away from the bandsaw for so long was fear, to be honest. Just like how I was afraid of the router when I started using one at the age of 16. With experience, that fear is replaced by respect, and it is my belief that this transformation from fear to respect is actually what creates safety. 

 

Fancy footwork with the truss rod access. I took this photo at a very rough stage - this will get cleaned up. The comparatively low headstock angle makes for a tight fit with the allen key, so I'm thinking about routing a T-shape to facilitate some left-right swinging room. It'd have to be wide and deep enough to make a difference, but skinny and shallow enough to fit underneath the truss rod cover and not wreck the strength of the area.

 

Glued on some ears. I took the offcut from above the headstock face, made it into two offcuts of maple, and glued them back on with the same grain orientation as the original piece. Revisiting past builds, I remember using the smallest offcuts to glue on to create real estate on the headstock, and usually that meant triangle-shaped bits that were a mother-pain in the orifice to glue without slip. This time round, I went for some oversized rectangles far larger than the requirement. I will be shaping to a template, so I'm keen for the extra stability under the router base. 

 

Tomorrow I'll be tapering the neck, making templates for body and head, and hopefully trueing and gluing wings and jointing the top.

 

 - Jam

Can’t wait to see the next stage. I made a jig just like that years ago and works fine for me to. Love the veneer strips. Have tried this myself but without any luck as slippage and not centrally aligned at time but seeing how you have done this is great. Can’t wait to see more. 

[Akula]

15 hours ago, Bizman62 said:

Hopefully you're living on a hill! The Sydney downpour made it into the news here. Looks kinda moist.

Yeah, I'm gonna stop building guitars and start building a boat...

 

Cleaned up the headstock front and back faces, and cut the taper of the neck. I took the width of the body part down to 56mm, then tapered to 44mm at the nut. For this task, I clamped down a bit of plywood with a trustworthy straight-edge and went to town with a flush cutting router. Good enough finish, but for the parts of the neck-through which will be joined to the wings, I smoothed out the machining marks with the plane. 

 

Cut out the templates for body and headstock. Nobody likes cutting acrylic, or even dealing with it in general. It cracks easily, the fumes suck, and the dust just gets stuck to everything. I invested in some nice thin jigsaw blades specifically designed for acrylic, and it went a lot easier. Some sandpaper wrapped around dowel will create smooth edges for the router bit to ride upon. 

I'm also going for a 6-in-line reverse headstock. Like I said, I'm not setting out to copy an existing guitar, I'm merely influenced by a beautiful guitar, and I like my in-line headstocks.

 

Couldn't resist. This is gonna be awesome, as long as I don't screw it up somewhere along the way.

 

 

Problems. 

Being bookmatched from a thicker piece, there was always a risk of warping setting in after releasing and unbalancing all those tensions in the wood. I imagine the weather did not help at all - it's wetter than feta!

Now that it's cupped, I've got it resting the other way up on the work bench overnight, hoping it'll equalise the moisture on both sides of the boards. I've done a little research, and I've head of people wetting (or even ironing) the cupped side of the board to bring it back to flat. I'm a little wary of putting even more water into the timber, and I have no idea what that'll do for the glue-up process. I could always take it back to the timber mill and get them to run it through their thicknesser again, but I'd prefer to keep the full thickness of the board.

 

Any advice on what to do from here?

[Nicco]

Looks gorgeous mate, lovely bit of timber. Unfortunately no advice for you on the cupping though. 

[Bizman62]

4 hours ago, Akula said:

Now that it's cupped, I've got it resting the other way up on the work bench overnight, hoping it'll equalise the moisture on both sides of the boards.

That idea makes sense and sometimes it may work. Like you I would be hesitant wetting the wood - the current weather over there must be moist enough!

If you get them straighter, stack them between slats or beams to prevent warping until you need them. Use thick enough beams on the outsides so that they don't bend with your top woods.

[Akula]

I stored the wood inside the house on stickers for about two weeks before I moved them out to the workshop five days ago. In the workshop they live on a rack shelf which has decent airflow, again on stickers. None of the other timbers warped, so I have to assume the top is adjusting to having the dry insides of a large thick slab suddenly becoming exposed to moisture after being sliced in half. Ergo, this is the shape the tree is trying to be, and the only way to change it without re-planing and re-thicknessing is to plastically deform the boards.

 

Enter, the hot air gun. Affectionately known as The HAG among set-builders and art departments all over, this thing can strip paint, dry paint, toast toast, and I'm hoping it can solve my little cup-problem.

 

Here's the process. Hear me out all the way through before you use that gun to heat up the "crazy" branding iron. 

I was pondering how to plastically deform wood, and I came across the thought of acoustic guitar sides, and specifically the old idea of heating a popsicle stick over a kettle and bending it without splitting it. Tassie Blackwood is often used for acoustic guitars, I thought it would be worth a shot. Of course there can be little chance of bending a 16mm thick board without cracking unless there's moisture involved. Having mentioned for what seems like this entire thread so far, most of Sydney is underwater, and yet the rain still falls, so only a pure sociopath would actually add moisture. I lightly spritzed a highly absorbent rag and did a quick wipe of the boards. I'm telling ya - if you spent a week in the desert eating salted chips and smoking cigars and then dragged your tongue across the timber, you'd still be adding more moisture than I did.

Then I whipped out The Hag and blew hot air across the top side until it was just too hot to touch. Placed cauls at the apex of the bow, and slowwwwly tightened the clamps until they were flat. No horrible cracking noises! A few gravity-clamps in the middle, and I'm leaving it for a few hours. Let's check back on this soon!

 

Moving on.

In the meantime, I went to work on the headstock. I needed to calculate the exact position of the tuners and mark them on the template for reasons which will become clear in a moment, so I went back to my paper plans for consultation.

 

Here is the reason. Template-routing headstocks simply scares the bejesus out of me. The area is small, the router can tip, and there's nowhere to clamp the damn thing down without having to reposition clamps every two inches and risk slipping the template. Calculating and marking the exact position of the tuners allowed me to drill and countersink holes through the template to attach it firmly to the timber, with a little help from every stagehand's best friend - double sided sticky tape.

 

Hell yeah. I think that's the first time I've done a headstock with absolutely zero tear-out. My router bit is a touch dull and needs replacing, so I got a little burn, but the absolute confidence in having a solid template with no slippage allowed me to have a clear mind and assert my dominance over the tool and workpiece. 

 

Onto the fretboard timber. This is Ironbark, a very hard and dense timber from the eastern seaboard of Australia known for it's strength and durability, most often used as beams, railway sleepers, and bridge members. The board in question is resawed off a lump of wood my neighbour took from a condemned building last year, and it probably over a hundred years old. It appears I'm either terrible at tuning my bandsaw or inept at using it, because I've gotten these horrific blade marks. 

 

 

This cute little detail sander loaded with 60 grit could hardly make a dent, literally speaking. Just behind it and to the left in the photograph is a bit of 40-grit attached to a flat maple block. That made a bit more of a difference, but it put me in serious danger of breaking a sweat. 

 

This is gonna shine up pretty well. 

 

There's a few strange holes that I've attributed to termites, or maybe little tiny aliens, so I sealed them with epoxy mixed with sawdust. They'll probably get another treatment of sawdust and CA once that's dried. Even though only one side "matters", I did this to both faces, just in case any critters are still in there. Hey buddy, you crawled into the wrong bit of wood, now you're staying here forever. Woah. Dark....

 

Cut a step into the neck blank. This takes the blank down to the same thickness as the walnut wings, so the top can sit perfectly flush with both. Of course, I couldn't cut this before I knew the final thickness of the top, which means it's been a few hours since I performed my crazy wet-heat-clamp-kill idea.

 

Shall we have a look at that top?

 

Well I'll be damned! It bounced back elastically, yes, but only by about a third of the cupped-ness it had before. We're talking 1.5mm difference between the middle and the sides now.

I was ecstatic. I was overjoyed. And in these moments we forget ourselves, so I kicked back for two hours to see if this troublesome arch-enemy would slump back into it's warped old self. It didn't move, not one hair.

 

Here's my final photo of the day. I glued up the wings onto the body, and repeated the process of spritzing, heating, clamping and weighting the top boards. The first time, they were clamped down to the bench for four hours, so this time I'll leave them for 18hrs, with the additional weight of a plunge-router in the middle. 

 

I'm aware that I've spent a lot of time, paragraphs and photographs documenting the early stages of this build, such as timber storage, planning, planing, surface preparation, and gluing. I had an epiphany that I've never gone into too much detail during the "boring" parts of my builds before, yet these are the most important steps. A wise craftsman once told me to practice making boxes - because if you can't build something dead square and true, you can't progress to the more interesting aspects of carpentry. So forgive me for these long and boring posts, but they serve me as a form of diary if nothing else. I do hope it'll become more interesting as I move forward..

 

 - Jam

[Bizman62]

This has been interesting so far, most likely it won't turn into a disappointment.

I'll store the heating method into some empty drawer in the back of my head. That's so logical! It's rare to see a cupped acoustic guitar side and for what I've understood the cupping in those cases has developed in a very long time with some abuse involved.

[Akula]

1 hour ago, Bizman62 said:

I'll store the heating method into some empty drawer in the back of my head. That's so logical! It's rare to see a cupped acoustic guitar side and for what I've understood the cupping in those cases has developed in a very long time with some abuse involved.

I am not skilled nor experienced enough to be building acoustic guitars - that lays probably a decade away from me. And I cannot pretend to know as much as I should know about the cellular structure of wood, our most basic building material. But I do know the difference between plastic and elastic form, and if that bit of Blackwood is flat tomorrow then I've done myself good!

 

Thanks for following the saga.

[komodo]

On 7/2/2022 at 6:00 PM, mistermikev said:

so nice to have a lumber place where you can just go looking through the stacks.  I have a local spot that used to let me do that... but they recently have gone through some changes and no such luck anymore.  really is therapy to just dig through some boards sometimes - enjoy that!

Yet there's nothing quite like obsessing over a nice piece on ebay and making a real late night drunken purchase. oops.

[mistermikev]

1 hour ago, komodo said:

Yet there's nothing quite like obsessing over a nice piece on ebay and making a real late night drunken purchase. oops.

not sayin' I don't ALSO do THAT!  lol.  nice to see you around komodo!

[Akula]

Haha, I'm sure that's a common thing between us here! Inebriated actions often reflect sober thoughts, which is my way of justifying those late-night eBay purchases - I was technically sober, right? Right? Oh and I just impulse-bought some abalone binding for this thing right now. Whoops.

 

Didn't do all that much today, so you can all have some relief from my image-intensive posts...

 

 

I did get the top glued up. After it's overnight treatment, it came out gooood.... We're talking less than a mil of difference between edges and middle. Tomorrow I'll make the call whether to repeat the process or to re-thickness it to flat, but I decided to get it glued up now so I have something to get on with tomorrow.

 

 

Rough-cut the body shape for the wings. I mean really rough; I nearly didn't share this photo because it looks like total ass here. The final shaping will be template routed after the top is glued on. So why rough-shape now? Well, if the top and wings are all rough-shaped, I can get clamps into spaces where it really matters, whereas if everything was a big 350x600mm rectangle, I'd be clamping down into areas that are going to be removed, and possible resulting in a poor join in the middle. Cauls can help with this, but for twenty minutes of double-handling, I'd take this method.

 

This is the top of the neck at the join with the body. I kept the straight line from the body until it hit the neck taper, otherwise the bass-side wing would have a gap where it meets maple. On the top, however, we don't want that - you'd see that sliver of maple protruding from under the fretboard. So I have to sand that off tomorrow, and then get the neck "pocket" cut precisely into the blackwood top before it gets glued down to the body. That'll be fun, but with enough dry-runs I'm sure I'll manage it.

 

There's a whole list of things to do tomorrow. It's a rare entire day off - well, almost, I've got to load-out some show at 10pm. But that'll give me a good long day in the shop, and with any luck it'll start looking a lot more like a real guitar by tools-down-o'clock!

 

 - Jam

[Akula]

Routed these two "slots" into the wings before even looking at the top. About ten years ago, I was drilling a wiring hole from the pickup bay to the electronics cavity, and I snapped the drill bit off in the guitar. It was a cheap drill bit, and nowhere near long enough for the job, but it left a sour taste in my mouth which has persisted for a decade. Two years ago, in the midst of a lockdown and with very little money, I built a guitar out of stacked 18mm boards from a hardware store, and I had the brainwave to carve the wiring "channels" into the body before gluing the top. Revisited that idea on this one, and hopefully it'll all work out.

 

 

Weight reduction chambers were not part of the original plan. But when I weighed up the rough-cut body and top, I was surprised to see 3700g on the scales. That's a lot, considering last year's 5-string bass weighs in at 2800g and my favourite guitar a feathery 2.6kg. No good, so I took out some material with some hastily procured templates. Holmesian minds shall deduce the purpose behind their shape.

 

Rough cut the top with the bandsaw. The really important part here was the neck-wings-body join, and I cocked it up. Removed too little material with the saw, to be on the safe side, then idiotically decided to file away the rest of the material instead of chiselling. After filing away like a farrier on a mission, I ended up with gaps! Dammit. I swore like a sailor, then glued some strips into the gaps. 

 

That top flattened out very nicely over the last few days, so I gave it the benefit of the doubt and glued it up. This is your standard clamped up photograph, taken before cleaning up squeeze-out like always.

 

Fretboard all cleaned up and epoxy sanded back. 

 

When I get home at 8pm and need to be up for 5am, it doesn't leave much time for getting out to the shed and getting stuck into a job. However, pre-positioning the fretboard and appropriate tools on the kitchen bench allows for some work to be carried out by marking the fret slots in my free time. Done with an X-acto blade, straight edge, steel rulers and reliable calipers.

[Akula]

Had another quiet day in the shed creating sawdust. As we know, luthiery is all about patience and carefulness, but I am definitely working towards a small deadline here - I leave for Italy in one week, and I want this project to resemble a guitar as much as it can by the time I leave. I most likely wont have much time free once I return to Australia.

 

Screwed the template to the body, just like I did with the headstock template, and for exactly the same reasons - it removed all fear of a slipping template, and allowed me to go heavy-handed on the router, dominating the workpiece.

 

Speaking of router bits, I really need to invest in some good ones. Like, really. I got zero tear-out, which is good, but between bearing bite and burning, I'll have to do a good job sanding the edges of this guitar to rid it of these scars. 

 

Those nice control dishes we see on all the fancy guitars? Well, I've seen a few different ways of doing it including forstner bits and patient sanding, large-calibre rotating bits, and even Ben Crow's modified spade bit method. I chose a template of a perfect circle cut into acrylic with a hole saw, made up to height with more acrylic, and routed with a 6mm radius cove box bit with a bearing down to a depth of 5mm. 

 

It'll need some TLC to clean up, but I like this method because it's consistent, doesn't cause huge tearout, and doesn't require modification of tools.

 

Electronics cavity. I did a whoopsie and didn't set the depth correctly on the first test-bump, as is very evident here. One idea for fixing this is to file is out at a shallow angle and make it the finger-grab-part of the cavity cover, but it's in a strange place for that. Other idea is to route the whole shelf down to that plane, and install a steel gasket. That idea absolutely shines with professionalism - it'd be a great contact surface for haptics, it'd look great, and form a good contact surface with shielding. But cutting something so precise out of 0.6mm steel will be hard, so I'll make this decision later.

 

Pickup bays got routed while the top is still flat. Tassie Blackwood seems take the router bit fairly well, but I got some "fuzzy" edges which will get knifed off sharp. I'll also be squaring off the corners and ears with a chisel after the bridge is installed and final string geometry is worked out.

 

Carved the top with an angle grinder loaded with a flap-disk. I'm fairly new to top-carving, so please lower those eyebrows - it works for me. I will definitely invest in some good gouges at some point, but a big two handed grinder seems for now the easiest way to remove large amounts of wood with some kind of control. A word of warning for others to follow down the grinder path: take your damn time. I did this carve today, and I'm happy with it. When I crack the shed doors tomorrow, I won't be, so I left enough timber to reshape. I'll do this several times before the carve is actually done.

 

A lot of this will get cleaned up with the detail sander and by hand. 

 

This shot shows a great deal of how rough it is at this stage. The join between the neck and the body is waaay too delicate, so that last bit will be done with a rasp, file, then sandpaper around a dowel. The line of the carve along the lower waist isn't even, so that'll get turned into something more flowing. But the main shape of the top is done. One thing I need to address is the height of the carve, because at the moment the back end is about 6mm above the wing-top line, whereas going around the horns it goes more shallow, to about 10mm from wings-top. It looks okay now, but I'm creating a second "line" after I install my 6mm binding. 

I think I'll carve lower and deeper into the top, to keep a consistent 6mm line between the top and the wings all the way around. The bass horn cutaway will be bound, but the treble side cutaway will not. 

 

Oh, and I glued on the fretboard. 

 

 - Jam

[JGTay]

Looking really good.

[Bizman62]

4 hours ago, Akula said:

Speaking of router bits, I really need to invest in some good ones. Like, really. I got zero tear-out, which is good, but between bearing bite and burning,

Have you ever tried to sharpen them? I've heard it can be done. The bearings should also be something you should be able to buy inexpensively from a bearing shop if you know the exact size. The latter reminds me of something that happened when I was much younger: I went to a bearing shop and asked for one that would be about the size of this or that. So they asked if I drive an Opel car... Why??? Because there was a certain bearing that would cost a fortune with the Opel logo on the box but just some pocket money as a common SKF (actual manufacturer) bearing.

[Akula]

On 7/14/2022 at 4:41 AM, Bizman62 said:

Have you ever tried to sharpen them? I've heard it can be done. The bearings should also be something you should be able to buy inexpensively from a bearing shop if you know the exact size. The latter reminds me of something that happened when I was much younger: I went to a bearing shop and asked for one that would be about the size of this or that. So they asked if I drive an Opel car... Why??? Because there was a certain bearing that would cost a fortune with the Opel logo on the box but just some pocket money as a common SKF (actual manufacturer) bearing.

That's a good idea, which I've never tried so far. I sharpen my chisels and knives, so I might just give it a go with a router bit and see the difference. I quite regularly bring my stone into work and sharpen colleagues knives in our down-time, it's a good way of ensuring I never have to buy a beer myself after work! The bearings are another thing - I noticed that bearing I had used where it bit into the top was quite clunky to rotate, so I think I'll lose it and go source a pack of bearings for cheap. Another trick I'll be using is to double up on bearings, so there's more surface area and thus less pressure on the "template".

 

I didn't get many photos of my fret slotting process, but it's pretty rudimentary - mark with a knife, cut with fretting saw, glue and taper fretboard, then radius, then re-cut fret slots with a depth stop. I installed inlays right after radiusing the board, so as to not "lose" any inlays in the sanding process. They're 3mm abalone dots, bound with aluminium tube. The ironbark timber held a brad point drill bit really well, actually, and I didn't get many problems with wandering. 

 

 

Shined up quite nicely. If I could find or accurately cut 1mm abalone dots, I would've been tempted to use them as side dots bound by 2mm aluminium, but instead I'm just going for aluminium dots. I foolishly drilled those side dots before remembering I was planning on binding the fretboard - damn! But then I laid out the faux-abalone binding on the fretboard edge and decided it would've been just way too much "bling" anyways. I believe you can go over the top with abalone and turn a luxury touch into a tacky statement, quite easily. So it'll just be the body and headstock that get the flashy treatment.

 

 - Jam

[komodo]

On that control cavity oops, couldn't you just route down .5 mil and then run the whole damn shebang through the planer and take off a .5 mil? It'd save weight!

I use a flap disc for the initial 3/4 of the carve also. Stolen from @Drak and it has served me well.