idmicheal

Your guitar turns into a sitar. SR Burned...

Here are the finished braces. I had a more trouble bending the sides on this one than the last one. I think that walnut is more difficult to put into tight bends by virtue of the really open pores. I had a lot of trouble with it splitting where the cutaways curve into the neck heel area. Luckily I had long enough pieces for the sides that I could cut off the split part and start again. I' really pleased with the neck block fit on this one. The previous guitar I'd tried to shape the block to match the curvature of the sides, so that I would have reinforcement, but after feeling that one I decided that putting a straight block in would be plenty sturdy enough. It is really difficult to get the sides bent to precisely match the form, so I made the neck block just a tad oversized and pounded it in with a mallet so that it formed the sides. Tailblock.

Here are the bindings scraped and sanded clean. Fitting the braces.

So what happens when I listen to Economic history lectures?

That fretboard wood is awesome! With figure like that you wouldn't even need position markers

I decided to go with plain ebony on the f-holes, but I think I'll do an ebony-maple 2ply for the back and sides, so that there is some nice contrast. Here are the sides setting after being steam-bent. And I decided to go with a single humbucker in this one.

That is awesome. I need to learn how to inlay like that. Or rather use different materials to create depth like that. I love God's fingers and the underside of Adam's wrist!

*edit, double post*

Oooh, maple would be nice. I hadn't thought of that for some reason. I could do a 2-ply with ebony for some contrast on the f-holes

I've got the back finished being carved and scraped. Here I've scraped it clean, but there is one gouge left from the plane that is a bit deeper. It is really hard to see without this kind of lighting, but I don't think I can get rid of it without altering the shape of the back, which I really can't do at this point. I guess I'll see what it looks like after sanding. When my friend found this billet of wood, we saw that there was this little hole in it, so we stuck a pencil in to see how deep it was, and it wasn't too bad, so we kinda just forgot about it. Come to find out after I start carving it that that hole ended up being in the back. It's only about 7/64" across, but I had to fill it with dust and glue, and it ended up being a small dark spot. It doesn't at all affect the structure of the back, but it's still kinda annoying I thickness planed my sides to 3/32" today, and I sawed some of the excess wood off to maybe try as bindings. I'm really feeling wood bindings on this one; something about plastic would look out of place against the walnut. I have some ebony for bindings too, but it really isn't much darker than the walnut, so I'm undecided on which I will do. Any opinions? I'll try to get some pictures of the options up soon.

Alright, thanks!

Your style works really well. I love the headstock shape. I never, ever would've suspected that the bridge slant was unintentional, or more slanted that intentional, I think is works with the way your lines flow. Is the pickguard plastic or wood?

I got it from Stew-Mac, so I'd expect that they would know what they're doing when it come so wood.

Starting the walnut back. I really want to get a bigger convex-soled plane to make this process go faster, and have fewer blisters. This block plane works okay, but only on the very edges. Mmm, I love the smell of walnut

So I had a huge amount of trouble with the f-holes on this one. I wasn't quite happy with the f-holes on my last top; I did them with a coping saw and they weren't as clean and perpendicular to the face of the top as I would have liked, and that made binding them more difficult. So I wanted to try a sort of over-arm pin router setup this time around, with a template that I would clamp the top onto, which in turn would ride on a pin that corresponded to a router bit, so it would cut the shape perfectly, and perpendicular to boot. But I don't have an overarm pin router. So I tried to rig something up with my normal router, but I didn't have enough clearance underneath, and the bit wasn't quite long enough. So lo and behold I found that I have a spiral down cut bit for my Dremel tool, which I'd used to cut out my templates. So I proceeded to rig something up so that I'd have enough clearance to run my top underneath. So all was going well, I started my Dremel and got it cutting though the wood, and then my work surface slipped. I had a piece of MDF sitting on my workbench to give me a larger surface, and I hadn't clamped it tightly enough, so when I was sliding my template along the pin, it just pulled the work surface, cutting a line that wasn't in keeping with the shape of the f-hole. So after turning everything off and staring in shock for a while, I starting messing around and realized that it would be salvageable if I made the f-holes teardrop shaped, like some Gretches. So I drew up a shape that would work and cut a new template and went about trying the same Dremeling method. This time I made sure my work surface was secure, but the bit on my Dremel was too long ( ) and sort of caught in the grain and started tracking outside of the confines of the template. So I turned everything off again, and thought that it was done for this time. So after leaving it for a day to avoid getting too frustrated, I again redesigned the already redesigned f-holes (outlined in the picture above). So tonight I cut them out with a coping saw *sigh* which I should've done in the first place, and I'm actually very pleased. I quite like the teardrop shape to begin with, and I'm sure I wouldv'e done one at some point, but I really didn't like being forced into doing it unexpectedly. So I noticed after cutting out the holes, that one side of my top was a bit thicker than the other, so I carved it down. ^ thicker^ vthinnerv Light!

Drilling the inside to 3/8". At some point while I was carving I noticed a very distinct piney smell, which I didn't notice quite so much on my first top. At first I attributed it to this top being European spruce, where the previous one was Sitka, and they each have somewhat different smells. But as I carved some more I found this: Now I wouldn't expect to see a sap pocket in a properly dried top, but it was just about dead center thickness-wise, so maybe it is just some strange sort of exception. If anyone has any input please chime in! I did notice that this European spruce is much easier to carve across-grain than the Sitka. It is slightly closer grained, but I don't how much a difference that would make.

So I started my second guitar last week. It's going to be pretty similar to the first, but with walnut neck, back, and sides this time. A friend found a huge billet of walnut in his basement (6'high x 10" wide x almost 2" thick), so after he took some wood out of it to make a harp, he gave me the rest, which is enough for two backs and one neck, plus one set of sides. I'm sure I could've gotten more wood out of it if I used scarf joints on my necks, but I really don't want to go there at this point in time Carving the top. Getting it hacked down. The shape is coming along. You can see where I planed it down to 1/4". And here it is after I've finished carving but before scraping.

Yeah, I actually had to shave about 1/8" off the box joint to get the metal tabs on the pickup to be able to bend back to their original position. I'm really luck that the metal was pliable and didn't break or take a set.

Yeah, his builds are always awesome. He's got really great wooden knobs too. I'll have to see if I can lathe some or something. I figure that fretboard stock is about the right thickness for pickup rings, so making some out of ebony or rosewood shouldn't be too hard.

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.

Well if the finish comes out like that sample you did it'll be a killer tobacco sort of burst. I like it.

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.

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.

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.

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".