pan_kara

After cutting the scarf joint I had to tackle another thing - reducing the thickness of the headstock piece from 2+ cm to about 5mm. I built something resembling a homemade version of the "luthier's friend" to do thicknessing jobs, but taking off 15mm of wood would take ages. So I decided to use my manual bandsaw substitute: To my surprise I ended up producing this: Now I can smooth out the surface with the sanding drum. I figured the offcut would make a nice cavity cover - but nope. Too small. I did some shaping of the body also. First I lightly radiused the top with a hand plane, then I pulled out my double-action polishing machine that I got some time ago to polish car paint. I stuck some P40 sandpaper on it to smooth out the top. It turned out that I can also shape it a little this way, so I ended up adding a delicate bevel all around the edge of the body. Funnily, after sanding with P40 this imbuia is already showing somewhat of a gloss. I wasn't expecting this:

Finally got time to move ahead a bit with this. I planed and sanded the neck blank to get it reasonably straight last week and it remained such, so I set out to do the scarf joint. And here's my scarf cutting... jig. that produced two very nice surfaces after some hand plane (and sandpaper) fun: This marks my first planning error as I just realized that I did the scarf upside down. The board is asymmetric to fit the headstock, and the way I cut it it would beed to be reversed. I don't want to do that so I'll probably end up modifying the shape a little (I'm only missing 2mm or so) or gluing in a small piece of bubinga. But the tricky thing I'm facing now is planing down the headstock piece. I will have to cut it down from 2cm to something like 7mm, I have a 1cm-thick headplate to go onto it (that I'll have to thin down also I guess). The tools I have available for this are the hand saw, the planes and the robosander. We'll see what I can work out.

I also love the hand tool work. Will we hand planing fingerboards soon too

wow, this is turning out great! Can't wait to see it with the finish on. Prostheta, so did you find a good source for TruOil in Europe? The homebrew option also sounds interesting, though somehow I thought TruOil is tung oil+varnish and linseed oil+varnish is Danish Oil. But maybe I got it backwards. What exaclty is "varnish" in that case?

Wow, this is looking good! I'll soon be doing my first binding job but I decided to use plastic binding before trying to bend wood.. And the top is completely flat. what is the finish on this one?

I don't thing you need a vacuum system to do veneer - I did one already following the tutorial on this site, and another one is in preparation. I think I remember seeing a thread about bending tops over the forearm cutout too. What I remember is: lots of steam, lost of clamps, go very slowly

wow, that video is scary. For now I'm following my router-less path with this build. Will get funny as I get to the neck pocket. But for today - just a small update. I got three sides of the glued 3-pc blank nice and flat so the final two pieces are going in. Unclamping tonight and letting it rest until Tue. Then I'll hand plane it and prepare to cut the scarf - by hand I guess.

Thanks Prostheta. I think I knew to leave the wood for some time after cutting, but I don't think I was fully aware that I need to do this after glueing too. And yes - I am using Titebond. With this one I think I will still try to get this straight now since I have two more strips of bubinga to glue to each side. I'll probably put them on tomorrow, which will be 2-3 days after the first glue up. Then the neck will have time to rest until Tue since I'll be away anyway. lol @ the warped pine curse

I've started gluing up the neck laminate: I pulled it out of the clamps already and none of the 4 sides is flat Looks like I will be getting creative now with a plane, a shooting board and sandpaper glued to flat surfaces...

ok guys, call me convinced - I'll have a go at radiusing. thanks for the input! I think I prefer the look o radiused body over a carved one. What I personally don't really like in most carved guitars I see is that the carve has sort of three sections - a flat middle part, the carve, and then a flat part again, around the edges. I'd prefer the carve to blend into the flat parts more than what I usually see people doing. I might drop the tail end a bit though, not sure about that yet. This would mess up the figure at the meeting point of the two halves where its actually supposed to match.. The imbuia - I got it here: http://www.madinter.com/b2c/index.php?page=pp_producto.php&md=0&ref=METIM (they have some wacky wood at good prices compared to other places I've seen in EU). I'd love to see a bass done with it! I have a 5-stg somewhere in long term plans, but for now I have to make at least one guitar to see if I'm capable of pulling this off at all. The imbuia does have a shiny spot in that photo earlier, I think that's just how it arrived. Wouldn't call it waxy. It is a beauty and the spicy smell it produces when worked is an added bonus

I finally finished sanding the body contour. Phew. after taking the template off and sanding the top a little I got this: This imbuia is looking amazing! Here its still a bit dull, but when wet all the details pops with color and contrast. What I'm trying to figure out now is how to shape this body further. I could just round over the edges and leave the top flat - like in a classical guitar.. I could add a forearm contour and go through the top, like in the pics I found here: http://www.tdpri.com/forum/bad-dog-cafe/344456-forearm-contour-maple-top.html ... or I could lightly radius the top, not reaching the edge (the top is 1cm thick). I did this to a sapele body I'm working on in parallel, mostly with a hand plane. Planing this imbuia burl might be a lot trickier, but could look pretty nice .. Here's how the sapele body came out: opinions, anyone? I'm leaning towards the radiusing option... An additional benefit would be the slight departure from symmetry in the figuring as I dig deeper into the wood.

Thanks Pestvic! At least I got one thing right Shifting my attention towards the neck now. The body gets robosanded piece-by-piece, trying not to annoy the whole neighborhood with the piercing sound. I think I managed to screw up my drill a bit by pressing to hard on the sanding drum, so now its a bit loose. So I'm changing the technique to make sure the template following wheel has always something to rest on on the other side - ideally I want to make a MDF "table" with a hole fitting the thing for this purpose. But back to the neck. First - I looked through the off-cuts from the body top and found a really nice piece for the headstock faceplate: I borrowed a rotary saw and had a go at the neck blank pile. The wenge-flamed maple-bubinga mock-up is what I plan to use for this guitar. The cuts are not terribly straight but close enough I think, as long as I can clean them up afterwards. For this I figured out that I'll be needing a shooting board, which will allow me to use my favorite tool - the hand plane. So I quickly put something together to see if this has a chance of working: I'm also perfecting the knob-making process, managed to make another 3 almost-there attempts and now I have one more improvement lined up - I'll post the complete process once I'm confident I can get it to work fine.

Thanks guys! I did some work on her recently, changed both pickups, re-leveled the fretboard and fixed the nut slot, stripped the whole finish from the back of the neck and finished it with danish oil and changed the strings to flatwounds. I'll post some pics soon - right now I just have "in progress" shots from the pickup installation: oh, and my small success with this project - it made it to Discovery News http://news.discovery.com/space/cern-physicist-builds-cms-inspired-guitar-120904.html

I think I've seen on some basses that people just glue the top on and carve through it - so basically the arm contour starts exposing the body wood. So that might be another option. I will have to consider the same thing as I have currently a 1cm thick top that I already glued to the body - flat.

but isn't the location of the neck pickup the reason for the notes fretted around 12th-15th fret having this funny distinctive sound? I did get a funny sounding combination of neck + middle out of phase once, where notes around frets 17-18 were sounding as if played an octave higher that in reality (so I guess the first mode was being mostly canceled out). I guess such interplay between pickup positions creates some character in the notes played at different positions.. but where to put the middle PU? I personally don't use it a lot, if I were to guess I'd go for regular spacing between the neck-middle and middle-bridge..

have you sanded the oil off before starting to spray? Spraying paint over an oil coat will porbably not work (my guess..). can you post some pics?

Didn't get a whole lot done over the weekend... one thing I learned is that the jigsaw is not an appropriate tool for making long straight cuts. Now I need to borrow a rotary saw. So this pile of neck blank wood is patiently waiting (instead of spending time in clamps): I've been also playing around with a headstock design, here's a test shot: I made a bunch of templates, worked on some other projects and glued the body. Here's "before": and here's "during": I'll post "after" when I clean up the sides.

thanks, I was thinking along similar lines. I have a bunch of off-cut pieces from the body so I figured I could probably use them to make drilling templates for the bridge, maybe for the tuner holes too - there drill clearance is not an issue, but precise positioning of the holes is. We'll see when I get there. Now I want to glue the top on and get to work on the neck. Neck building scares me

Well here's some more experimentation. First I remembered that I need a channel to run the piezo wires from the bridge. The best thing that came to my mind was to rout one before the top goes on. The downside is that at this point the bridge position will be more or less fixed - so I will have to trust the measurements and plans I have been making. Especially since I have to drill the access holes in the top too. I guess when I get to making and fitting the neck I will wait with gluing on the fingerboard until the neck-body joint is completely done. That will give me some minimal headroom at least with the scale length. Sideways I will have no freedom so I just have to watch the centerlines carefully So back to the body. I have a routing bit for the dremel that matches the side of the channel, so I just clamped two pieces of wood on two sides to have the dremel base go back-and-forth in straight lines and routed the channel in 10 or so passes. Looks like I could use the same techique (and some extra patience) to do a truss-rod slot when it comes to buidling a neck that WILL have a truss rod. Next up was drilling the holes thru the top. I realized that my drill stand will not allow the drill to reach the bridge position over the body, so I had to do this handheld. (and start wondering that to do when it comes to drilling the bridge screw holes, and more important - the string-thru body holes...) The holes didnt end up perfectly even, but as they will be covered by the bridge, I figured this is not critical at this point. I angled them towards the cavity so that when I try to push the wire through the channel later on it naturally goes in the correct direction. A quick mock-up test showed that so far everything is aligned: The top is laying on the body piece, though it's not apparent from the photo... The final thing now before glue-up was finalizing the control cavity shape. The method I came up with was to trace the shape I had to a piece of MDF, cut out that to have a template, and copy the exact shape from the body to the MDF with the robosander: Then I used various tricks to fine tune the curves and make the straight lines straight on the template. Then I attached the template to the body again and copied the new shape to the mahogany. Phew! Done. Next step - glue the body and start on the neck!

Ok, update time. After the body and top have been jigsawed out I wanted to get the contour closer to final before doing the final shaping with the robosander. This was going really slow with some cheapo sanding drums I had, but thankfully a friend at work let me use a stationary belt sander in his workshop so I was able to sand all the convex curves, and had just the concave ones left to do at home. Before all that, I laid out the control cavity and cut it out by hand: Then I smoothed out the sides with a sanding drum. Maybe I'll make a template, maybe I'll just get the straight lines really straight with sadpaper on a flat block. Not sure yet. Here's what I have now: and here's how the top is looking in a close-to-final shape: the maple veneer is already glued to the underside of the imbuia top, so as soon as I finish the electronics cavity and rout out a channel for the piezo wires running from the bridge I can glue the body together.

Interesting. I had a thought about building one for my 5 year old daughter some day (that would probably not be ready before she turns 6 ) but I was thinking 3/4 would be too big and though of something closer to 3/5 or so, maybe even dropping a string or two to make it simpler and make the fingerboard narrow. I will be following this (and digging for Ripthorn's build thread)

Sorry guys for some reason I didn't notice all the comments. So thanks a lot and let me make up: Yes, this is going to be a piezo-only guitar. I already bought a set of graphtech saddles some time ago and tested out that the setup works reasonably with nylons before starting this. Tested because I got the normal electric saddles (the ones for wide string spacing - ended up having a hard time finding a bridge baseplate that fits) and the acoustiphonic preamp. Here is my test setup Its a cheap warped pine board that I tested making a scarf joint and a headstock-like-thing on. I did at some point put all six strings on and even recorded some video prooving that it makes sound. At this point I wanted to leave it and start on the real thing but a friend of mine spotted it and said "dude, I need a silent classical guitar - can you sell me this?". And so I ended up making a fingerboard from a merbau floor tile, gluing on wings from some unidentified wood somebody threw away, topped it with some plywood and then wenge veneer, oiled the neck and brushed on some nitro on the body and ended up generating... THIS: I learned a lot along the way I have to say. So coming back to the piezo setup - as I'm trying to do this with minimal use of power tools I went with a fixed bridge - maybe a nylon-string with a tremolo will materialize some time down the road. the graphtech system has a single push-pull volume knob (push-pull engages some sort of tone switch) so I'm going with that - hence the single knob. And the knob itself - I like it too. I'm going to be making more of these. I've been doing some work on shaping the body and the top and cut out the control cavity in the body block, I'll post an update with photos soon.

Jigsawed out the body shape: before I glue the top on I need to finalize the control cavity layout - I will drill it out in this piece and then smooth the edges with a sanding drum. Then I can glue the top on. I checked what happens when I hit the little piece I glued together with a hole saw and voila: pretty clean cylinders. In an attempt to create a homemade lathe-like tool I jammed one of these in the hole saw and had a go with some sandpaper glued to a wood block while it was rotating (after a failed attempt to use a chisel, lol). Turned out pretty nice, though I still need to shape the underside, which will be the tricky part. Here it is, with some danish oil put on:

Here you go: http://youtu.be/P4NrS1Tq-YU sorry for my crappy fretless playing (had 5 days to learn) I managed to get this project officially acknowledged by the experiment, yay! http://cms.web.cern.ch/news/when-music-and-physics-collide-cms-guitar

Thanks. They're off in the summer, but I will keep this in mind. I have a habit of placing them there, so I better change that now In the meantime I took the off-cuts from the body pieces and clamped a little imbuia-maple-mahogany testpiece to see how it comes out and to try making the single volume knob that this guitar will have (for the piezo system).