Archive for the “Links” Category

With the finish line in sight, I expected that last week’s session would end in me taking the completed guitar with me to have it sprayed with lacquer. Things turned out a little different…

The last four or five frets on the fretboard extention (the ‘ island’ of the fretboard that resides above the guitar body) hadn’t been seated properly. Why I hadn’t noticed this before I don’t know, but the frets ends were clear of the wood, and a piece of paper could easily be slipped underneath the fret. Not good. And because the slots were too shallow, trying to hammer them in any further was useless. So, we had no other option left than to remove them…

Ebony is very brittle. We were left with quite a few chips missing around the fret slots after the frets came out. These gaps are filled with black shellac from a stick (like this) and sanded back. It should be mostly invisible. I hope this was the last set back before I can take it to the finishing shop.

Today, I spent the whole day in the shop. We made some great progress but you’ll have to wait for my next visit to see some results. My iPhone was empty with no charger at hand so no photos.

Anyway…

First job of the day was to continue working on the sound box. The back of the guitar, which had been finished months ago, had been patiently waiting for this day. I had to create the notches in the sides and the kerfed lining to accomodate the back braces and make it all fit snugly. It almost worked. Only one notch was slightly off and had to be sawed slightly bigger than I’d had hoped, but luckily the binding will hide all that.

Next up was some work on the fret board. It was planed on the shooting board, but I couldn’t get this ebony planed straight for the life of me. Luckily Jan helped out. I need some practice on this really hard and dense stuff. After the finger board was done (aiming for 1 11/16″ at the nut) I cut the fret slots. Easy job on the saw table.

We decided not to close the sound box yet. Reasoning behind this was that because we diverted from the original plan (Spanish Heel neck-to-body attachment to a bolt-on), we had to make sure we could still make adjustments around the neck block in case more improvisation was needed. So… with the tenon already cut on the neck, it was time to route the mortise into the neck block to receive the neck attachment.

Scary stuff indeed. We (and I use ‘we’ liberally, as in ‘Jan’) used the StewMac routeing templates. Most of the afternoon was actually spent on creating a jig to fit the template and attach the body of the guitar. All in all, we ended up with a solera-like contraption which held the body and could be mounted to the side of the table, allowing free access to the neck block with the router. I’ll take a picture next time, because I realise I’m not making this any clearer…

But… numerous passes, routeing bits and prayers later, we ended up with a perfecty fitting neck joint. The tenon on the heel needs to be adjusted slightly by cutting it a bit shorter, but that shouldn’t be a problem.I’m getting there!

Knowing that I’d be doing this for a long time to come, I took the plunge and ordered a set of master grade  Madagascar Rosewood (or MadRose, as it’s affectionately called by builders). The supplies are dwindling fast and prices are rising. To match the reddish and orangy streaks of the wood, I also ordered some pink heart shell strips from Kevin Ryan, who created a product called Zipflex. This is pretty amazing stuff: flexible strips of abalam (laminated shell). With this stuff, even a novice like me could D-45 a whole guitar!

I’m looking forward to using it. Here’s a picture of the set of rosewood:

Set of madagascar rosewood

The site has been unreachable for a while due to some technical issues I won’t bore you with. We’re back and that’s all that matters!

A lot of ground to cover in this long post, so here goes:

The neck was left alone after the last post. It’s good enough as it is for a rough fit. I’ll get back to it as soon as more work is needed on the fret board.

Almost all of the work of the last sessions went into constructing the sound box of the guitar.

I started with the bending of the sides. We use a Fox bender type of construction, which is a bending jig named after its creator, Charles Fox. Basically, the sides are bent over a template by placing a silicon heating blanket over the jig, followed by the soaked wooden side and finally a flexible metal sheet. By gently pressing down the wet wood over the heat, the wood starts to give and takes shape.

Here’s one of the sides being cooked:

Bending sides

I must say that I was almost disappointed at the relative ease of this procedure. Here’s a detailed description of a setup that’s similar to what we did. Maybe next time I’ll try my hand at bending over a traditional hot pipe, but knowing me I’ll probably just burn myself and break the sides as well.

Result: a nice set of OM shaped rosewood!

Bent sides

The sides are glued together using two blocks of mahogany. The block at the back is relatively small. It will hold the end pin (or maybe a jack if I decide the guitar is good enough for a K&KPure Western mini pickup).

End block

The neck block is a different matter all together. You may remember we had to change the original design which was based on a so-called classical or Spanish Heel neck-to-body construction, to a bolt-on. In order to accomodate the mortise and tenon and get a good connection, we ended up with a pretty large neck block. You’ll see it below.

After the sides we joined together, I started on the kerfed lining. These flexible strips of wood are glued in marginally proud of the sides after which they are sanded back and flush with the sides. They provide a good glueing surface for the top and back. You need a lot of clamps for this!

Glueing the kerfing

After both lines of kerfing were glued and the sanding was completed, I glued the soundboard onto the sides using spool clamps. I need to make some of these myself on a rainy afternoon. All you need is some threaded rod, mdf, cork and a few wing nuts. And a lot of time and patience, of course.

Luckily Jan has them aplenty:

Glueing the soundboard

With the top attached, I moved on to the back. Same procedure more or less, but the back is slightly more complicated. If you look at the way most steel string guitars are built, you’ll see that the back is not straight. It takes quite a dive towards the neck. This is clearly visible if you look at a photo taken from the side, such as this picture of a Gibson J-45:

Side profile of a Gibson J-45

You’ll notice the dramatic drop-off starting more of less where the guitar is at its smallest. To accomodate for this, you need to remove quite a lot of material from the sides. You also have to make sure you do it evenly on both sides, or you’ll end up with a crooked instrument. There are lots of ways to achieve this evenly, but I just measured and used a sanding stick. It seems to have gone OK!

After that, the kerfs were glued to the sides again. More sanding next time, and then it’s time to close the box! This is the state I left it in:

Almost ready to receive the back

Also visible in this picture is the piece of ebony that will be made into my fret board. It was thicknessed on the drum sander to approx. 6.5 mm. It has a bit of flame/streaking which is usually dealt with by staining the board black. I think it adds a bit of character to this first guitar, so I’ll leave it as it is.

Stay tuned for more!

Posts are far and few between, but that’s because last session was spent mostly on making a routeing template for my headstock. But first, we more or a less finished the rough shaping of the heel and neck block:

Shaped heel

It needs a bit more work and a lot of fine sanding, but for now it’s good enough.

We continued on the headstock. To be able to copy the right shape, we had to create a template out of plexiglass like material. This proved to be quite a challenge. My orgininal design was a bit too small, so we enlarged it, but because a template like this has to be absolutely spot on (i.e. symmetrical), this poses some difficulties. After about two hours we had a complete template, and left and right were slightly off, so we need to look into the issue a bit more this coming week.

On a positive note, I received a package from Andy Depaule at Luthiers Supplies. It took two months to arrive because I got stuck in customs apparently. But it dod contain my headstock inlay: a so-called alternate torch.

It’s quite an intricate design, and very brittle. This will be a nice challenge to inlay!

Here’s the design on the first ever guitar to be outfitted with this particular torch, a martin 1902 00-42S:

First, the good news: I finished bracing the top. It looks good and I wonder what the brace shapes will do to the sound. It was quite a bit of work for someone without a lot of experience with a chisel, but I’m pretty chuffed at the way it came out:

Finished bracing

With the top out of the way, I got back to working on the neck.

I roughly cut out the shape of the head stock on the band saw. I case you’re wondering about the multiple saw passes in the right and left top corners: I made these cuts to remove these corners more easily.

Roughly shaped head stock

And then… on to the neck and heel:

Neck with stacked heel

I’ve mentioned before we’re using a spanish heel on this guitar to attach the neck and body. The stacked mahogany blocks form the heel, which is then carved at the front. Two slots are sawed into the block at a slight angle to let in the sides. The whole process is clearly shown here:

http://www.hanalima.com/building_spanish.shtml

As you can see in the first photo, the slots in the heel are cut to about 1cm from the center line.

Enter mistake #1… while happily sawing away I was chatting to my fellow builder and looked at the wrong measurement line. I over cut the line. *#$^%

Then it turned out that the angle at which we cut the slots was too great. Although we’re talking fractions here, this has huge implications for the rest of the build. The neck on a steel string guitar is set back at a slight angle (approx. 1.5°). This is done to allow the strings to pass the birdge at the correct angle and to keep things playable. More about this later.

This mismeasurement means that the action on this guitar would be far to high. After a good nights’ sleep Jan decided to remove the stacked heel and put a new one on and re-cut the slots. That’s something to look forward too for next week.

Last week’s session showed some steady progress on the neck.

For those not completely familiar with the inner workings of a guitar, take a look at Frank Ford’s frets.com. It’s one of the best sites on guitars and repairs in general. Frank is the joint owner of Gryphon Stringed Instruments, one of the shops I need to visit if I ever make it to the States… But I digress

Frank has a great page on truss rod adjustments over here . A truss rod is an adjustable rod to alter the bow of the neck and to reinforce the neck itself. In some cases these truss rods can be adjusted from the headstock (Taylor, Gibson), or as in my case (eventually) through the sound hole (like on Martins).

I took my time to route a small channel into the neck. Because it was my first experience with a proper router it took me longer than I expected, but the result was absolutely spot-on. I did experience a hairy moment with the router when a thread of wood was curling up around the router bit causing the router to pull from its path. Luckily I managed to turn it off in time. Phew. Here’s the finished product:

Neck with truss rod channel

After the channel was completed, the neck was planed down, taking off a little more from the nut-end of the neck and less towards the neck block.

Finally, I selected a nice piece of stripey rosewood as a head plate, fitted it and glued it onto the headstock. It has a really nice pattern which I think will look great with a polished head stock. Pics to follow…

During the previous session, I redid the inner-most ring of the rosette. Or more precisely, I watched as Jan worked his magic with three slivers of wafer-thin veneer. It stayed down, so I started this session with the trusty cabinet scraper and scraped the rosette flush. It definitely looks the part!

Scraping was followed by the thicknessing of the top. It seems easy enough, feeding it through the rotating sander? Well, if you’re like me, you’re still heading for a near disaster…

Thicknessing the top

What happened was that I didn’t open the correct valve on the dust hose. So, although the vacuum was happily blasting away, no dust was actually being collected. It built up inside the sander resulting in uneven sanding and STRIPES in my top (as can be seen in the picture above; it’s clearly visible on the left!).

After a few of these near misses, I’ve luckily become weary of everything I do, so I keep asking for opinions around the shop.This mistake was caught in time and corrected. *phew* Top saved…

The sound hole was removed with a circle cutter like so:

Removing the sound hole

After which I ended up with a nice coaster and a nice looking 3-piece rosette!

Sound hole removed!

On to the bracing!

X-brace stock

Time to draw some of the braces onto the inside of the top. I began by measuring in the X-braces. These are slightly radiussed, so onto the shooting board they went. With that done, I marked the points where the two braces will intersect and created the overlap with the use of a Japanese Pull Saw. I actually finished this, but didn’t take a picture. More to follow next time.