Archive for the “Building procedures” Category

Since the last post in April, I’ve been working on my second guitar and eagerly waiting for the return of #1. Well, the wait is over. It’s done at last. I’m very pleased with the way it came out. It does need a bit a of tweak in the set-up, but the neck angle is good so that should all be a matter of adjusting the nut and saddle. Here it is, in all it’s glory on a crappy video.

To be able to play your own instrument is something very special. And now on to the next one(s)!

Here it is, waiting in its case to be taken to the finishing shop:

And because I know you can’tget enough:

It’s taken me a year and a half to complete in bi-weekly sessions of roughly four hours, so I reckon it comes down to well over 120 hours of work to this point. And I’ve only just begun to understand some of the basics. The good thing is I’ll be starting on a new one while this guitar is in the shop. It’ll take approximately six weeks for this guitar to be finished in lacquer and to cure. Once that’s been done, I can do the final setup: glue the bridge onto the top, make a nut and saddle and put some strings on!

The second guitar I’m building will be modeled after a Gibson slope shoulder jumbo. Back and sides will be made of Madagascar Rosewood (the set I bought last year), with a European spruce top.

More to follow shortly!

These last stages of the build are not particularly interesting for my audience. I do apologize.

Apart from shaping the neck, I’ve been sanding. And sanding. And sanding some more. This does mean, however, that the guitar is about ready to be finished! And I’ve decided that that’s not something I want to do myself at this stage for a couple of reasons. First of all: I like nitro cellolose lacquer finishes. Unfortunately, nitro is not very nice to work with. In fact, it’s pretty toxic. And with no prior finishing experience, no spraying booth and a couple of small kids around the house, it sounds exactly like something best left to a pro.

Secondly, after having put a year and a half into this thing, the last thing I’d want is for me to screw up the finishing. So, I’ve found someone who’ll do it for me and hopefully I’ll be able to drop this guitar off at his shop in the next couple of weeks or so. After which I have to wait for six long weeks for the lacquer to cure. Then it’s ready to be stringed up. Can’t wait!

In the mean time, time to start work on #2!

The last bit if real hard work is underway. I’ve started to shape the neck:

So, what was once a straight piece of wood is slowly but surely becoming something that resembles a guitar neck. Pretty cool. This does take quite a bit of practice and after all of the nightmares I’ve had with this thing the idea of screwing up is really quite daunting. So, I’m definitely taking this one slowly…

Now what we almost have a guitar, it needs somewhere to live. So I settled on a nice Hiscox Artist Pro-II OM/000 sized case which should be arriving soon.

More next week!

With the fingerboard now glued to the neck I was ready to give it its radius. The fret board is not flat, so using a 16″ radius sanding block, I went through a whole range of sandpaper: starting at 80 grit and moving through 120, 180, 240, 320, 400, 800, 1000 and 1200. The result: an ebony board, silky smooth to the touch. I also filled the little gaps around the fingerboard inlays (especially the one at the 12th fret) with black shellac. Not as flat as I would have wanted, but good enough for now.

Next up: fretting!

After cleaning the slots and adjusting the depth mostly at the sides because of the newly sanded radius, the frets were hammered in.

This really does look like a guitar, doesn’t it?

Next time: the last thing to do before it time to do the setup: shaping the neck. The shape I´m after is what I have on my martin D-18V, which sports a so-called modified v-neck. more info on these shapes here.

This journey is slowly but surely moving into the final stages, but I haven’t taken a lot of photos of the last few sessions. One major accomplishment: the fretboard has been glued onto the neck.

Next up: shaping the neck, which is probably the last of the bigger woodworking jobs. After that: hammering in the frets, crown and polishing them, glueing the bridge, install the tuners, sand it as smooth as a baby’s bottom and do the setup.

And then…  finishing it with either nitro or KTM-9.

I forgot to take pictures at the last session, but a quick update:

the neck will not be bound. It’s time to finish up on #1 so I’d rather settle for a smaller neck than run into issues with binding again. As a result of this decision I had to make a new bridge because the original one was drilled for string spacing for a slightly wider neck. Using that one would result in strings running off the fretboard at the high frets.

I did some inlay work at home on the ebony fretboard, slotted diamonds as position markers and a fancy leaf inlay at the 12th fret:

More diamonds to be added at the 3rd and 14th frets. It’ll be glued onto the neck this week.

The Sunday night was spent with a jeweller’s saw, needle files, a nice mother of pearl shell blank and a lot of patience.

I ended up with a nice logo to inlay into the headstock:

MOP headstock logo

Finally, the binding job is finished! This was definitely a nasty experience: the last post still showed the the half-herringbone purfling strips installed. We had to route those out because of the glueing disaster with the Weld-On cement, but when we bent a new set of these purflings, they came out twisted from the bender! Argh.

I decided to do the sensible thing and install simple black-white-black purflings. Finally, these came out perfectly with the new ivoroid binding installed. We ended up using CA glue for the job, which did the trick nicely:

Binding done!

Next up: scraping! No pictures are available of the hours I spent scraping the binding flush with the sides, but the result is really quite good.

I’m now moving into the final stages of the build, and things are really coming together. There’s a bridge that need shaping:

rough bridge

And the neck, which I haven’t really touched in months, is fitted to the sound box:

A guitar!

Getting a really tight fit is crucial. At close inspection it turned out I had been a little overly enthousiastic when sanding and scraping the binding near the neck pocket. This area takes a bit of a dive forward, as a result of which, I’m left with a slight gap between the neck and the sound box. Some more scraping’s in order to fix this.

Having roughly fitted the neck, I moved on to positioning the fret board. This is done by aligning this on the neck and drilling four tiny holes through the fret slots on the tenth and fourth frets. By putting some tiny nails through these I have achieved a fixed position for the fretboard on the neck.

Here it is in all its glory:

Next time, the fret board will be glued to the neck, and I’ll work on finishing the bridge.

So, as discussed in the previous two posts, the last sessions were spent on installing the binding around the edges of the guitar. The result on the top was pretty spiffy:

Top with binding and purfling

Cleary visible in the picture is the residue from the glue. So I got to work with the trusty cabinet scraper to remove the glue, and scrape the binding flush with the sides.

All went well for about five minutes until just about half of the back binding came off! As it turned out, the combination of the glue, the binding material and the rosewood was an unfortunate one. They simply hadn’t attached properly. At closer inspection, the top binding and purfling also didn’t stick. Disaster! Two nights of work gone (a month!), and I was left with a soundbox with messy binding channels filled with dry and hardened glue…

After the Great The Weld-on Disaster

Only one sensible option here: route the channels clean and start over… After cleaning up we opted for a different ivoroid binding material and used CA (super)glue instead of the Weld-on cement. A test piece showed it stuck properly so by the end of the night, the new back binding was installed. Look two posts back for pictures, it looks much the same.

Definitely a shame, but in all honesty, the new binding material looks better and I managed to install it much cleaner. Fingers crossed for next session and let’s hope this was the last surprise for this guitar.