Posts Tagged “mistake”

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.