Neck carving

So I decided to take a break from carving the body, the planes were killin my hands, and I decided since there was still 2.5 hours left to work on the neck. I'll just post all the pics of the progress since I've already detailed before how I do it.

Carving the top

So sunday I actually got there on time. First thing to do was flush rout the body since the cap was cut out slightly larger.

Now that i look at it, that was the before picture, and there was no after between here and the next step. So after flush routing, the cap got routed down to where the body bindings will sit as a referrence point for the top carving.

After that, I got to carving. Ian had let me use his palm planes so it would go a little faster. Mine is only like 18mm I think, he's got one 2-3x that size. Aftermaking progress around the edge, I used rasps and sanding dowels to smooth it out before starting again. I'll just put up all the pics of the progress in action now.


I'll just post those to keep this less graphic heavy. I'll post the neck pics in a different post in a minute.

Massive progress

So I did the weekend seminar on construction at school. 15 hours of working, although I realistically probably worked half that cuz i kept having to take breaks cuz the tools chew up my hands. I'm not sure if I have pics of every step, but there's a ton.

First thing I did saturday was cut and fine tune the neck tenon, then glue the fretboard on and cut out the neck taper.

While the glue was setting on that, Ian helped me glue my Sequoia cap onto the chambered body. We used a bunch of scraps of wood left over from his Horn speakers so the clamps wouldn't dig into the figured wood.

So while that was setting, after taking the neck off the caul, I glued some ears on the sides of the headstock to accomodate my modified Mosrite shape. I had the good idea to join the edges before cutting em out so that they'd glue on without a lot of sanding.

Since the ears weren't completely precise, I had to do a bit of sanding so when I safety plane the back to uniform thickness, the ears won't go flying off. After that I got the template worked out and transfered and we cut out the headstock shape. I had Ian do that since I'm still getting used to the bandsaw and needed to see how to do it on an angle like that. But here's the shape, a little oversized to accomodate for refinement and routing.

I'll do all the sunday work in another post, since its mostly just arch carving.

Keep an eye out for new posts

I'm in the inlay and engraving workshop now, and doing a few more construction sessions as well so I can finish up my archtop. Can't wait to get that thing done so I can play it.

Got a new toy today

w00t, new bandsaw. Hopefully picking up some more tools next week.

one step closer...

to having a guitar that is slightly less a piece of shit than before.

So I finally got all the frets glued down and began levelling them. about 80% of the way thru the proccess, I discovered that the neck was warped/bowed. No reinforcement/truss rod. I gave up on that, it was close enough anyways.

Crowned them all last night, did the last 3 this morning, and polished em up. Cleaned up the fretboard with some pledge, a toothbrush, and a sock, and then glued in the nut. Here's some pics....

Gonna let the glue dry probably overnight, then put the saddle back in, string it up, and see how awful it feels and sounds.

long time no post

Its been ages since I've posted. School is out til August, and I haven't set up my woodshop yet, so things have been slow the past 2 months. I decided to dig something out of the garage earlier out of boredom and work on it.

So several years ago my sister bought a cheap acoustic guitar on ebay, intending to learn how to play after messing with my gear I'd left around the house. It was pretty unplayable to begin with, unless you're a classical guitarist with huge hands, which neither of us are. So a couple months later when she broke her hand doing gymnastics, it left her completely unable to play so she gave it to me.

Since I didn't much care for the way it played, a couple summers ago I began tinkering with it. When I was still living in Crete, all I had done was pulled out the frets. Once I had moved I began working on reshaping the fretboard and just set it aside to collect dust. Earlier I dug it out and finally finished sanding that down. It was a pain in the balls since I'm pretty sure the neck is fiberboard with some sort of softwood veneer over it.

For some reason it won't let me rotate it... But anyways... After I finished the sanding with my stew mac radius block, I cut new fret slots and cleaned them out with the back of an exacto knife.

Following cleaning that up, I wiped the guitar off and tried to tap as much dust out of the sound hole as possible. I'm most likely going to vaccum it later when i'm done with everything. I concluded that acoustic guitars look stupid with natural wood colored necks unless done right, so I busted out the Dark Walnut stain leftover from my shitar and stained it up. Turned out looking somewhat interesting, I may go one coat darker, not sure yet. I'll have to wait until it dries.

Thats all for now. I'm going to have to seal it and find what the hell I did with the frets. I saved them because I don't feel like spending the time to do a fine job on something that cost a dollar to begin with. I have plans to build a better acoustic later this year when I have the proper tools for cutting and sanding anyways.