Weekend One: The neck blank

Sunday, March 4, 2001

The neck material, of Honduras
mahogany, comes in a big billet
3X3X30 inches. The rulers in the
photo are 12in and 6in. It's destined to
become the neck shaft, heel block,
head block, tail block and head stock.
It's big enough to simply bandsaw a neck out of, headstock, heel block and all, in one
piece, with plenty left for the head and tail blocks. That form of neck, however, has
short grain in the headstock, meaning that there are cleavage lines - the lines up the tree
along which it is easy to split the wood - passing through the headstock from front to
back. The way Cumpiano and Natelson recommend to build the neck involves a scarf
joint joining a thin headstock to a thin shaft, and attaching the heel block separately to
the shaft. This yields a stronger neck shaft headstock with the wood fibers running
straight along the lines of the neck. But it's harder to make!
I started a discussion on the Musical Instrument Makers Forum board. Opinions ranged
from "hell, just bandsaw it out, millions of guitars are made that way by the big
companies" to "I just broke a headstock the other day - along the short grain". Most
posters were irrelevantly concerned with the strength of the glue joint. I knew that a
well-made glue joint would be stronger than any piece of mahogany, so I wasn't worried
about that. What made my mind up was that I would have only one shot at bandsawing
the neck out of the billet, while I could make two or maybe three necks from the same
billet using the scarf joint. If I messed it up, I'd have another chance. That's what I
decided to do.
The first step is to
take the neck blank
out of the billet. 24
inches by 3 inches
by 3/4 inch. I ran
the relevant faces
of the billet over
the jointer - the
narrow faces were
factory-dressed, but
the wide sides were rough. The end cut was made with a Japanese Dozuki saw - one of
my favorite tools - and the rip cut on the band saw

The next step calls for cutting the neck blank along a fifteen-degree angle to the face.
The cut-off piece is then turned around and the sawn face is glued to the underside of
the main piece to make the headstock angle. This is an extreme angle, much tighter than
my miter saw can do. I looked around for a protractor - I must have a dozen of them
dating from grade school on up - and couldn't come up with one. How to make the cut?

I pondered the meaning of fifteen degrees. I knew I could easily draft such an angle
with a compass or with a pair of drafting triangles, but I didn't want to go drafting on the
side of a piece of wood, or cutting up little pieces of paper to transfer the angle. I started
playing with my draftsman's triangles and came up with the equation 45 - 30 = 15.

If I clamped the two triangles together with their points together and sides aligned, the
angle between the two hypotenuses would be my fifteen degrees.

Resting the hypotenuse of the 30-60-90 triangle on the face of the board with the 45
degree triangle resting on the edge and the points lined up with my mark on the top
gives the correct angle along the edge of the board.

Here the board is marked for cutting. The

cut is seven inches from one end of the
blank; meaning that the furthest part of
the cut is seven inches -- the short face is
about three inches. That's not totally clear
in C&N, but you can figure it out. It's a
tricky cut for a handsaw, but a lot of
trouble to jig up for a table saw or
bandsaw. I decide to start with the
dozuki, a small Japanese backsaw, since
its tiny teeth will immediately dig in on the line, and then follow up with something
larger, since the "back" on the dozuki won't let it go all the way through the cut. In fact,
none of my backsaws will make it all the way through, so I finish the cut with a small
ryoba, seen in the background of the next photo. These Japanese saws cut on the pull
stroke, which is more comfortable for me. The cut starts from the top in this view, and I
watch the lines down both sides as I saw.
Here is the finished cut. As you can see,
the end where it feathers off is pretty
ragged, but it's very thin there and that
will be taken care of with a little planing.
If you can begin to imagine how this will
be put together, you're a better visualizer
than I am. I needed to turn the blocks
around and line them up before I could
really see it. You'll see it in a picture later
on, but imagine the smaller block turned
180 degrees in the horizontal plane and
moved underneath the larger block and tipped so that the sawn surface meets the
underside of the larger block with the feathered end of the larger block just meeting the
line on the smaller block between the sawn surface and the original surface. Well.
You'll see.

Before any of that happens, we need to

true up both sawn surfaces. Here I've
clamped the small block on top of the
larger piece on a workboard that's held in
my workbench vise. The sawn faces are
lined up to become one continuous plane.
I'll take a block plane and smooth out the
roughness left by the saw, checking the
surface with a straightedge for flatness in
all directions. This is a slow, meticulous process, but I love working with the block
plane. I use the low-angle Stanley block plane with the adjustable mouth. I spent a good
deal of time tuning it up when I first got it, flattening the sole and knocking the corners
off around the bottom, and now it works like a charm with regular sharpening. You'll
see it frequently if you follow along.

When the sawn faces are smooth and flat,

and the three lines marking the beginning
of the angle, the end of the smaller block
and the end of the larger block are all
parallel, the surfaces are ready. Now the
headstock piece - the smaller block needs to be reduced in thickness so that
the tuning machines' shafts will reach
through them with enough thread showing
for the nut to grab and hold. Using a
marking gauge, I mark the two long sides
and the end 1/2 inch from the longer face.
I thought about just running this piece through the bandsaw with the fence at 1/2", but
it's somewhat small and I like my fingers (push stick? Moi?). I'd have to smooth up the
results with a plane anyway, and I like my plane as I've said before. I adjust the plane
for a big cut and begin hogging material
off the smaller face.
This shows what the curl should look like
when it's taking off lots of material at the
start of the process. I plane close to the
edges at first, leaving a hump in the
middle. The stroke starts at the edge of the
ramped part and goes toward the back
square edge. Watch the line on the back as
well as the sides. When the edge comes
down to within a 16th of an inch of the
line, work on the center until it's all
roughly level. Then readjust the plane for
a finer shaving and bring the whole
surface down level right to the lines.

Here's what the plane does when it's set

for a thin shaving. With this type of plane
you can set the mouth closer as well as
pulling back on the blade. This helps to
eliminate tear-out where the grain is
contrary. On bigger planes you'd have to
take the plane apart and move the frog
forward to accomplish the same thing.

When the line demarcating the beginning

of the ramped section is straight, you've
flattened the top surface. At this point it
needs to come down just a hair in the
center (it looks tilted because of the
camera angle). I said it was a lot more
work making a scarf joint than just
bandsawing it out. But don't fear, we're
nearly ready to glue up.

Here's the setup for gluing recommended in Cumpiano and Natelson, with a small
difference. Instead of using a narrow board, I'm at the edge of a table. It doesn't make a
lot of difference, just a little harder to fit all the clamps. Two clamps hold down the
main shaft while an engineer's square checks to see that it's perpendicular to the
tabletop. A clamp on the right holds down a stop block that will keep the headstock
from slipping along the slippery glue plane. Two cauls a little narrower than the joint
are ready.
Glue is applied to the sawn face of the
headstock, and it is swung into place to
meet the shaft. The cam clamp (second
clamp from the right) holds it down, while
the cauls protect both surfaces from the
four C clamps pulling it all together.

And here's the glued-on headstock. A lot

of work, but it came out well. That's a sixinch scale for reference.
This operation -- everything up to this
point -- took one Sunday afternoon from
about 2:00 to 6:00, including an hour in
the clamps. Including a 4:00 run out to
Home Depot when I realized I had no
fresh glue. Including searching around for
the protractor and coming up with a trick
substitute. Including a lot of headscratching and pondering over what do do next and exactly how. The next time I do this
operation, it's probably 40 minutes excluding the glue-drying time.
Next: Truss rod, heel block, headstock veneers, who knows what else? Carving the heel,
cutting out the peghead, drilling? Find out next week, same web-time same webchannel.
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Copyright 2001, 2002 Stephen Miklos

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Week Two: March 5-11

I managed to get down to the shop during the week and do one quick chore, which was
to cut and glue the heelblock to the neck blank. The rest of the operations on this page
took place on the weekend.
The heelblock was cut in a single block
from the big log seen in last week's
pictures. The total height of the neck and
heel at the juncture with the guitar body is
to be 3-1/8", so there was plenty of wood
in the 3x4x30 after the 3/4x3x24 was cut
out of it. Here it is being glued to the
neck blank. The position is determined by
the planned position of the 14th fret - the
neck-to-body juncture. The heelblock
ends 3/4" past that point to provide wood for the tenon that will hold the neck to the
headblock.

A little terminology here. From one end to the other: The Headstock is the piece of
wood at the far end of the guitar that will be cut down to become the peghead - this is
familiar as the place the tuning machines are mounted. Peghead veneers are laminated
to the front of this piece to provide strength and to hide the scarf joint made last week.
The other side of the scarf joint ends up where the carved curve of the neck meets the
flat of the peghead, so it's disguised by the complex geometry of the area. The next part
is the neck shaft itself. The fingerboard with the frets is glued to the front of this, with
the nut at its very end. The nut has the notches that the strings run through, and
determines the spacing of the strings at the "head end" of the neck.
At the other end of the neck is the heel -- right now, until it's carved, it's called the heel
block. The heel is the deep part at the end of the neck that joins to the body of the guitar.
It ends in a tenon (sometimes a dovetail tenon, but not in this guitar), which is a
projecting piece of wood that mates into a recess in another piece, which recess is called
a mortise. The piece on the guitar that contains this mortise is called the headblock. The
headblock is just inside the body of the guitar at the "top" end.
I think that covers the terms we're going to be using for the moment. The next job is to
install the truss rod. The adjustable truss rod is now a standard feature of steel-string
guitars, both electric and acoustic. Classical (nylon-stringed) guitars don't use them,
because the string tension is so much less that the neck is likely to stay straight without
help. A little digression here. When a guitar fretboard is absolutely straight, it won't play
properly, because the strings vibrate both side-to-side and up-and-down (and every way
in between) even though the plucking action may be side-to-side. On a straight
fretboard, the up-and-down vibrations would hit against the frets further down the neck
causing buzzing or even wrong notes. So a little relief in the fretboard is called for. This
relief is a slight curvature along the fretboard away from the strings. So that if you were
to fret the string at the first and fourteenth frets, you would still see a little daylight
between the string and the fifth fret.
This relief is automatically provided by the tension of the strings pulling against the
neck; but it might be too much, or after some time, the neck may tire and bend a little
too far, raising the action - the height of the strings above the frets - so high as to make
the guitar unplayable. The truss rod is able to correct this by introducing a reverse
curvature inside the neck. The simple adjustable truss rod consists of two steel rods
firmly attached at one end (or, usually, one rod bent double) and with one (upper) rod
held stopped at the other while the other (lower) rod can be shortened, by turning a nut
threaded on to it. Pulling in on the lower rod forces the upper rod into a downward
curve. When this pair of rods is embedded in the neck, its curve forces the neck to bend
back a little, restoring the relief to the proper amount.
The truss rod is not able to adjust a bad high action on a guitar - although the results of a
truss rod adjustment can seem to do this. All the truss rod can to is to force the neck to
bend backwards, which helps only if the neck is bent too far forwards. (Some truss rods
are two-way adjustable, that is, they can add relief as well as reduce it, but the one going
into this guitar is not that kind).
The neck shaft is given a 1/4" groove,
9/16" deep, to accept this Luthier's
Mercantile "TRS" style truss rod. The rod

itself is seen in the foreground of this picture. It's wrapped in heat-shrink plastic to keep
it from rattling in its groove. The rod is not glued into the neck, but just laid into its
groove. I didn't take a picture of the process of making this groove, because I had both
hands on the router! Perhaps I'll go back and make a pic of the router set-up, which
involves a standard router "fence" that attaches to the bottom of the router and slides
along the side of the neck, holding the router bit at a fixed distance from the edge of the
neck. Item to remember for next time: the router fence comes in a "U" shape with two
pieces that ride the edge. The face of each piece has a hole for mounting a continuous
piece of material to serve as a solid fence -- make that solid fence! This operation will
be much less nerve-wracking at the lower
end of the neck!
Here the rod is in the groove, with its
rectangular block hanging out the end of
what will be the neck tenon. The block has

a blind hole for the upper rod and a

through hole for the lower. The lower rod
is longer and it's threaded on the end,
accepting a long threaded sleeve that can
be adjusted with a hex key through the
soundhole of the finished guitar.

This photo shows the end block of the truss rod as well as the markings on the neck for
cutting the tenon. The line across the neck marks the distance of the fourteenth fret from
the nut: this will be the place where the neck joins the body. The lines running from this
line to the left mark the edges of the fingerboard: the neck blank will be carved back to
these lines. The lines running from the juncture line to the right mark the edges of the
tenon. The wood outside these lines will be cut away to leave a protrusion that will fit
into the body of the guitar, into a matching mortise in the headblock. Those paying
attention will notice that the part of the neck shaft that overhung the heelblock has been
cut off.

The truss rod will be covered in its groove

with a spline made of rosewood. Any
strong hard wood will do for this, like
maple or white oak. This spline prevents
the truss rod from bearing right against the
underside of the ebony fingerboard, which
it might crack. Sealing the truss rod into the
neck this way would also help, I think, to make the action of the truss rod produce a
smooth curve in the neck, rather than a kink.

Planing the rosewood spline down to fit

into the groove leaves a lot of red streaks
on the sole of the plane, and on the
workbench, too. Rosewood is beautiful
and strong, but it's a problem to work
with. It dulls the edges of tools that are
used on it, because of mineral inclusions
in the wood, which also help to provide
the color we prize in it. This red streaking
will have to be cleaned off the plane sole
before it can be used on any lightercolored wood that's going to show on the guitar.

That color comes with oils and resins that

can interfere with glue doing its job. In
order to help the glue, the rosewood spline
is washed with acetone. As you can see, a
lot of color comes out on the paper towel
used for this, without appearing to reduce
the color in the wood piece at all. The
acetone treatment seems to work
beautifully on the sole of the plane, as
well, and to a lesser extent, on the streaks
on the workbench top. The acetone, as
you can see, came from the drugstore in the form of nail polish remover. Be careful not
to get nail polish removers with "proteins" or "nutrients" in them...which is just about
any ordinary nail polish remover on the market. This brand is marketed as
"professional" n. p. r. consisting of "100% pure acetone". It's a little cheaper than the
"Cutex" and "Revlon" brands with all the
additives.
The sides of the spline are coated lightly
with yellow glue, but the bottom is
avoided - we don't want to glue the truss
rod in, as it needs to be free to move
within the neck. The clamps from either
side really do provide some pressure
against the spline, though it looks like
they would not. But the geometry is such
that it makes sense: the neck is 3/4" thick,
and the groove is 9/16" deep, leaving a
bare 3/16" underneath the truss rod before carving! No wonder it can bend the
neck back so easily!

After the clamps come off (it's Sunday

afternoon now), the spline is planed down
until it's just a small nub along its length.

To finish leveling the spline in its groove, a scraper is used, in order to have better
control in not gouging a hollow into the neck face. The scraper is simply a flat,
rectangular piece of high-quality steel. To prepare it, the edge is rubbed flat on a
whetstone on both sides, then perpendicularly to the stone. This ensures a flat edge
that's square to the sides. Then a "hook" is burnished onto both sides of the edge by
running a smooth, very hard piece of steel along the edge with a slight angle -- either a
purpose-made burnisher or the side of a chisel. This draws out the metal on the edge of
the scraper into a sharp hook that can take very fine shavings, as you can see in the
photo. You flex the whole scraper slightly, then pull the edge along the wood, tilting it
toward you so as to make the hook "bite" into the face of the wood. It's very easy to
control just where you're scraping and leaves behind a very smooth, shiny surface. The
scraper will be used all over the guitar for finish-leveling surfaces and very controlled,
delicate cutting.
The excess wood -- the "cheeks" -- of the
neck tenon are cut away along the lines
shown in a previous photo. This is done
with a hand saw, in this case the trusty old
dozuki, or it can be done with a table saw.
You might be able to see in the photo that
the faces that will meet the guitar body are
angled slightly back, to make a close fit to
the body easier. The gap will be covered
by the fingerboard on top and the heel cap

underneath, so nobody's the wiser. This step should be done before the installation of
the truss rod, but I got carried away and went out of sequence. No harm, assuming I'm
going to do the tenon by hand. It makes the table saw method impossible!.

The next step is to attach the peghead

veneers. These hide the scarf joint and add
strength to the thin peghead, which is
under a lot of tension from the pull of the
steel strings. Usually a steel-string will
have a single dark veneer for this purpose,
and a classical may have two or three of
contrasting colors. My materials came
with a thin maple and a thick rosewood
veneer, and waste not, want not is my
motto, sometimes. I'm going to install
them both. Cumpiano and Natelson recommend a complicated method for installing
more than one veneer, involving registration pins and so forth to keep them from sliding
around, but recommend just clamping down a single veneer. The pins and so forth
sound like more trouble than doing the whole job twice, so I'll glue down the maple
veneer, clamp it for half an hour, then pretend it's a solid peghead and glue and clamp
the rosewood over it.
Before doing that, I take a well-squared
block of wood and glue 100-grit
sandpaper to it (I'll use this block a bunch,
I'm sure), and dress the face of the
peghead, making sure that the line of the
angle comes right up to and lines up with
the line marked for the back edge of the
nut. I then stand the sanding block up on
edge on the face of the neck. Holding the
veneers together flat on the peghead, I rub
their ends side-to-side against the
sandpaper. This gives them the proper
angle to sit up square against the nut when
it's installed later.

Being careful to cover the peghead face

entirely, I smear a thin layer of glue
evenly over it and lay the maple veneer
down. With a thin caul beneath the
peghead to protect it, and a thick one on
top to distribute the clamping pressure, I
give it six clamps loosely, then slowly
tighten them. I have to loosen them and
retighten twice to correct slippage of the
veneer; I'm trying to get it exactly up to
the line that denotes the back face of the
nut. After half an hour (occupied
otherwise, as you will see) I take off the
clamps and cauls and repeat with the thick
rosewood veneer. Note that the handles of
the clamps are alternated up and down to
keep them from interfering with each
other during tightening. Except for the big
red ones, which go wherever they want to.

Here's the headstock with the veneers glued on.

And what was I doing while the glue was

drying on the veneers? I'll digress a little.
When I was in the planning stages of this
project, I sent away for several sets of
measured drawings of famous guitars. I
knew I wanted something in the fingerpicking style, a smaller, crisper guitar than
a dreadnaught strummer. Among others, I
located two sets of plans for an "000" sized guitar and ordered them from
Luthier's Mercantile and from Elderly
Instruments. These turned out to be
identical sets of drawings of a Martin
Grand Auditorium with fourteen frets clear of the body. Elderly, by the way, charges
$3.00 less for their plans than LMI. I decided to build from these plans. What I did then

was to designate one set as sacrificial, to be cut up to make templates. I cut out a halfguitar from the sacrificial set and spray-glued it to a piece of 1/8" plywood to make a
body template. I bandsawed around the paper and smoothed out the curves with a
microplane rasp.

I used this template to trace out a fullsized guitar body on two pieces of 3/4"
ply to make a workboard. The workboard
is cut 1/2" larger all around than the guitar
body, and has a short neck extension for
clamping it to a workbench and a shorter
tail extension for some fixtures that will
come later. This kind of looks like the
back of a jumbo archtop, doesn't it?

Lacking clamps that can reach out to the middle, I weight down the two pieces for
gluing with whatever is handy.

And so to bed for this weekend, the second of the great homemade guitar documentary.
I had hoped to get a little further this weekend, but slept in both Saturday and Sunday.
The following weekend was worse in terms of the project. Work and social
commitments prevented me from getting into the shop at all. I picked up the following
weekend, though, on the rest of the operations on the neck.
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Week 3: March 12-25

Yes, week three is 14 days long. The weekend of the 17 and 18 was taken up with a
special project for work (having nothing to do with wood), and helping set up a
computer for a friend from Colombia. But Saturday the 24th saw some progress being
made again!
I bought a new dozuki saw to replace one
that had seen better days and too many
close-ups of the concrete floor in my
shop. These saws are incredible, getting a
bite with the merest touch and able to
shear away a wafer from the side of ... the
headstock in this case. The sides of the
headstock are cut away to the familiar
taper. I also learned how to set the camera
to take a timed shot, so there will be more
"action" shots like this one. Note how the left thumb guides the cut. The right forefinger
focuses the energy of the driving hand and directs it along the line of the cut. Naw,
really, it's just the way I cut.

The dozuki makes the long cut down the

side and another where the peghead
angles in a bit, then the coping saw is used
to turn the cut down along the side of the
neck. I'm not exact with a coping saw, so
this cut is just to hog away some wood so
I can get at the sides of the headstock to
plane it smooth and straight.

Here it is with the one side coped. You

can see the two dozuki cuts on the right,
one along the long, shallow angle, and
one right through the first cut, making the
short, slightly steeper angle down to the
nut seat. No, I didn't make a 90-degree
turn with the coping saw on the left; I
used the dozuki to meet the coping saw
cut and remove the block of wood. If you
look closely at the coping saw cut on the
left, you'll see it wavers a bit. I have a
bear of a time cutting straight with a
coping saw, or following a curve. I keep
clear of the line, though, and I'll clean it up later. By the way, the peghead shape was
marked by cutting out the peghead from the second set of plans and tracing around it. I
found that the width of the peghead at the nut on these plans was substantially less than
that of the neck at the nut. I tried to figure out why this could be and finally decided it
was a mistake, and adjusted accordingly.

Here's another action shot, showing how

it's a bad idea to try to take too many of
these. It helps for those who can't read,
though. Here I'm planing down the side of
the headstock to smooth away the saw
marks. The dozuki leaves very little in the
way of saw marks!

After trimming the top edge of the peghead off with the dozuki: here's a really cool
plane curl that came off the side of the peghead. Next to the dark rosewood and

mahogany, the thin edge of the maple veneer looks like Oreo filling.

I marked the location of the holes for the

tuning machines by taping down the
pattern from the plans and tapping a nail
through at the appropriate places. I had to
tape it down because the rosewood is so
hard that just pushing the nail with my
hand didn't leave enough of a visible
mark.
The drill shown here was actually
spinning when the photo was taken! It's a
brad-point bit, which has a separate sharp
point dead center. If it were a regular bit,
I'd clamp the neck down for each hole, because the bit will wander. In case you can't tell
from the table, this is a drill press. It's difficult to drill these holes straight enough with a
hand drill, but possible. Note the backing board underneath the peghead; this is to keep
the exiting drill bit from chipping out pieces of the wood around the edge of the
hole. The photo angle makes it look like the bit is not vertical to the surface of the
headstock, but it definitely is.
Look, Mom, no chip-out! You can see a
little fuzz, though, on the two lowest holes.

So, here's the first part that's looking a

little bit like a guitar. Had to show this
view. The roughness down by the nut will
be carved away later when the neck is
shaped.

Here's the first step at shaping the heel; cutting away most of the heelblock. The choppy
appearance of the curve is caused by having to back up the bandsaw blade and re-angle
to make the curve. I still have the 3/4" blade on it that I use for resawing. Keeping the

cut quite far from the final curve is a security blanket for an insecure carver. The rest of
this operation is done by eye, and I want to have a large margin for error in putting the
'point' on the heel.

The cheeks where the heelblock is wider than the neck are removed with the bandsaw.
In Cumpiano and Natelson, visible here behind the neck, it says not to come closer than
1/8" from the line where the edge of the fingerboard will go, but it's not quite clear
whether they mean sideways or below or both. Later it's clear they at least mean not to
carve all the way up to the corner from below. I keep away both ways.

The first step is to make a straight "ramp"

from the fingerboard edge (or rather just
below it) to the corner of the bottom of the

heel. I did this with a 1" chisel. The cutting

went quickly, because the mahogany is soft and fibrous.
The next step is to "concave" the ramp to the outer curve of the heel shape. The sides of
this curve are still straight along the direction of the length of the neck; no curving
toward the point of the heel is tried yet. This will establish the contour of the part of the
heel that meets the guitar body. Cumpiano and Natelson use a specially modified chisel
to make this and other cuts in carving the heel; I prefer a knife. This is a knife of a
pretty ordinary contour, similar to a Sloyd knife. It's from Woodcraft, and they just call
it a Swedish carving knife.

Here the concave shape is established. The next step is to knock off the corners,
establishing a second facet tangent to the curve marked out for the bottom of the heel,
blending up to the neck shaft. I started in carving that with the knife seen above, and
didn't stop for a picture until...

Here's the heel carved into the neck shaft.

The shaping of the rest of the neck shaft
will wait until later on. The knife carving
here was followed with the scraper to
smooth out the tiny ridges between knife
cuts. And that's it for this weekend. Tune
in next week, or, if you're not following
along in real time, click the link below to
see the rosette inlaid into the top, and
other exciting procedures!

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Weekend 4: March 26 - April 1

The Rosette from the LMI boxed materials set comes in three parts: two 35" strips of
dark/light/dark veneer sandwich about 1/16" thick and 1/8" wide (the dark/light/dark
shows on the 1/16" face), and a pre-formed circle of Martin-style herringbone purfling
1/4" wide and about 4" inside diameter. The ring is a little more than a full circle in its
relaxed state, that is, it is not joined and the ends overlap, so it can be inlaid at that size
with a little cut off the end, or pulled open to a larger size. The procedure is to rout a
channel in the face of the top, surrounding the intended location of the soundhole, and
to inlay the strips and the purfling ring into the channel. Well, that's how it came out.
The intention was to rout a 1/8" channel for one double circle of veneer strip, then 1/8"
further out, a 1/4" channel for the purfling, and then another gap and another 1/8"
channel for veneer strips.
I began by following the figures in Cumpiano and Natelson, starting with a 4"
soundhole, 1/8" of wood, an 1/8" veneer strip ring, and so forth. When I routed the
channel for the purfling ring, I naturally tried it for fit. It would not open out that wide.
The most it would do was a 4-1/4" diameter, and I was asking it for another 1/8" beyond
that, which was enough to leave a wide gap that would not be covered by the end of the
fingerboard. I retrenched, and routed down the wood between the first and second
channels, leaving a 1/2" channel into which I would inlay all three parts of the rosette. It
came out fine; but next time I'll measure all my materials before working on any of
them!
The process in the pictures, then, shows the start of a three-piece rosette ring that
finishes as a one-piece. If you see
anything odd, that probably explains it!
The veneer strips are too brittle to bend
into a ring, so they need to be pre-shaped.
Cumpiano and Natelson suggest soaking
in hot water, then bending into a prepared
mold with channels the same size as those
in the top. I didn't have anything long
enough to soak them in, and carrying hot
water downstairs would be a problem
anyway. I decided to try one of the
specialist tools I got for this project: a
bending iron (click here for the tool
description). I soaked the first few inches
of the strip in a bowl of cool water, then
worked the strip against the iron. The iron was hot enough to sizzle the water, and the
strip bent readily. As you can see here, I fed the strip in with my right hand and pulled it
around the iron with my left. All it took was about two seconds sliding back and forth
by about 1/2" at the contact point, and then moving over to the left another 1/2".

Because I needed two circles on either

side of the herringbone, I just continued
curving the whole 35" strip, and then
curved the other strip.

I had prepared a board by routing the channels I thought I was going to use, and used
this as a mold to let the curved stripping set.

With the strips loaded in the mold, I placed

another board over them to keep them from
popping up, and put them aside overnight.

I used the template I had made by gluing

the plan cutout to a board to trace the
outline of the top onto the spruce sheet
from the materials. I then cut the shape of
the guitar top out of the sheet, leaving a

1/2" border all around.

The materials come with the top wood in
two "bookmatched" pieces; that is, they
are two consecutive slices from the same

log. To bookmatch the pieces, you place them in the orientation they had in the log, then
open them like a book and glue the two near edges together. It yields a symmetrical
grain pattern, and, for an instrument soundboard, a symmetrical wood structure. When
you order a top, you can have LMI sand them to a given thickness and glue the pieces
together. These operations are tedious and they require either extreme skill with a plane
or a heavy-duty thickness sander, so I opted to pay for the thicknessing and joining to be
done for me. I also had them thickness and join the back, and thickness the sides.
This top is made of Sitka spruce, a wood native to the American Northwest. It has a
very high strength to weight ratio and acoustic characteristics that make it the most
popular wood for steel-string guitar soundboards. When I "tap test" the top wood by
holding it near the edge and rapping it with a knuckle of my other hand, it has a bell-like
sound. It is a beautiful piece of wood. I'm now about to take a chance at not wrecking it.
I agonized for a while about how to put the channels in the top for the soundhole
rosette. I thought of grinding a special cutter for a fly cutter, but the one I have isn't big
enough, and besides, if you look at it, it seems awfully risky. The thought of modifying
my Porter-Cable router to cut circles as recommended in Cumpiano and Natelson didn't
appeal to me. That's a lot of horsepower against the delicate spruce of the top. LMI
offers a specialized router harness for a Dremel tool that does all kinds of magic for
lutherie...but it's 125 clams, and I've already spent a lot on this project. In addition to
which, LMI takes forever to ship anything.

Then I noticed the lowly plastic router

base I had gotten for my Dremel long ago.
If you take away the fence from the router
fence attachment, and leave the part that
rides on the rails, you find that that part
rides level with the bottom of the router
base, and it contains a hole right through
the center of it that perfectly
accommodates a 1-1/2" finishing nail or
brad. Swiveling on this nail, it becomes an
excellent circle cutter. I bet it's even
described in the instructions for the
Dremel router base that I never read. I
tried it out on the scrap board that became the mold for holding the veneer strips to set
in their curved shape.

The rings come out of the mold on

Sunday morning quite content to be rings.
They are shown here with the LMIsupplied herringbone rosette. Using the
Dremel tool circle cutter, I cut the first
1/8" channel and fit the smaller veneer
strip rings into it, cutting the strip to make
two separate rings so as not to have a
bump where they overlap. Then the 1/4"

channel for the purfling, when I notice that the purfling ring won't stretch to fit it. After
shaving down the wood between the two rings, I have approximately a 1/2" channel. I
rout down against the inner circumference of this channel, shaving about a 32nd of an
inch each time, until all the rings fit into this channel.

Here's the result, messed up with glue

squeeze-out. The gap in the herringbone
ring will be covered by the end of the
fingerboard.

It begins to look like part of a guitar, no?

Now the glue has dried, and the rings

must be scraped level with the
soundboard. I clamp the top to the
workboard -- backwards, so as to have the
soundhole close to me -- and set up a light
so I can see the high spots as I work. I'll
use the scraper rather than a plane or an
abrasive, because the scraper is easier to
control than the plane, and I want to

scrape the rings without too much scraping the top, and an abrasive might drive darkcolored dust from the ring material into the light top wood.

The scraper takes fine shavings from the

ring material. Soon the rings are level
with the top surface. This took about ten
minutes of scraping. After scraping, the
area is smoothed with 120-grit sandpaper
on a block, and then lightly scraped again
to remove any dark material from the
spruce.

If you use a fly cutter to take out the soundhole, don't be alarmed when the soundhole
climbs up the drill bit as it cuts through!

The next step in Cumpiano and Natelson

is to do the top braces, but I have the
Dremel-router out and I know I eventually
have to inlay the decorative back strip.
Here is the gorgeous East Indian
Rosewood back material. I really don't
want to mess this up. You can see the
results of bookmatching on this piece: the
light, slightly curved figure streak about
1/6 of the way from the edge repeats in

mirror image on the other side. The material for the sides is closely matched to the back
in color and figure. Luthier's Mercantile Inc. promises first grade materials in the boxed
set, and in my admittedly inexperienced opinion, they certainly deliver.
LMI offers two grades of boxed materials for steel string guitar, differing mainly in one
having mahogany back and sides and the other rosewood. The other differences are in
the ritzier decorative materials in the rosewood set. The rosewood set comes with
Martin-28-style herringbone purfling and rosette, and the back strip features an
elongated checker pattern of maple and rosewood pieces. Picture a little further down!

The Dremel router base comes through

again, with one flat edge offering the
perfect bearing surface for routing a long
straight groove by following a long
straightedge. I'll retake this picture
another time -- it's a little shaky. I find
that not using the flash I get better colors,
but I really have to steady the camera with
a tripod or some other support...I skipped
that this time
Routing a long straight groove to take the
decorative strip that disguises the joint
between the two halves of the back. The strip is about 3/16" wide. In order to get a snug
fit, I start with a 1/8" router bit.

The initial try at routing to full depth sends up smoke, so I back off the depth a bit, and
take about .02" at a time. Any more than that burns badly. This rosewood is dense,
which makes it a stiff and resonant reflector of sound. After getting to about .07 inches
(the material is .11) I need to increase the width of the groove. This I do by adding
successive layers of tape to the bearing edge of the router base. This adds less than
1/64" at a time, so I am sure I will not go over and get a sloppy fit.

Here's what I meant by "elongated

checkerboard". The strip is glued into the
groove and I'm scraping it down. You
know you've learned to sharpen a scraper
when you get curls like this. I saved a
bowlful of them to make people guess
what they are. The discoloration on either
side of the strip is from acetone that I
wiped into the groove (and slopped over).
I did that on the advice of a book called
"A Guitarmaker's Manual" by Jim
Williams. Seems the oils in rosewood can
keep glue from adhering properly. Wiping
with a paper towel lightly moistened with
acetone certainly brings a lot of gunk out
of the wood, and a bright purple color.
Cumpiano and Natelson don't mention this. I worry about the discoloration, but it
scrapes away once I get the strip down.

I had to get in my weekly macro photo of

a curl of wood. This came from the
scraper, not the plane, and it shows the
rosewood having no trouble adhering to
the glue that sticks it to the back strip.

And here's the result.

And now for something completely different. The wood for making the braces that help
to strengthen and stiffen the underside of the top comes in a billet split right from a log.
As you can see, it is split along the radial lines of the fibers of the wood. To make
braces that will have the best acoustic properties and greatest strength, you should have
wood that has no run-out of the grain, i.e., the fibers should continue through the piece
to the greatest extent possible given the shape of the piece. The way to get that is to split
the material along the grain down to the approximate dimensions of the piece, and then
saw and plane to the final dimensions.
The normal way to do this would be with a froe, a specialized tool for splitting wood. It
has a long blade with a handle mounted perpendicular to it. You drive the blade into the
end grain of the billet, then pull the handle to the side to turn the blade and widen the
crack. I found Sunday afternoon not quite done when I glued in the back strip, so I went
over to the Woodworkers' Club to see if they had a froe. They carry two models, an outin-the-woods he-man one and a small one for splitting basket strips. I figured on the
small one. Well, they didn't have either one, so I settled on the method pictured. I

started a crack about where I wanted it by driving a chisel deep into the side of the billet
near the end, then walked the crack down the billet by leapfrogging two chisels down
the crack. Apart from having whacked my thumb four or five times, it worked like a
charm.

Having accomplished this glorious split, I

decided to call it a day. Actually, I went
back and scraped the back strip down as
described above, now that the glue was
set, but that's telling the tale out of turn.
Next week, I'll lay out the bracing pattern
and make the braces and maybe get them
glued onto the soundboard.

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Week 5: April 2-8

A short weekend, and no chance to get
into the shop during the week. Worked on
soundboard bracing.
You can just barely see it in this picture,
but I drafted the outline of the braces on
the underside of the soundboard. I did this
by cutting out the soundboard from my
sacrificial copy of the plans, and marking
around the edges where the braces met the
edge or would meet the edge if extended.
With a straightedge along the line of the

brace, I continued the line out to the edge of the extra material. This gave enough of a
line to orient the straightedge after the plan was removed, to draw the actual brace
within the outline. This sounds more complicated than it was!

Having split the brace wood once, I split it again, perpendicular

to the first split. The first split went in tangent to the growth
rings of the tree, and it split fairly straight down the length of the
board. This split will go along the "ray" lines, radially from the
center of the tree out. If there is any twist in the grain, or if the
billet was sawn at an angle to the vertical, it will show up in this
split.

As you can see, the split diverged significantly from the sawn face of the billet. I'll now
resaw the braces out of the billet using the split planes as references, and the lines of the
fibers will run uninterrupted through the length of the braces, at least in the center third
or so of the brace.

Here's the curl of the week. This came off

one of the pieces that will become part of
the X brace. Yes, it's really one curl. The
plane is a fore plane.

Here two adjacent sides of the brace blank are smoothed and square to each other; this
was done with the fore plane. I'll mark the height and width from these sides and plane
(or in some cases, re-resaw) the rough sides down to that dimension.

To keep track of what I'm doing, I lay

each brace blank onto the plan as it's
dimensioned. Here they all are, with the
exception of the bridge patch. The small
brace below the soundhole is in the plan,
but not in Cumpiano and Natelson. I think
the X-brace is more "closed" left to right
on this plan because of the overall width
being less, and that leaves more of a gap
between the x-brace intersection and the
bottom of the soundhole.

Speaking of the bridge patch, here it is

being glued down. It's just a thin piece of
rosewood cut into a trapezoid shape
closely following the lines of the X brace.
The boxed materials come with a piece
specifically for this, but in the future I'll
cut it from the waste on the back, as long
as I'm making small guitars anyway. I
haven't measured it out, but it seems I can
get both the bridge plate and the peghead
veneer this way. The grain on the bridge
patch runs left-to-right. The caul is 1/4"
plywood: I'll use a thicker one in the
future, as it will distribute the clamping pressure better. I don't anticipate any trouble
from using the thinner caul here, but better safe than sorry.

Here is the clamping arrangement for the upper transverse graft, a thin piece of spruce
that runs under the area above the sound hole. The grain runs right to left. The piece is a
cutoff from the soundboard material, less than 1/8" thick. It's an inch wide, and reaches
to within about 3/4" of the edge on both sides -- far enough away to miss interfering
with the linings when the sides are attached. It's being glued here with a piece of 1-by
stock cut to fit it as a caul. I've read a number of things about this piece, and there's
some controversy about its use. But I'll put it there because I'm building this first guitar
"vanilla" and both Cumpiano and Natelson and the plans have it there, and it's
traditional. Here you see there's a board underneath the soundboard for the clamps to
bear on. The board is used in clamping the bridge plate as well, though you can't see it
in that photo. The board is used for these wide, flat braces because a bit of extra
pressure is needed to make sure they meet the soundboard over their whole surface, and
a little extra pressure is needed for that. Other braces, as you will see, are clamped
without such protection because the pressure is lighter and the soft faces of the clamps
prevent marring the soundboard face.

After the graft is glued down, it is shaped to a rounded profile.

After rounding, the ends are beveled

down to the soundboard level.

Finally, a notch is cut into the center of

the graft to allow clearance for the truss
rod.

Finally, here's the result of this weekend's work. Next weekend is Easter and my folks
are visiting, so I'll get even less done! Actually, getting all the brace blanks roughly
dimensioned took most of the time this weekend.

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Week 6: April 9 - 22

Another 14-day week, because with house guests for Easter and a visiting relative in
New York the next weekend, I just about
got one day in the shop over the two
weeks.
The next step is to glue on the soundhole
braces. They don't take much clamping
pressure, as the glue soaks right into the
spruce. A very thin glue line.

The two side soundhole braces are longer due to the geometry of the thing, so they need
a different clamping scheme.

The finger braces are glued outboard of

the X brace in the lower bout. There the
clamping is done on the workboard.

The braces are glued "in the square" to give a level surface for the clamps to bear on,
but are then shaped to various rounded profiles. The finger braces are feathered away to
nothing right along the edge of the X brace and a half-inch or so away from where the
sides will be, leaving room for the linings. Other braces will run right up to the sides,
and there will have to be gaps in the linings to accommodate them.

I didn't see anything in Cumpiano and

Natelson or on the plans to indicate what
the grain orientation should be in the
braces. There is a figure in C&N that
shows all the braces in cross-section that
has hatching that might indicate grain
direction, but elsewhere in the book grain
direction is plainly marked and labeled
with the word "grain" as in the diagram of
the headblock. So I didn't pay any
attention to the exact orientation of the
grain in the braces, taking care only that it
should have as little runout as possible, by
cutting along the split planes. So some of
the braces have annual rings oriented
perpendicular to the surface of the
soundboard and some are parallel. They
must be different in acoustic properties: I
would guess the vertical grain in the
second picture above would be less
flexible. But maybe the difference is
negligible.
Yes, it's another photo of my small but
elegant collection of clamps. Actually,
there's an important difference between
the braces that went before and the one in
this photo and after. These braces are
arched slightly along the side that contacts
the soundboard, giving the soundboard a
very gentle curvature. The curve is a
deflection of 1/8" at the center of an 18"
arc, so it is barely noticeable. The
clamping of these braces must be done
using a flexible caul under the
soundboard. In this case it is a strip of
1/8" plywood, that I had cut to the specified curve and used as a template to mark the
braces for arching. Nothing goes to waste. The caul is needed in order to help ease the
soundboard into the smooth curve against the arched brace.

Once glued, the upper face brace is also

rounded and feathered down at the ends.
In this case, however, the end is left 1/8"
thick and it goes right to where the side
will meet the top.

Here is the layout of all the braces except the X. The lower face braces have been glued
in and shaped like the finger braces. They are also arched like the upper face brace. As
you can see from this, all the braces except the two uppermost lead into (or away from)
the edges of the X brace. All the ends go right down to the X-brace line, whether they
will feather away or butt up against it.

The X brace is the largest, or rather it

consists of the two largest, braces on the
soundboard. The two parts cross
symmetrically between the bridge patch
and the soundhole, and the arms of the x
contact the bridge patch and the
soundhole braces. There is a lap joint at
the point of crossing, that is, each brace is
notched and the two notches interlock.
The joint is made with a very exact fit -not just as a way to clear the crossing --

to have the most effective coupling of the two members. In this photo, the braces are
just laid into their position. Like the upper face brace, the X brace is given a slight arch
before being glued into position.

Here the first X-brace member is being

glued. I hope it's the one whose notch
faces up. Actually, I know it is, because I
first put the two parts together, then
applied glue to the "lower" member and
located the paired braces against their
respective sides of the bridge plate and the
soundhole braces. I then opened the center
clamp and removed the unglued brace,
concerned that a bit of glue squeezeout
might tack it down and make it difficult to
remove later. When the glue is set under
the first member, the clamps are removed,
the flexible caul is moved under the location of the second brace, and the second brace
is glued down and clamped.

While the braces were drying I went

ahead with installing the neck-bolt
hardware. These brass inserts with their
matching bolts are available from LMI,
and also from hardware stores a little
cheaper, if you like to poke through those
endless racks of drawers with your little
paper bag and golf pencil in hand. I prefer
it when it's sort of in the back and dimly
lit and there's an ancient guy hovering
around who will point out that that there is
an Allen bolt and how he went to school
with Mr. Allen, and took Shop class with
Mr. Philips. Ahem. Sorry. These are from
LMI. The brass insert requires a 3/8" hole,
and the hex key for the bolt is 3/16". I
point this out for the enlightenment of innocents like me who find that the information
sheet LMI includes with the bolts and inserts does not include this information. The
insert is not equipped with the usual screwdriver slots, so I threaded two of the inserts
onto one of the bolts, and used the hex key to drive the lower insert into the hole. It
worked pretty well, though it's important to point out that to install the second insert
using my method I had to borrow another insert from a second pair of these that I
ordered along with the boxed materials.

This is the headblock. The slot running all

the way down the front of it will accept
the tenon on the heel of the neck. The
small slot all the through it at the top of
the big slot will allow the end of the truss
rod to poke through. The uppermost side
in this photo is glued to the underside of
the soundboard. The other end of the
block is 1/8" taller on the far side than on
the side facing you in the photo; this
accommodates the arch of the guitar back.
I'm not sure how I'll locate the holes for
the bolts that will hold the neck on. At this
point on Saturday, I'm too tired to decide
if it's worth calculating or I should use
some method to mark it with pointed cut
off bolts in the actual inserts. I'll leave it over until later to decide.

Yes, the hex nut on the truss rod is only

barely accessible over the upper face
brace. I'll need to check this when the glue
sets on the headblock. The piece that was
cut off to give a slight angle to the back
side of the headblock was saved and is
here used to provide a level clamping
surface. Those Messrs C&N are very
clever fellows indeed.
This is the end of the line for these two
weeks. I need to cut out and install a tail
block and then I'm ready to bend the
sides. So next session is highly likely to include that adventure.

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Week 7: April 23 - 29

This week, the sides must be bent. I've done some bending before, making a couple of
small Shaker-style oval boxes of white oak and cherry. That was done by boiling strips
of wood in water and strapping them around a form. The free-standing method of
instrument building involves shaping the ribs against a hot tube by hand and eye alone. I
look forward to the challenge.
First some preliminaries must be taken care of.
The last item for the soundboard is to make and attach the tailblock. The making is
straightforward; it's just a block three by four inches and 3/4" thick. The grain runs
parallel to the grain of the sides, so that the surface glued to the soundboard and the one
glued to the back is long grain rather than end grain.
Because the four-inch dimension is to be across the grain, there's no way to cut it out of
the neck blank log, since the widest dimension is just shy of four inches. Presumably
LMI intended the tailpiece to be made with the grain going the other way. While
recommending the horizontal grain, Cumpiano and Natelson acknowledge that folks
disagree about it. Since I have a good, straight-grained piece of mahogany knocking
around the shop, I decide to use that and follow the C&N program.
It's critical that the end that attaches to the soundboard be perpendicular to the face that's
going to be glued to the sides at the butt of the guitar. I use the fore plane to level the
edge of the board before cutting off the block, checking with and engineer's square.
After cutting out the piece, I final-level it
with the block plane.
This is the purpose of the little tab at the
end of the workboard. While clamping the
block to the soundboard, the tab provides
a ledge to set a square. The excess wood
at the bottom of the soundboard is
trimmed away to allow the square to
reach. Because the block doesn't come all
the way to the edge of the soundboard it's set back by an amount equal to the
thickness of the side material - the small
combination square shown is the best way
to get a reading: you can slide the ruler up
an eight of an inch to clear the last little
bit of the soundboard material and come
into contact with the tailblock. I did check
this arrangement against an engineer's
square to make sure that sliding up the
ruler didn't introduce a small angle into
the square. This square, by the way, may
be the classiest tool I own. It's a Starret four-inch combination square that my Dad
recently gave me.

Here's the soundboard complete. I've left

the braces rather heavy according to most
descriptions I have seen. They pretty
exactly match the plan that I'm following.
Tapping the soundboard yields a crisp,
high-pitched sound. I'm doing my best to
remember exactly what I'm hearing and to
record the sizes and shapes of all the
braces, so that when the guitar is finished
and I analyze the sound, I will know as
nearly as possible what led to it.

Something I left over for later back when I made the workboard was to make a cork rim
to support the edges of the soundboard after the arched braces have been applied.
Operations up to now, like attaching the braces and the head and tail blocks, have not
required it, but it will be needed when the sides and the back are attached. I had a hell of
a time finding the sheet cork. Not at Frank's (crafts and garden supplies), not at
Woodworker's Club (Woodcraft), not at Home Despot, though I can't stand being in
there long enough to make a thorough search. Not at the couple of local hardware stores
I tried. The guy (I should know his name - he knows mine) at Woodworker's Club in
Norwalk, Connecticut is always super helpful and knowledgeable in suggesting other
places to check for things he doesn't have, and he suggested Michael's craft supplies
(among other places), which is where I finally found it. The cork is 1/8" thick and
attached to a sheet of stiff paper.

The last thing I can think of to do to avoid

bending sides is to make the workboard
cleat. A bolt through the workboard at the
location of the center of the soundhole
holds a block of wood that contacts the
upper transverse brace and the juncture of
the X braces to hold the soundboard
assembly firmly down on the workboard.

Because this is in place when the back is attached, it's important to remember to put the
wing nut on the underside of the workboard at that time. It's a little more trouble, but
because I know that I will forget it if I have a chance when the time comes, I decided to
always do it that way.

Bending the Sides

The first thing I learned about side
bending on a bending iron is that you need
a lot of space! You've got about 35 inches
of board flapping around and you are
going to be applying it to the iron at many
different angles and from both sides.
Make sure you have clearance above and
below as well as on both sides. You also
need space around your template for when you make the frequent checks against it for
the shape of the bent sides. The setup I have here is barely workable. The handle of the
vise was sometimes in the way, though I pushed the iron out to where I could just clamp
it. The way it is here, I could only clamp it on one side, and sometimes it would turn in
place. I will have to arrange a better setup for next time.
Yes, there will be a next time. I will drop the clue that the process was successful to a
good degree, and quite enjoyable. I've never had the opportunity to see this being done,
so I relied on the thin chapter in Cumpiano and Natelson and a couple of other sources.
I had wondered about the brevity of the information I was able to find on this, but now,
trying to describe the process myself, I no longer wonder. It's pretty hard to describe,
but here goes. I'll try to point out things that I think are helpful; things I didn't know
from reading, things that surprised me about it.
First off, I don't have pictures of the process. Maybe another time I will recruit my wife
to take some, but the procedure is so intense and hands-on (and damp!) that I just
couldn't set up even a time-delay shot or two. I don't think still pictures would convey a
lot of information about how to do it, anyway.

Preparations
The sides need to be matched and jointed. Place the sides together so the figure
matches. Usually, the pieces will have come from a single board and matching involves
placing them back together in the orientation they had in the board and then opening
them like the pages of a book so that two edges are together. There are two ways to do
this, so pick the one that looks best and choose the side you want to have showing on
the outside of the guitar. On my materials, there was really no difference inside and out
so I could pick the figure orientation without considering this. At one end of the pieces,
the figure took a slight curve, and I decided to put this end at the tail of the guitar. I put
the two pieces together face to face and, using the fore plane, jointed the edge that
would be contacting the soundboard so that it was straight and smooth.

Both pieces had begun to split at the tail end, probably due to bringing them into my
house in mid winter when the inside humidity went to almost nothing. I had to plan on
not using the last inch or so. Fortunately, this is a small guitar!
I rolled a small roll of electric tape along the outline of the template, and marked the
location of each major turning point or focus of a bend in terms of the number of
rotations the tape made. I then transferred these measurements to the side material so I
would have reference points to work from. I made each mark on the convex side of the
bend, so I could see it while holding the concave side against the bending iron. This
turned out to be only a little bit helpful, as I checked the bend against the template so
frequently I always knew where I was without referring to the marks on the wood.

Soaking the side material

The first step is to soak the side material in water. I looked around for an appropriate
container, and came up with a 36" window-box liner from Frank's garden and crafts
store. It wasn't a good choice, as it turns out, but it was better than anything else I found.
36" turns out to have been the outside dimension. The sides and ends of the container
narrow down to a little shorter than the side wood and a little narrower than the side
wood, which is 35" long. Of course. I was able to sort of wedge it in there. Brosnac's
book shows a tray made of sheet metal that he uses for boiling the sides in. I may go
that route if I can't find anything ready-made of plastic. On one side I soaked the neck
end first, bent the shoulder on the pipe, and then was able to fit the whole piece in. On
the other piece, I used more water and soaked all but six inches or so of the butt end.
When I stepped back to look at it, the end sticking out of the water had warped almost
into a "C" (as you look at the end grain). I was concerned that this stress might increase
the split. I turned it around and got that end under water and it unbent pretty quickly. At
first I intended to use water from a teakettle that had been brought to the boil, but it
barely covered the bottom of the trough. I used hot tap water instead. I soaked for about
20 minutes.

Bending
The LMI Professional Bending Iron takes a long while to heat up. So long, in fact, that
when I first tried it out I was afraid that it was defective, because after several minutes
on "HI" (Hello!) it was barely warm. It gets there eventually. I have the blisters to prove
it. I let it heat up at the "HI" setting, and then backed it off to 6 (it's marked "LO", then 1
through 6 and "HI", so 6 is the second highest setting). I set up the iron on its side so
that the wide parts were on the two sides and the sharper curve was down. In section,
the iron is egg-shaped, and the pointy end of the egg was toward the floor. I ended up
doing almost all the bending against the
blunt end of the egg.
I began bending the first side at the pencil
line I had marked for the narrowest point
on the waist. I laid the wood against the
iron at this point and rocked it back and
forth to get the heat into a band of wood
about 3/4" wide. The water in the wood
hissed and popped, and I could see it

surging up through the wood, or perhaps just the water on the near side of the wood was
boiling. I began to apply pressure on both left and right while continuing slowly to rock.
The wood began to bend, almost imperceptibly -- until I held it up and looked at it, I
wasn't sure there was a bend at all. After a minute or two, the wood seemed to "let go"
and I could easily push a bend into it. I held the wood in its new shape and checked
against the template -- still had a way to go.
By this time the wood was dry on the surface on both sides, so I dipped it in the water
for a few seconds and went back to work. I thought I was focusing too much on the one
point, so I went a little to one side and the other of the pencil mark and rocked and
pushed until I felt a bend starting. This was a mistake. The waist on this guitar is a
pretty sharp curve, and I needed to get most of the bend focused at that pencil line. I
found this out later when I tried to get the lower bout to come down to the line.
It takes some pressure to get a bend into the wood, and you have to not worry too much
about tearing or cracking the piece. Otherwise, you are going to rock or slide it back and
forth until it scorches without any bend getting into the piece at all. In the first photo of
the bent sides you can see scorching on the piece above and to the right, and almost
none on the other piece, which I did second. You can learn by doing! The scorching is
there on the inside of the waist bend as well. I hope the scorch marks will scrape out. If
not, they will be a little mark of history. When bending the waist on the second side, I
found that the pressure can be applied sooner and more strongly. The bend will still start
gradually and then almost suddenly the wood will be supple. I can only speak for
excellently quartered and straight-grained rosewood at this time, but by the time I was
finished with the second side I was applying considerable force at each point and never
heard a tear or crack. It's a matter of getting a feel for it, which, for me anyway, didn't
take very long.
While the waist bend needed to be done almost entirely in one place against the iron, the
upper bout bend is less pronounced, and needs to be introduced a little at a time as you
slide the wood along the iron. I found that it worked best to apply pressure while
rocking back and forth for just a few seconds, then move over maybe an eighth of an
inch and repeat. Do this only three or four times and check against the template. If you
get ahead, you may over bend further along the curve.
The long, changing curve on the lower bout was almost more difficult to bend than the
tighter curves. The best method I found was to be very careful not to get ahead, but to
work one short section (about 1/2" at a time) until it would lie right against the line in
the template. Any time I tried to work a longer section I found that I had overbent out
along the curve.
The wood dries visibly as the process goes along, though internally it remains quite
damp, as you can tell as soon as it cools a little. To prevent scorching, I tried to dip from
time to time whenever I worked a section long enough so that it looked dry.
That's about all I learned from this experience. It took about four hours to bend both
sides, much of which was pondering just how to do it or correcting overbent sections.

Here are the sides an hour or so after the

bending was done. As you can see, there
was some "springback" evident. The
wood was still quite damp at this point.
Cumpiano and Natelson advise letting it
go overnight. They say they leave the
sides free during this period, while others
clamp them in a form. I decided to clamp
them to the headblock and tailblock in
their assembled configuration. It probably
migrated some moisture to these parts, as
I realized later, but I hope the amount was
insignificant. Probably was. Anyway, it
worked very well. The springback you see here was reduced considerably by the next
day and the sides seemed to have settled into their shape.

Here one side is clamped and glued at the

tailblock and headblock. The cam clamps
are just lightly holding the side down to
the line. The side was first clamped like
this and the two ends marked -- the
headblock end was marked just along the
inside edge of the mortise on the
headblock, and the tailblock end was
marked about a sixteenth of an inch shy of
the center line. I trimmed the ends off
square with the dozuki saw.

I've decided to use a modified "tentellone" method to attach the sides to the soundboard.
Tentellones are small individual gluing blocks that provide more glue surface than the
thin edge of the side material. With the sides lightly clamped to the soundboard as in the
photo above, the blocks are glued one by one to the top and sides. Because they are
small and light, the surface tension of the glue is enough to hold them in place until the
glue sets. While Cumpiano and Natelson describe this method, they prefer using

continuous kerfed linings that are glued to the sides; then the assembly is glued to the
soundboard. This involves locating the ends of the braces that reach all the way to the
sides and chiseling away the already-glued lining at those points; later, when the sides
are attached, individual blocks are placed on the sides over the braces. I have a couple
of reservations about this. First, gluing something on only to chisel it off later goes
against the grain. Second, the operation of gluing the entire side at one stroke is an
invitation to disaster and an awkward setup, requiring a lot more clamps than I like to
use (or than I even have). By clamping the side down dry, I can fiddle and adjust until it
lies just right along the line without smearing glue everywhere.

I am using a modified tentellone method,

because I am using a piece of continuous
kerfed lining that came with the boxed
materials and gluing in a short strip at a
time, containing from one to six blocks.
This will be quicker than individual
blocks, while allowing the assurance of
positive gluing contact for every part of
the strip. I can glue blocks over the braces
as I go along. I found that at the incurve
of the waist, I needed to place the blocks
one at a time. On the long straight part of
the lower bout, five or six blocks was the
limit. Any more than that and the blocks toward the middle of the section would want to
pull away from the side. I ended up having to hold one section down for a good ten
minutes until the glue was tacky enough to hold it. One trick that worked well for me
was to put down the strip and slide it back and forth along the side a few times. This
thinned and spread the glue enough so that it really grabbed and I could let go right
away.

Using this method I was able to trim a

block at an angle and get it right into the
sharp corner by the X brace just above the
waist. I really don't know how much of a
difference this will make in the long run. I
don't like to think of hitting a big void
when I try to glue the binding in, though.
I think that overall, this method is superior
to the continuous kerfed lining. It allows
the blocks to be placed right up to the
braces like this without any chiseling
away and regluing. It allows leisurely
adjustment of the side along the line before any glue is applied. The jointed edges of the
material lie flat along the soundboard, and there is no need to plane and sand down the
linings after gluing them to the sides.

Here's the second side glued to the blocks

and lined.

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Week 8: April 30 May 6

The side material was about 5-1/2" wide,
and the widest point of this guitar is 4". If
I were smart, I thought, I would have cut
it before bending. But with my big hands,
I'm sure the extra width saved me from
burns on the bending pipe. As it was, I
only got two burns that developed blisters.
Anyway, I cut it down after the sides were
assembled to the soundboard. I'm glad I
wasn't dumb enough to try to saw it bent
but unattached. As it was, sawing it off
wasn't too big a chore. Plus, it left me this
nifty inch-wide piece bent exactly to the same form as the sides. This piece came in
handy for the next operation, which is to mark and trim the side so it slopes down.
Cumpiano and Natelson suggest using a piece of paper for this. However, a sheet of
paper would wrap around to make a continuous slope along the side -- as if it were cut
when the material was straight. What's wanted is a slope that is straight relative to a
projection of the side against a flat surface. What you want is to see a straight line as
you look from the side of the guitar. I puzzled this out for a while, then used the off cut

from trimming the sides flat.

I used the dozuki to cut a little wide of the

line, and the block plane to bring it down
to the line. There's no more room for chip
out or ragged edges, as we're approaching
the final outline of the guitar. Well,
alright, I still could screw up a little here
and hide it under the binding. When I
think of the complexity of traditional
guitar construction, I now see the
numerous opportunities to hide mistakes.
I don't have a picture of it, but this is also
the way I trimmed that inch-plus off all
around. The picture would have looked pretty much just like this one, so imagine that it
serves for both.

The near side is now formed close to its

final shape. The intermediate shape along
the back is parallel to the soundboard
from the tailblock to a point about two
inches below the waist, then a straight
slope from that point to the top of the
headblock. This is refined using a large
sanding board (photo below) to make sure
that the back profile at this stage defines
just these two planes. The angle of the
sloped part of the back will match the
angle in the headblock that you can see in
this photo, if things work out correctly.

Someone with another guitar making web

site called this the obligatory photo.
Actually, it should show the kerfed lining
being clamped to both sides with about a
zillion little clothespins, but I just had
enough of these clamps to do one side at a
time. I didn't use the individual tentellones
on the back here because, well, it would
have to be done through the soundhole!
The lining is applied in two pieces on
each side, one for the level section and
one for the sloped section.

Here's that big sanding board, being used to level off the sides with the linings attached,
and to round over the break angle between the level and sloped parts of the back. A
slight dip at the headblock and tailblock is also imparted using the board.
As I approach the attachment of the back, it occurred to me that the six-inch bolt I'm
using to hold down the block that holds down the top will not come out of its hole if the
back is in the way! Once the back is on, I'll need to release the box by pushing the bolt
up through the workboard and fishing the block and bolt out of the soundhole. I cut the
bolt down to a more manageable length.

Here's the shell, ready for the back. Pretty

exciting! The linings look continuous
here, but they are kerfed. The reduction of
the resolution on the photo has blurred the
kerfing lines. The tiny gap you see on the
far side is where the angle breaks. It is
also where one of the back braces is going
to go, so the lining will be chiseled out
there anyway.

I've marked and cut out the back, leaving

a half-inch safety margin all around. It
will have to be trimmed right down before
gluing, but the arched bracing is going to
change the dimensions slightly, so the
back will be marked and trimmed at the
last step before gluing.
Cumpiano and Natelson simply instruct
you to mark the outline and cut it out at
this stage. However, you need to be aware
that because the sides are sloped, the
outline of the back differs significantly,
and in a complicated way, from the outline of the top. You can't just mark it up with
your template, because you will have a big problem, even if you leave a half-inch
margin. I marked the back up by turning the box over on it and tracing around it,
rocking it to make contact with the entire edge as the pencil moved.
A cross-grain strip has been glued down along the center joint as reinforcement. This
could have been a cutoff from the soundboard stock, but LMI includes a strip in its
boxed materials, so I used that. I've saved the cutoff from the back material to make the
bridge patch on the next instrument.
The back braces are arched more than the soundboard braces. The widest brace here
gets 1/4" off the underside of each end.

Here are the back braces all glued down

and partly shaped. I rest the back on a
plush towel on the workbench for this
work.

The back braces are shaped similarly to

the soundboard braces, though they are on
the whole larger and stiffer.

Here's a train wreck. No, it's a bridge gluing caul. This is much more complicated than
the one in Cumpiano and Natelson, because this smaller guitar has more braces meeting
near the bridge. This is made to go under the bridge plate to act as a caul for clamping
the bridge to the soundboard later on. The biggest part of it rests against the bridge
plate, while the small triangles fit on the other side of the x-brace, straddling finger
braces. The chuck taken out on the lower left in this photo accommodates one of the
lower face braces. Because the triangles are so small, one of them broke off while
chiseling out the gap between them. I went ahead and glued pieces of rosewood from
the cutoff from the bridge plate to see if there was any problem fitting. Because the big
part sits on the bridge plate, the small triangles would not contact the underside of the
soundboard without these pieces to act as shims. I'm going to make a new caul along the
lines of the upper face caul in the next photo.

Here, this is much nicer, isn't it? This is a

caul to go under the soundboard between
the soundhole and the headblock. It will
support a clamp while the fingerboard is
being glued down to the soundboard.
Instead of taking a thick block of wood or
plywood and sawing and chiseling to
make channels to accommodate the upper
face brace and the truss rod nut, I took a
plain piece of wood and glued other

pieces to it. No train wreck. The two blocks to the lower right in this picture sit on the
upper transverse graft above the upper face brace while straddling the truss rod nut. The
block at the upper left will contact two of the soundhole braces while the piece of
soundboard cutoff glued to it contacts the soundboard between them along the upper
edge of the soundhole.
Why am I showing these cauls in the middle of fitting the back to the box? Since they
must straddle the braces to contact the soundboard snugly, they need to be made before
the back is put on, so that they can be test-fitted and adjusted. This would be hard to do
through the soundhole!

Now that the back braces are on and

shaped, the back must be fitted to the
sides. The braces are trimmed to fit
exactly within the outline of the sides, and
the linings are notched out to receive the
ends of the braces. To do this, the back is
places on top of the box with the braces
overhanging, and the box is marked with
the locations of the brace ends, while the
brace ends are marked against the edge of
the sides. The back must be exactly where
it will be when attached. It's centered
along the back strip and located front to
back by meeting the bottom of the outline
drawn on it earlier to the edge of the sides
at the tailblock. That line is hard to see, so
I put a piece of masking tape along it.
What a pathetic excuse for including a photo, don't you think?
The back is held down with one hand while the marks are made with the other. The
back must be bent or rocked to make it contact both at the back and at the front.

Here is one of the notches in the lining,

made by sawing with the dozuki along the
marks at a 45-degree angle and clearing
the chip with a small chisel.

The ends of the braces are marked along

the outside of the sides, and cut off a bare
eighth of an inch inside that mark so they
will (with luck) contact the side material
or come close, at the very least coming
under the notch in the lining. This adds
some strength to the back in resisting
stresses or blows tending to push it in.
Once the braces are trimmed and fit into
the notches, the back is set onto the sides
and a new outline is traces on it. The back
will need to be trimmed right down to the
outline of the sides, because the method of
attaching the back can break off any
overhang.

And that's as far as I got this weekend. I had hoped to get the back on this weekend, but
real life happened. The trimmed braces fit into the notched linings quite well, and I was
able to get a good tracing of the sides onto the back for the final trimming...and then all
that's left is to strap it on! Tune in next week.

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Week 9: May 7 - 20
Most of the work on this page was done May 7 and 8, as I got sick during the week and
really couldn't do anything the following weekend.

After the outline of the sides is marked on

the back, the waste is trimmed to within a
sixteenth of an inch of the line. The box is
cleaned out and the box and back are set
up for a last photo opportunity. I hope I
haven't forgotten anything! You can see
my signature and the date scrawled into

the lower treble side of the soundboard.

I bought some stuff at a surgical supply

store that I thought would work in lieu of
strips of inner tube, inner tubes being
scarce these days of tubeless tires. It was a
thin elastic material about six inches wide,
intended for use in exercises for physical
therapy. I cut a third off the roll, making it
a two-inch strip, and tried wrapping the
back down to the sides without glue and
everything seemed quite alright. When I
got the glue on, however, and started to
wrap it again, the material kept breaking,
to the point where I gave up on it with the
glue sitting there drying. Plan B was
nylon rope. I think this worked out well -- though as I write this the jury's still out, since
the box is still tied up like this. Because the rope wouldn't cover every inch of the back
the way an elastic material could, I added a couple of clamps just tight enough to bring
the back edge into contact in the two
places on the upper bout where it was a
problem.
Well, it came out all right. There are no
gaps visible between the back material
and the side material. There was a small
problem that I will describe later when a
picture of it comes up. I used an edgetrimming bit in a laminate trimmer -- a
tool that's halfway between a router and a
Dremel moto-tool in size and kick -- to
chew away the remaining overhang on the
top. The back was trimmed closely
enough before gluing. The next step is to
install the end graft, a piece that joins the two ends of the side material as they meet at
the bottom end of the guitar. The sides meet (theoretically) in the neck at the other end,
so no treatment is needed there. First a pair of saw cuts are made and the side material
chiseled away between them, right down to the bare wood of the tailblock.

The saw cuts are slightly further apart at

the soundboard side than at the back side,
so that a slightly wedge-shaped piece will
fit in tightly, leaving no visible gaps.
Sometimes this is done to the wedgeshape is obvious; I decided to make it
only very slight. The end graft is a piece
of cutoff from the back material. It is fit
by taking a plane stroke or two on each
side until it can slide all the way down
into the slot, fitting snugly.
As you can see in this photo, there was a
slight movement of the back while roping
it down, putting the back center stripe
between a thirty-second and a sixteenth
off-center. Though it's obvious here, the
back binding will come between the end
graft and the stripe, so I hope it won't be
noticeable. The two parts of the binding
will meet here, so I'll try to make the
meeting line up with the strip to further confound the eye.

Here's the scary setup I used to hold the

box while doing this procedure. It's
similar to the one in Cumpiano and
Natelson. I'm going to think of something
better. Actually, I saw a setup in The Big
Red Book of American Lutherie, a
collection of articles from the magazine of
the Guild of American Luthiers, that I'll
probably use.

Here's the end graft installed.

Here's my bench setup for routing the binding ledges. The guitar box is held between
two bench dogs which are hidden under the plush towel that protects the box. Because
the end hangs off the front of the bench, I've lightly clamped the upper bout. After
routing up to the waist on both sides, I'll turn the box around and rout the upper bout.

This "design" for a binding-ledge routing

setup comes roughly from the Donald
Brosnac book that first inspired me with
the notion of guitar building so long ago. I
say roughly, because I didn't go back to
the book to refresh my memory, but I
must say I nearly memorized that book
back in the late seventies. Forgive the
multiple photos here; I didn't get one that
seemed to explain the whole thing.
I used the basic Dremel router base as a
starting point, removing the fence from its
mounting as with the circle-cutting setup. I used the screws that hold the fence mount to
the rail to attach a piece of 1/4" plywood to which was mounted the "finger" that will
bear against the guitar side. By keeping the finger pointing perpendicular to the tangent
to the curve of the guitar's side at every point, a consistent depth of cut is maintained.

This is easier than it sounds, especially if you slept through high-school geometry.

I am using the LMI 1/8" down cut end

mill. I originally tried this with a regular
Dremel router bit, but the cut was very
rough. The end mill was too long for the
router base -- at the setting for the shortest
cut possible, it stuck out more then the
depth of the binding. To solve this I
added the 1/4" ply base plate to take up
some of the slack. I used the screws that
hold the Dremel base plate to the toolholding mechanism or superstructure -very convenient! I had to countersink the holes for the screws so they wouldn't ride on
the guitar surface..

The end of the finger is based on a circle

whose diameter is larger than the diameter
of the bit. Therefore, if you point the
finger a little bit off the perpendicular to
the tangent, it cuts a little more shallowly
rather than more deeply. This is good just
for safety reasons but also because when
the depth of cut is more than half the
diameter of the cutter the wood can split
away when cutting along the grain. I
didn't know this ahead of time, but
discovered it through experience. After
that I began taking a first cut with the
finger pointed 25% off to the side, then
finishing with the finger perpendicular. I
may get a bigger cutter.

Here's step one of the routing, the ledge

for the binding strip. I'm going to put a
small purfling band in as well, a piece of
the black-white-black veneer strip. This
will take another, shallower ledge which
you'll see in the next photo. Here you can
see the unrouted nib over the mortise.
There's nothing for the finger to bear on
there, so it will have to be taken down
with a chisel.

Here you can see the second ledge and the

nib left by that routing. To remove this
nib I place the ruler along the cuts on
either side and score the wood several
times with a knife to establish the back
edge, then clip it off with a chisel into the
end grain. This bit is too small to use a
chisel freehand with, as I did the first nib
above.

Both the veneer strip and the binding strip are too brittle and stiff to simply glue on, so
both are bent against the bending iron first. This proves difficult with the binding strip,
because it is far from straight-grained. At one point I broke the strip clean through, with
the grain running at 45 degrees across the strip. I found that using a block of wood
against the back of the strip right at the point of bending helped to keep it from splitting.
I first glued the purfling to the guitar and then the binding strip to the purfled edge. I
said that so I could use the word "purfled" and add it to my spelling checker dictionary.
The strips are held down while the glue sets by pieces of masking tape. Some folks, I
have heard, use cord or rope to do this. One amateur etymologist claimed in the
MIMForum that this is why the binding is called binding. He's wrong. I think.*

Here's what it looks like after gluing. The

binding and purfling need to be scraped
flush to the surfaces of the guitar. I've
started that process in this photo, which
accounts for the bits of fuzz you can see.
I'm going to make a small scraper holder
that can be held in one hand, because
clamping the box down and contorting
yourself to get the right angles on this
while holding the scraper flexed with both
hands is for the birds. Scraping it down is
going to take a while, and I'd love to do it
while sitting on the front porch instead of
in my basement shop.

After a couple of pleasant hours with a

scraper, the binding is level with the sides
and back. At the top you can see the
black-white-black veneer strips while the
binding itself is rosewood with a strip of
maple veneer at the bottom.

And now it looks like something.

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Week 10: May 21 - 28

This week I didn't do much, even though I had a long weekend, because I was
recovering from a bad chest cold that also wrecked last weekend. Though it wasn't a lot
in terms of time, it was still pretty exciting. I got the neck attached for the first time; the
guitar's basic parts are essentially there.
The first job today is to set up the neck
attachment. Two holes for the bolts are
located by measuring from the top of the
soundboard and from the top surface of
the neck, so those two surfaces line up.
Where the binding crosses the neck
mortise, it makes a little rim that the neck

tenon is going to have to accommodate. You can see a little mismatch on the height of
the two pieces of binding; this will be covered by the heel of the neck when it is
attached. I scratch my head over how this mismatch occurred, since the binding rests on
the routed ledge, which should be the same depth on both sides.

A notch is cut into the neck tenon to step

it over the binding.

One thing I discovered when trying to set the neck level to the top of the soundboard is
that the truss rod isn't set deeply enough into the neck. I followed the recommendation
in the LMI catalog for the routing depth, but the top of the end piece on the truss rod is
only about 1/16th" below the top surface of the neck. and therefore hits the underside of

the soundboard. Since this part of the top is going to be buried under the fingerboard, I
simply cut it away instead of trying to make a notch in the underside of the soundboard.

Finally, a sense of proportion. The neck

here is bolted on and feels quite firm. Of
course it looks chunky as the carving
hasn't been done except at the heel.

The binding and purfling stairstep is

routed onto the top in the same way as on
the back, with the Dremel setup shown
here. I check the depths on a piece of
scrap shown here, using a short cutoff of
the herringbone purfling glued to a similar
piece of the binding.

Here's the ledge on the guitar box itself. The purfling ledge looks wide as the ocean
while I'm routing it, but it fits just right.

Herringbone purfling varies in how it

matches up, changing "phase" along the
same strip. In the section at the top, the
white trapezoids pretty much match up
even with each other, while in the next two,
they are pretty much out of phase. In the
bottom strip you can see the phase shift
from one side of the picture to the other. I
bring this up because I was trying to match
the two pieces that meet at the bottom of
the guitar, which I only partially succeeded
in doing. [I'll add a photo of this part later
on]

Here is the purfled top. As with the back,

I decided to glue purfling first, then
binding. Bending the herringbone was
easier than bending the binding. It seems
the glue that holds it all together lets go a
little with the heat and it takes and retains
a bend quite well. It is also a bit more
flexible overall than the binding, so
bending it "pretty close" and squeezing it
down to meet the edge worked well.

Can you see the slight gap about 1/3 of the way from the right edge? That's the only
place it happened. On the back, I got several such gaps between the purfling (the thin
black-white-black veneer strips) and the binding (thicker rosewood strip with a maple or
holly veneer strip glued to one edge. Because it's all very dark, I hope to fill these gaps
with dark brown lacquer burn-in stick. When it comes to "finiting" I'll show that
process.

You can see here where the routing went

through the side material in a few places
and revealed the inner lining.

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Week 11: May 29 - June 3

These are the three elements of the
binding/purfling that I'm using. The two
photos show the top view and side view of
the same three strips. The strip on the left
is the same black-white-black wooden
strip that was used as part of the rosette.
It's the narrow purfling used on the back
of the guitar. The center is the
herringbone strip that's used as purfling
on the soundboard and the strip on the
right is rosewood with a thin line of maple
or holly or some other white wood. This
last is used as binding on both the
soundboard and back. The scale is marked
in 1/32" increments

LMI recommends bending the herringbone dry, and it bends quite readily, possibly
because the heat makes the glue let go a little and allows all the components to slide
around against each other slightly. The b-w-b also bends without a problem, but the

binding strip was a real pain. I bent the strips for the back dry, and had some cracks
where there was short grain in the strip; I was quite surprised to find that is wasn't
straight-grained like everything else supplied in the box, but took it as a lesson and went
on more carefully, soaking the binding strips before bending them for the face. Though
I was able to push the binding flush everywhere in a dry run, I got gaps in several places
on the back between the binding and purfling. I could not see these gaps while taping
the glued binding down, but there they were when I lifted the tape. This was the most
unsatisfactory part of the process so far. As I mentioned on an earlier page, I hope to be
able to fill these gaps with burn-in lacquer stick.

There is a slight variation in the depth of

the rout, due at least in part to the slight
arching of the soundboard. In addition, the
depth of the purfling ledge is deliberately
limited to keep at least 1/32" of the
soundboard under it in contact with the
linings inside the box. Together these
factors mean that the purfling and binding
will stand a bit proud of the side and top
and will need to be scraped down. As
attentive readers will have noticed, I don't
mind using a scraper; in fact I get a kick
out of it. I spent a happy hour or so
scraping the bindings down to what you see in this photo.

I have been eager to get to this next step,

making the fingerboard. It's a real
milestone. Once this is done, only the
bridge remains as a major part that's not at
least shaped and recognizable. Here's the
setup for marking the fret locations.
Readers over forty will appreciate
the headband magnifier, for reading the
half-millimeter scale. The ebony blank is
flattened and thinned to 7/32" and the nut end is flat and square to the edges. A block of
wood is clamped to a plank to act as an end stop, and the fingerboard blank is butted up
against it. A ruler marked in half-millimeters is also butted up to the stop and clamped
down on the fingerboard blank. The plans with the list of fret distances is handy, and so
is a can of caffeine-free diet Pepsi (you don't want shaky hands or a sugar high).

A knife is used to mark each fret position.

This is just a nick, and will be gone over
with a square to make a clear cut mark
across the board.

Here I've marked the fret at 158.6616 mm

from the nut. Just kidding. I aim for the
nearest quarter of a millimeter, since my
scale is marked in half-millimeters. Just a
little nick with the knife at this point, and
then take away the scale and use the
engineer's square to mark a fairly heavy
knife cut straight across the fretboard at
each nick.

This fretting saw came from Stewart MacDonald. I've adjusted the side rider to the
depth I want the slots plus the thickness of the blade of the engineer's square, so it stops
cutting downward when the slot is 1/8" deep.
I had a good deal of trouble with the saw binding in the slot while cutting these. There is
little or no set on this saw (the teeth of a saw are are "set" by bending them to alternate
sides of the blade to make the cut a little wider than the thickness of the saw, to prevent
binding). I smeared a little Butcher's wax on the teeth of the saw, which helped, but it
had to be renewed after cutting every second fret. In one instance, the saw bound in the
slot, then bounded out of it, putting a deep gouge in the surface of the fretboard.

Here the slotted board is ready for gluing.

The rest of this page has few photos for a
lot of work, because I got into the work
and neglected to take them. In addition,
many of the steps involve subtle changes
in the contour of the surface of the
fingerboard, something it's a little difficult
to get good pictures of! I'll do my best to

describe in words what's missing in the pics. After slotting for the frets, the shape of the
fingerboard is laid out on the fretboard blank and the blank is cut down close to the line
with the bandsaw and then trimmed to shape with a plane.

C&N say to cut slots for twenty frets and

then cut off the fingerboard just past
where the twenty-first fret would go.
Since I'm using a different plan than they
are, I was wary of blindly following this.
I decided to cut the twenty frets and get
the thing glued to the neck and test-fitted
to the box before deciding where to cut it
off. Besides, I thought I might want to try
some kind of treatment at the end of the fretboard. Stay tuned.
Here the trimmed fretboard is being glued to the neck. The thick caul on top is 3/4"
plywood. It's intended to insure that uneven clamping pressure doesn't introduce a curve
into the assembly.

This block is clamped to the tenon to

provide support for the overhanging part
of the fretboard during the fretboard
radiusing and fretting operations. Here's
where the photos get pretty thin. For a
better description than I can craft, see
Cumpiano & Natelson. In brief, the
fingerboard top is shaped so that a smooth
curve that results in a difference of about
1/16th" between the sides and the crown
is planed in all along the fingerboard.
Because the fingerboard is wider at the
body end than at the nut end, this results
in the shape of part of the surface of a
cone, with the fingerboard running straight under each string. C&N recommend final
sanding after the frets are installed for beginners, but say they final-sand first, and are
careful when installing and shaping the frets. So I say what the heck, I'll sand down to
320 grit before the frets go in, and if I screw up I can always re-sand.
Installing the frets goes smoothly -- again, not much to photograph about this process.
Frets come in a four-foot length of t-shaped wire, and you can cut off a piece and gently
tap the lower part of the T into the fret slot. Or, you can hold the end of the wire to the
slot and tap it in, and then cut it off. After fumbling around with the first process for a
while I settled on the second. You cut it with a strong pair of wire-cutting pliers -- it's
pretty thick and it takes a good strong squeeze.
After all the frets are installed, the cut ends are hanging over the edge, and they need to
be filed flush to the side of the fingerboard. If you trimmed the side of the neck blank
right down to the line before this, you've made a mistake -- the file rides nicely on this

overhang while staying vertical to eat away the fret ends flush to the ebony. When the
ends are flush, the file is tilted and run along the ends of the frets to put a 30-degree
angle on the ends of the fret beads (the bead being the visible part of the installed fret
wire, while the tang is the part inside the slot).

As you can see here, I've cut off the end

of the fingerboard a little generously; I'm
still deciding what to do with the end.
I am tremendously psyched by the end of
today's work I swear I eat up more time
sticking the neck back on the box for
photo-ops than I do building. Not quite
true, but what the heck. It helps morale to
sit back and see the progress you've
made.

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Week 12 June 4 - 13
The process of carving the neck was one of my favorite parts of this project so far. That
may go some way to explain why I didn't stop and take pictures between the beginning
and end of the process -- it was too relaxing and too much fun. C&N have a very good
pictorial series on this process, words for once having failed them to explain the carvin'
o' the neck. I'll have to wimp out and refer you to them for the pictorial steps. If you've
been following along, you'll probably be relieved that I haven't snapped in excruciating
detail!
Well, this is rather clever, isn't it? I got the
soundboard clamp and put the bolt
through one of the bench-dog holes in my
bench and through one of the tuningmachine holes in the peghead. This holds
the neck steady so I can use two hands to
operate the spoke shave seen in the
background and in the next picture.

I set about carving without attaching the heel cap. So here it is being glued on ex post
facto.

This shows the heel cap glued on and

partly carved to match the heel profile,
and also a notch I've cut into the heel
tenon to accommodate the binding
running along the back underneath the
heel. Here you can also see one of my
many klutz marks, a chip out of the edge
of the heel that's going to show when the
guitar is assembled.

I told you I didn't stop to take pictures during the carving process. The peghead-to-neck
transition needs a little more work here, but not much. You can see the edge of the scarf
joint running across the peghead here.

This came out rather well, and I'm pleased

with the shape. I had a bit of trouble
visualizing it in a vacuum, and I didn't
like the style of transition pictured in
C&N, so I referred to other guitars I had
around the house to get a feel for how to
shape this. It just needs a little touching
up here.

I rounded over the corners of the peghead. It still seems to want an inlay, but I think I'll
pass up on that for a while. I may do it as a retrofit, if I think of something to put on it!
I agonized over what to use to finish the guitar. Everything seemed either extremely
difficult or toxic or expensive to equip for. I read dozens of articles about guitar
finishes. Shellac was attractive because it is non-toxic and requires more skill and
patience than costly equipment. I've always been shy of finishes in my woodworking,

tending toward oil and wax rather than anything sprayed or brushed. I also have had
problems with dust in my basement shops over the years, so something that basically
dries as you put it on is a plus. I settled on padded shellac as my finish.
Shellac applied with a pad is a very old, traditional finish for musical instruments. It
makes a very thin and flexible finish that will not scratch white and which can take a
high gloss. Shellac is either an excretion of insects that attach certain South Asian trees
or an excretion of the trees attacked by the bugs or a combination of the two -- there is
some controversy. The stuff is non-toxic; in fact shellac is approved by the U.S. Food
and Drug administration as a coating for
pills and candy.
The process of finishing with padded
shellac is often called French Polishing,
and the shellac dissolved in alcohol is
often referred to as French Polish. The
LMI handbook/catalog has two articles on
French Polishing giving two quite
different techniques, and Fine
Woodworking On Finishing has two
articles giving two more different
approaches. American Lutherie has some
more different advice in The Big Book Of
American Lutherie (Volume 2). I read
them all and picked the easiest one!
The pad in the picture is made of an old sweat sock rolled up and wrapped in a piece of
a cotton tee shirt. The pad is called a fad or a pad or a mueca or a tampon or a sock
wadded up in a piece of tee shirt. The shellac comes in solid flakes that must be
dissolved in pure grain alcohol (you can use denatured alcohol, but I really don't believe
in using denatured alcohol -- all it is is alcohol with poison added to it to make you
throw up if you drink it. I know I'm not going to drink it (and what if I did?), and I have
no children in the house, so why bother?). I got a glass jar and filled it about an inch
deep in shellac flakes (I got 'em from Woodworker's Club/Woodcraft) and put in
alcohol up to an inch and a half. I shook it and put it away for a few days, shaking it
whenever I thought of it. When I went to use it, I put it in a (brand new) mustard
dispenser so I could easily charge the pad
with controlled amounts.
The first step is to give the whole guitar a
wash coat of the shellac. This will serve
as a base for the filler on the rosewood
parts. I squirt a little polish onto the pad
and rub it in small circles on the surface
of the guitar body. According to the things
I've read, I never let the pad stop on the
surface, but "glide" it onto and off of the
surface. I rub until the pad is somewhat
dry and is just beginning to stick on the
surface, and then shoot a little more polish into it and go on. The resulting layer is so

thin that it lacks any tack to pick up dust, and is practically dry to the touch.

This is going to take a lot of short

sessions, so I seal the pad in a jar with a
little alcohol. I try a little drop of white
glue on the tip of the mustard dispenser to
see if it will keep the shellac fresh.
Update: the drop of glue disappeared,
either it shrank back away from the hole
or it fell in (I hope not, and I don't think
so) but the shellac shows no sign of
drying out over the course of three days
(so far).

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Week 13: June 11 - July 22 (long week!)

I've taken a little family vacation, which has kept me out of the shop for a while! I'm
back in the shop as of July 1, and bodying up the finish. Finishing has been a long,
frustrating, but edifying procedure. It hasn't come out as well as I'd hoped, but I think
next time it will come out better. There were effects that I can't explain, and some
mistakes that I do understand. I'm glad I went with the French polish process, if only
because I know I
haven't inhaled
anything toxic
while doing it.
My first mistake
resulted in the
white flecks you
can just barely see
to the left of center
on this picture, very
short lines of white.
This is pumice
trapped in the pores
of the rosewood
back. I should have

"cleared" the pumice by mixing it on the pad with alcohol before just starting to rub it
in. This mostly went away over the course of rubbing and re-rubbing, but there are still
traces of it. This is one of the aspects of French polishing where the authorities disagree;
about all they agree on is that you do it with some kind of shellac. Some say put the
pumice in tiny amounts on the pad, squirt alcohol on it, and then rub it on a small patch
at a time. Others say sprinkle it on the wood, dampen your pad and go for it.

Finish is beginning to have a deep shine a

few sessions after the previous photo. This
shine will come and go over the next
several weeks as I rub it on, rub it off, and
rub it on again.
From somewhere, a dark stain appeared
under the finish. Nothing happened that I
know of to cause this stain. You can see the

edge of it near the waist in the upper left.

The bolt holes in the head block are handy

for hanging the box to cure the finish.

I didn't fill pores on the neck, as I prefer a

less slick finish here. I know this sounds
odd, but a slightly sweaty hand can
actually stick to a high-gloss surface on
the neck. I did fill the peghead front, and
polished that surface up as much as the
body. The tape on the fingerboard was
probably unnecessary since I wasn't
spraying.

One thing I have learned well in this project is always to do dry runs of any operation
involving glue. On the dry run of attaching the neck, I found that the neck bolts were in
the way of the upper face caul. It needed another notch on the left in this picture.

Gluing down the fingerboard end so it

won't rattle. The neck joint proper is not
glued, but simply held together by the
bolts. Most folks who put on necks this
way will at least lightly glue the

overhanging fingerboard down to the neck

This is beginning to be exciting. I cut the

bridge shape out of the extra set of plans
and traced it on the bridge blank. I poked
a nail through the crosshairs on each peg
hole on the plan, making laying them out
a breeze. I also poked holes at each end of
the saddle, which turned out to be much
longer than the blank I had. No matter, as
the saddle blank is plenty wide enough to
handle the strings. I guess they liked a wide saddle on those older guitars.

Another clever use of the soundboard

cleat. I glued two small scraps of spruce
to the side to make a jig to hold the bridge
blank while sanding the bottom flat.
When I redo this text I'll count up all the
uses this soundboard cleat is put to.

The Bridge Routing And Drilling kit. Underneath is a piece of pine with to scraps of
spruce glued to it a a 1/8"-to-3" slope. This will orient the bridge blank at the proper
angle to the front edge of the pine block to have it slide along a fence on the drill press
while routing the angled slot for the saddle. To the upper left is the all-important scrap
of ebony into which I drilled test holes with the 13/64" brad-point bit. I put a little rim
on each hole with the countersink at right, and then reamed the hole with the #3 spiralflute taper-pin reamer above center. This makes a snug fit for the ebony bridge pin also
shown. Ain't it all just so complicated?

In order not to lose control of the bridge

while routing, I drilled the peg holes and
screwed the bridge down to the jig. This
will quit working after a while as different
bridges with different peg layouts are
used, since the jig would get so full of
holes as to become impossible to use this
way. It would work well with bridges of
identical design, but hey, I'm a hobbyist.
I'll be making my next bridge fourdimensional or something. Anyway the jig
took all of ten minutes to make and cost
only a few pieces of scrap. As another
brilliant innovation, I glued another small
scrap of wood to the front and carved it down so that it would indicate the depth of the
slot. I can then set the depth stop on the drill press with the bit just touching this scrap.
The drill press fence is a straight piece of wood held down to the table with a couple of
cam clamps. I waxed the front and bottom of the jig, and set the fence so that with the
jig sliding along it, the bit hits the line of where I want the slot to go. The line is not
quite visible on this photo, but the white marks I made to indicate the two ends of the
slot are. With infinite time I would have set up stop blocks on either side of the fence to
limit the travel of the jig and stop the ends of the slot, but I trusted myself to hit these
lines by eye.

The routing of the slot went beautifully, so

now I'm ready to carve. With a black or
dark brown piece of wood, it's important to
have bright light to create shadows so you
can see how the carving is proceeding.
Here's how I set up the "carving station" in
the vise at the end of my workbench. I'm a
tall guy, so these lights are normally way
up in the ceiling joists where I won't hit my
head on them. When they are up there,
however the inverse-square law means they
don't shed enough light at bench level for
carving!
I got a(nother) scrap of wood that's thinner
than the bridge is wide, and stuck the
bridge down to the edge of it with foam
double-stick tape that's sold for mounting
pictures to walls. It worked like a charm, holding it solidly but releasing quite easily
when finished. I don't know how it knows when I'm finished. This method of mounting
the blank holds it up away from the jaws of the vise so it's easy to get at from all angles
to round over edges and so forth.

I marked the line where the fist slight

slope begins and another where the
swooping curve leads down to the level of
the "wings" at the ends. I also marked this
swooping curve along the edge of the
blank, but you can barely see it in the
photo. Then I let loose with a 1" paring
chisel, followed by one of those
combination rasps that has one flat and
one half-round each of coarse and fine
teeth. I'll put a picture of it in the tools
section when I get around to it, but I know
many people will know which tool I
mean.

After the rasp it's all the different grits of sandpaper that I possess, followed by buffing
with a little cotton wheel on my Dremel tool. I don't recommend this method of buffing,
as it is too easy to slip the little wheel off the surface of the bridge and hit it with the
spinning collet. Good thing the ebony's so hard. Here with the appropriate chapter and
verse of the "Bible" for a background, is the finished bridge.

I read this clever tip somewhere about using a razor blade with the corners broken off
and a burr burnished onto it to make a mini-scraper for removing the finish under where
the bridge will go. Don't believe it. I burnished and burnished and couldn't get a decent
hook on this thing. In addition to that, a French polish finish is so thin that all you need
is a little hundred grit to get rid of it with much less damage to the underlying wood
than you get by scraping. Lesson learned.

The bridge clamped

down in the usual
way. How I got to
this point is a
comedy of errors. I
made some cauls
by gluing cork to
the bottom of some
small blocks of
wood. I figured I
didn't really need to
wait as the tack of
the not-yet-dried
glue would hold the
cork in place. I did
a trial run of the
clamping and all
went smoothly, but
when I took it apart to add the glue and do it for real, the cauls were clued to the bridge
by glue that had squeezed through the cork. Because the bridge had been finished with
its own resins as it were by simply buffing, there was nothing to keep this glue out of
the pores of the bridge. A long bout with sandpaper and rebuffing intervened. I finally
glued the thing down, as you see in this photo, without cauls but with pieces of cork
directly under the clamps.

I didn't, this time,

take photos of the
process of making
the nut and saddle,
because it was so
small and fussy and
because my
impatience to hear
this guitar
overcame my
dedication to
documentation just
this once. These
photos aren't quite
the end of the
process. I had used
MicroMesh
abrasives to polish
the French polish,
as it were. Coming
in grits from 1,500
to 12,000, they
claimed to be able
to put a high gloss
on finished wood.
I was disappointed
in the finish.
Blotchy and with
not much of a
sheen, most of the
body was not very
attractive. I know
that MicroMesh can
do the job, though,
because the
peghead came out
quite nicely -except that the
finish wore through
at the edges. I'm
trying to analyze
the reasons for the
difference. It's
possible the
peghead was flatter
and I know I did a
better job of filling
the pores there -something I will

pay much more attention to next time. I'm reading around in hopes of clues.
I was having trouble finding the last two items I needed, according to the sources I used:
a 3-M product called "Perfect It" and Meguiar's #7 Show Car Glaze. Both are Auto
Parts Store items, and as it turns out, both are pretty easy to find once you've found an
auto parts store. Astonishingly to me, I couldn't find such a store by simply driving
down Route 1. Not being much of a gearhead, I don't spend a lot of time fussing with
my car, and I haven't been to an auto-parts store since I moved to this town eight or so
years ago. I had a vague impression that they were just everywhere. I knew of two that
were located in places where parking was a nightmare, so I hoped to find one that was
more in my usual route of weekly chores. Due to my commute, finding one during the
week was out, and for a while, the weekends were full of social commitments.

To make a long story short, I found Meguiar's on the web and used their dealer locator
to find a dealer located somewhat nearby and this weekend (July 29; the guitar has been
strung up for a week) found the two items I needed early on Saturday morning. Using
them to polish the polished polish took about 45 minutes and made an incredible
difference. There are still flaws in the finish that will be lessons for next time, but now it
shines like...a new
guitar.

Also after these pictures were made, I spent time making adjustments, chasing buzzes in
the nut and the saddle, and compensating the saddle with different compensations for
each string -- you've seen the crooked saddles where the E string takeoff is at the front

of the saddle and the B string is back toward the pegs and the G further forward, with
the rest more or less evenly marching back again toward the pegs. It made a detectable
difference in intonation. I discovered that the approximately .15 inches that I added to
the scale length to get the rough compensation wasn't quite enough. At the rearmost
edge of the 1/8" saddle, the low E string is not quite far enough away.
When I first strung it up, I let go some of the tension in the truss rod to give the neck
some relief by letting it bend toward the pull of the strings. This relief gives the
fretboard a curve between the nut and the 14th fret that allows the strings room to
vibrate. After a week now the curve is getting more pronounced, so I will put a little
tension back into the rod. A few of the frets are showing a tendency to catch my fingers,
so I'll need to re-dress their ends. Many different small adjustments to make, but overall
the guitar is easy to play and has a rich, full sound. The bridge, I think, is too thick at
3/8" -- there's very little saddle under the two E strings -- so I might have to take it
down a bit. However, this is the most humid time of the year, and the top tends to crown
up with humidity, so I'm going to wait and see what happens in the fall and winter. I
may need to make a winter saddle when the strings come down too close to the frets. A
problem with the low saddle as it is now is that the angle the strings make going over
the saddle is so small that the pressure on the saddle is lessened, which lessens the
amount of volume and attack. A too-tall saddle (relative to the top of the bridge) risks
tipping forward under excessive string pressure.

Updated July 29.

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