kwakatak

The top is nearly braced and ready to start voicing. The Carpathian is down to .105" at the centerline and under .098" at the edges so it's at the razor's edge for stiffness. I showed it to Tim McKnight who flexed and tapped it and pronounced it still usable but typical Martin style bracing was not going to stiffen it up so it would be bass heavy and lack articulation. Being of the Somogyi school he suggested a design that I found radical and beyond my ability to execute so I asked if I could do a double X brace variation? As for the bridge plate I haven't decided on a material yet. I am thinking of going with rosewood. As you can see by the outlines it's going to be slightly oversized.

Thank you. I put a lot of thought into it. If I'd had a sanding dish it would be a matter of looking for 100% contact all the way around with the help of a flashlight. I've addressed your concern with the use of locking washers and a regular nut/locking washer/regular washer underneath so that the threaded rod is fixed in place. Meanwhile, the sanding block can descend on the rod but it cannot rise above the height set by the top wing nut. When I can do a complete revolution without resistance I know I'm done; when I hit resistance I know I've hit a high point. Now I'm done and on to sanding a 1.5 degree angle in to the upper face of the neck block tongue. That will hopefully prevent the dreaded 14th fret hump.

Things have slowed down a little but I'm still at it. Family stuff had literally gotten crazy and about 2 months ago we decided to do something about it. Now I have more time to myself but in my current state of mind that's not a good thing so I've been trying to keep busy and find more positive diversions. These past few weeks I've been focusing more on home repairs and renovations but am still turning to this when I hit a wall. Anyway, developments this past month have been on bracing the soundboard and binding the fretboard: I bought jigs from Stewmac to radius the braces. I figure I don't really need a radius dish for the glue-up. Just lots of clamps: I cut an arc at the end of the fretboard and used my wife's clothes iron to bend some maple. Don't tell her I did that! She's likely to go out and buy another iron now - as if GAS was bad enough! The woman has an entire collection of curling irons and hair dryers too. The A Frame/upper transverse brace and the finger braces have no radius so I used my homemade gobar deck. I also revised my setup to sand the rims without having to drop $160 for radius dishes by cutting an arc on the underside of a couple of 2x4s and and anchoring it all on a threaded dowel in my work table.

My next major steps are gluing to maple binding on the fretboard and bracing the soundboard. Even though the back is braced and the braces chiseled once the soundboard is braced and partly voiced I intend to glue the soundboard to the rims first to complete the voicing process.I'm really looking forward to closing the box and setting the neck but until then I can lay things out and compare this build with my first. I'm pretty proud of how close the headstock came out to the original. The ziricote headstock veneer is thicker than the original's rosewood so I had to thin the headstock a lot more but the Gotoh 510 midsized tuners are a bit heavier than the basic Gotoh tuners so the neck on #2 here feels much heavier. One thing that is different with #2's neck is that I have purposely left the heel thicker at the end cap. #1's neck was a mess because I drilled laterally across the tenon to admit barrel bolts and it compromised the bottom half of the entire heel, causing it to actually break off. #2 has threaded inserts but I still need to epoxy them into the tenon.

Skipping ahead a bunch of steps I have something resembling the finished neck. There will still be some final carving once the fretboard has been installed but first I need to finish the body in order to set the neck. Close up views of the heel to follow. I was not able to bring it to a sharp point, opting for a more semi-oval shape to the heel cap.

The previous two days have been spent concentrating on shaping the neck. I went on to carve out the entirety of the neck shaft's profile using a combination of a curved profile file, a band of 80 grit sandpaper and a card scraper. I tried using a spokeshave but couldn't get it to work smoothly without too much "chatter" leaving gauges into the wood. Then I moved on to shaping the heel. In hindsight I should have done this step first as I did during my first build. First, I used my block plane to taper the heel toward the end cap. I originally wanting to cut it out using a coping saw (since my bandsaw is too small) but the blade traveled a bit too much for my comfort. My 3/4" chisel was not cutting very cleanly either as I was attempting to carve across the grain using the flat side of the blade and the angled edge was better suited to the fine tuning the final profile shape. Moving on to the next facet I again tried both sides of the 3/4" chisel and found the grain to be resisting, whether it was because of grain orientation or the sharpness of the chisel I am not sure. I opted to move on to using the file and sandpaper instead.

Moving right along to the neck profile, I put some protective tape on my inspiration for the neck profile: my trusty Larrivee OM-03R which is very comfortable to play. Using a cheap profile gauge I took a measurement of the Larrivee's 1st fret and overlaid it at the same area on my neck: As you can see, the area is pretty close to being finished. Next is to take a similar measurement of the Larrivee neck at the 10th fret and set to work on that area on my neck blank. As with the basswood on the kerfed linings on the rims things are proceeding pretty quickly but I have a ways to go before I get there. Still, I think I've made some decent progress this week.

Moving along in a slightly different direction in order to keep up on momentum - and not concentrate on a life issue that I will not discuss here - I shifted focus back to the neck. As you know, I had been focusing on the profile of the neck at the 1st fret and reducing the thickness of the headstock in order to accept a set of midsize 18:1 ratio Gotoh 510 tuning machines. Well, I got the headstock as thin as I was willing to go and using a caul and my new drill press I drilled out pilot holes for the tuners and used a reamer as a bit to widen them out. The placement isn't perfect as the drill press is a bit small and clamping the headstock down with cauls on either side is tricky so I aimed to get things "close enough." This is a hobby so I have no delusions of perfection. Here's how things came out: I would like to note a couple of things: 1: using a reamer and drill press generates a LOT of heat. In fact, there was smoke. It appears that it is very easy to scorch ziricote and it almost appeared to have melted around the edges of the hole. Gladly, there was no charring and a couple of passes with a card scraper smoothed things out fine. 2: the tuners make the headstock VERY heavy. From experience with my first build, this neck is going to be very heavy, though I have also noted that on my first build the mahogany/cedar body is very light in weight. The EIR rims OTOH already feel heavier. The entire guitar is going to be heavier. Hopefully there will be a better balance between the body and the neck.

In order to attach the back and top to the sides I have to sand the kerfing to match their radius. As i understand it, the radius of the plates is determined by the underside arc of the bracing. To do that, I purchased preradiused jigs from LMI at are only 16" across. The length of the body is 20" though and I wasn't willing to pay $75 for a radius dish - let alone $150 for two of them - so I had to get creative. In my basement I have a 2X4, a chop saw and a bandsaw. I also have a pencil and some rules but that should be a given. Long story short, I cut two 2 foot long sections of the 2x4 and marked the centerline of each as well as the centerline of both the 15' and 30' radius jigs. I traced the arc of each on a 2x4, extended the arc by overlapping the jig over the drawn line and voila! a 24" long radius. After an hour or so of slowly and painfully trying to stay true to that line with the bandsaw and planing/scraping/sanding it as true as I could get it I had two sanding cauls for the rims: For my birthday I got some spending money and I went to Harbor Freight with a 20% off coupon and bought myself a little 8" drill press. I marked the centerpoint and using the biggest drill bit I have I drilled a hole in the middle of each sanding caul. I also marked out the center in the top of my homemade gobar deck/work table and drilled a hole. I clamped the rims and mold to the table top then I searched in vain for a threaded metal rod but ended up using the drill bit to mount the caul over it: I grant you, it is imprecise and unwieldy but it works well enough as long as I'm diligent. I monitored the depth of the imaginary "dome" by finding the lowest point in the revolution of the caul and wraped the bit with some painter's tape. Using a block plane I smoothed out the high points then I found some 80 grit sanding belts and a stapler and went to work "driving the bus" as John Hall puts it. It's not perfect but I think I did a pretty good job on the back plate. I have yet to set up the 30' radius caul for the topside rim. Doing the back was exhausting enough. Still, even though the back rim is ready I will wait to glue on the top plate first when it's all braced up.

The other day I had three amjor things planned that didn't get done that left me upset. This has been good therapy and there's no better part than when you have to actually do some shaping, so I jumped into shaping the volute on the neck: I also cut out the sound hole: Yes, I realize that there's a hunk of my rosette missing, that there are some "irregularities" to my soundhole and that the abalone lost a lot of its luster because I had to sand it down a little . Next time I will do better with the bling. The soundhole can be fixed. .

I worked on the headstock and rosette yesterday. I really like this set of bookmatched ziricote that RC Tonewoods sent me. I think it sort of looks like a flaming torch. Working with Zip Flex for the rosette was remarkably easy - maybe even easier than working with the wood fiber purfling strips. It's still slightly proud of the top but I don't want to rout anymore so I just glued it in with runny CA glue. Hopefully the Ablam sands well. If not, more routing. I am leaving my circle cutter and Dremel untouched so that I can just rout it out if I sand away all the abalone. BTW, I made another montage video. I'm just having fun with this. 9HHZAHNoRf0

This thread is well in need of update. I've kept it up more at AGF but even then it's been lax. I've just had bigger fish to fry regarding my son with autism. Long, private story there but these past few weeks I've had time and a need to concentrate on other things so I'm back it. So where were we? December? OK, then. Let's start with the rosette, then touch upon the soundboard as a whole before moving on to the neck, shall we? This is where we have nearly ended up: As you can see, a long far cry from the bold herringbone that I was originally going to do. The circle cutter just wouldn't cooperate so cutting a singe trench seemed easier. Cutting up scrap of rosewood in perfect angles to make 12 segments of a radial rosette proved tricky enough to have to do twice. I also bought another circle cutting jig that cost me $10 on Amazon that isn't a perfect solution - but that's what they sell purfling for: to cover up your mistakes. Eventually I got the hang of running the Dremel at a fixed depth and working slowly and at lower RPMs. I know that's still not ideal but I'm patient. Luckily, it turns out that my only major mistake will be hidden by the fretboard. Moving on to the neck, I have been refining the shape of the headstock and even started filing away at the first fret area to make the neck profile there. Meanwhile, I've also glued on the headplate veneer. I actually just complete trimming it to nearly match the shape of the headstock. I've yet to get it to the desired thickness. Right now it's a tad thick and hefts like the woodle paddles that we used to make in shop class for our favorite teacher who used to practice corporal punishment. My kids don't know how good they have it! Going back in time a little bit, I attended the McJam and showed Tim McKnight my soundboard. He ran a deflection test on it, handed it to his daughter - and protoge (sp) and schooled her on how thin was too thin. Tim - who I count as one of my dearest friends - then went into his wood locker and provided me with bracing that he said should tame that top that according to him is going to be bass heavy and loud. I won't post pics out of respect but the the lower bout will be overbraced with a sort of Triple X bracing pattern with an A frame upper bout bracing. He cautioned me against scalloping the bracing and instead stick with a parabolic shape - a la Larrivee. \ Moving back further, I also braced and outlined the back plate. With luck I'll soon be just as far along with the soundboard. After that I anticipate getting the sides ready to accept the plates. That will involve getting access to radius dishes - but given the Tim gave me preradiused X bracing I has to look a gift horse in the mouth and ask what that radius is. I have access to my friend's 28" and 20" radius dishes but they aren't necessary for closing the box, just sanding the kerfing.

Thanks, Freeman. The fretboard and body are going to be bound with curly maple. purfling combination for framing TBD.

Last week I went over to my friend's shop and finished thickness sanding the back and sounboard. The back plate is now .095" thick and the sounboard is a tad thin at .011" in the center and just below .009" at the edges. That's as thin as I dare to go. I also sanded the back braces to a 20' radius using his radius dish. The OLF MJ plans call for a 16" radius but he didn't have a 16' radius dish. I don't care for such a pronounced dome on the back anyway. In the meantime, I've picked up work on the rosette. I've been trying to work around the limitations of the Dremel plunge router base's circle cutter so the inside edges of the trench and ring to be inlaid are still a bit rough. The idea is to get things close enough so that when I pay my friend's workshop I can use his Stewart MacDonald circle cutter I can finish the job. I already have it measured to take a double ring of fine BWB purfling both on the inside and outside edges of the radial rosewood ring. The darned thing doesn't want to stay together though; I've been having to piece it back together many times with CA glue.

The back is just about ready to be braced. Maybe one or two passes in the thickness sander first to get things to a uniform .095" thick before moving ahead. I cut out the shape though to expedite the process. The braces are rough shaped to 1/4" thick by 3/4" tall but also need to be radiused underneath as well. Meanwhile, in getting the top ready I had trouble getting the channels routed cleanly for the herringbone rosette so I'm ditching it. Using random sections of the trimmed back and following a tutorial for radial rosette I've got 12 sections cut and ready to be glued together. I measured out for a ring to cover my boo boo. The plan is to borrow my friend's StewMac circle cutter because the Dremel brand one is crappy and made for too many irregularities in depth and radius of the cut.

Yesterday I worked on sanding and scraping away at the thickness of the back. I'm down to about .095" in places and am being cautiously optimistic. Hopefully I can get it down to a uniform thickness in just a few runs through Mr. Kitchen's drum sander next week? Regardless, I'm getting close so my through two started turning toward bracing. I have the spruce billets split, a nice sharp plane and a small bandsaw on hand to get them to the desired thickness, length and height but the plated is still rectangular. I discovered that my plexiglass template was broken however, so I decided to leave my sides in the mold on top of the plate. It was here I discoverex that my back is just slightly narrower than the width of the body. Not by much; at the ends of the lower bout the kerf is slightly exposed; a little trickery with purfling should hide any gap. Just to be sure, I laid my first guitar build on the plate and found that it wasn't all that bad. So I traced inside the mold, then added another 1/2"'for wiggle room and turned my attention to the braces. All that I need to do now is radius the bottoms then I can start gluing things up.

Thanks! I've been waffling on what I'm going to do with regards to fretboard binding. Originally I was going to bind it with ebony and stick a piece of white purfling between to give it a faux border - not to mention hide the side of the fret tines. Now I'm thinking maybe I'll just go with maple for contrast. That has me rethinking body binding now though. I was going to use ebony there too but now I'm not so sure. My neck has maple as a laminate so maple binding would tie in there. Then there's the matter of carving the neck. I think I need to bite the bullet and buy a spokeshave. Last time I used a sandpaper roll cut open to sort of "bootstrap" the blank into a round shape. It was slow going and I'm still not happy with the neck profile of number one. Strangely, spoke shaves - and any specialized hand tool really - are pretty hard to find in brick and mortar stores. It's almost easier buying a firearm around here it seems. Please, no comments. I just want to be able to carve the neck once the frets are in. That I'm nearly ready to go on.

I've been focusing on the fretboard inlay for the last couple of weeks. I opted to upgrade from white pearloid crosses to abalone crosses instead. It's been a learning curve but I think I have a system down. The key is to find not only the centerline along the length of the fretboard but the centerline between each fret too. I found that masking the fretboard with tape also has two benefits. First, you can see every pencil mark better than on ebony. Secondly. when laying the inlay on the board to scribe the outlines it tends to not want to slide around like if it were placed on the bare board. Finally, go with a smallish bit and take things slow. Anyway mistakes can be filled in with some glue mixed with ebony dust.

Yep, that's what I have. Do you have a close up of how much you cut off?

Already done. I wash coated the entire top with 1lb cut of shellac flake that I bought from StewMac last year. As for the circle cutter, I started with a popsicle stick with an exacto knife to start things out then moved on to using the Dremel plunge router base's circle cutter and some new bits that I bought online. The problems I'm coming up with are: 1: my inner rosette ring is smaller than the circle cutter will go so. 2: my smallest fluted bit is wider than the purfling I want to use so I've been using a rounded bit. 3: the circle cutter has some play in it so the large central ring is slightly oval in spots and even though I measured, the radius for the herringbone ring is smaller than the trench I cut for it. Not a big deal but the edges are not going to be crisp.

*Phew!* Both blocks and the new reversed kerfing are all glued in. Things look like they should have last week when I did these steps the first time. Now on to finish inlaying the rosette. It could be going a little better but I don't have the best circle cutting jig. I'm going to be using a LOT of extra purfling strips.

OT: I've been trying to get my 8yo involved. He's been giving everybody a lot of trouble but shows an interest in music. Since my guitars have been taking such a beating when he and his brother are around I've tried to interest him in other musical instruments that can take more of a pounding - literally. So last winter I bought the keys for a 2 octave xylophone from the local Rockler along with a 3/4" thick board of padauk. I ripped it into 1" wide planks a couple of weeks ago and am in the process of trying to figure out how to mount them so that they ring out without being muted by the mounting screws. Here he is hamming it up between sessions of telling me what to do (he gets that from his mother) and how what I'm doing is wrong. You gotta love kids.

I glued in the tail block this afternoon. I don't think it's crooked this time, but if it is I'll just steam it off again. Meanwhile, I've been working on the rosette. The popsicle stick circle cutter is good for cutting out the initial line but still leaves room for guesswork with regards to the depth of the channels. Scoring the outlines seemed to help somewhat but I opted to used my Dremel with a double fluted downcut bit to do the job on the main herringbone ring the right way. The Dremel brand router stand/circle cutting jig doesn't go small enough to do the inner rosette ring though. I'll need to work very carefully by hand on that ring. I also tried to whittle way at the thickness of the back the other night too. It's over 1/8" thick. I'd like to take it down by 1/3 but using a bench plane to do that has really been a hassle.

I wasn't about to give this one up - and truth be told I was kind of hoping that it would draw out some of our fellow tinkerers. This forum has been so dead lately it's depressing. Anyway, the neck block is glued back on but I'm waiting until tomorrow to glue in the tail block. I need to take it out of the mold to do that because there just aren't many good points to clamp all four corners of the block; the mold is only 3" deep whereas the sides are about 4-3/4". Sure, I could use a cawl but the sides have lots of play the way it is and I already split one of the sides. As with my Larrivee, thank God for east Indian rosewood's dark grain and pliable qualities! Meanwhile, I just cut more shellac to use as a wash coat on the soundboard and have fashioned a homemade circle cutter using a nail, a popsicle stick and an Exacto knife blade. I don't know if my chisel is quite narrow enough to rout out the central herringbone ring so I have my Dremel with several 2 flute downcut bits that I bought online. I'm proceeding VERY slowly. Sorry no pics, my iPhone took another dunking and I'm a bit tense about it. OT: The iPhone still works but I turned it off and put it in a bag of rice. I'm not touching it for at least three days. My wife says if it dies I go back to having a flip phone because this iPhone replaced one that took a dip in the washing machine thanks to my autistic son's fascination with it and running water and my general absentmindedness when it comes to the whereabouts of my things at any given moment. .

I wasn't sure which guitar you were talking about? if it's that old Olson dread it lives out in Wyoming with its owner. Instead, what I'm going to do is approximate the bracing pattern of my first build along with the abutted upper transverse brace a la Ervin Somogyi only this time the X brace will be 1/4" thick instead of 5/16". As you know, I love the Martin HD-35 and I'm hoping that the 4-1/2"'deep body retains the bass rumble but with the focus of a jumbo because of the tighter waist.