Morning Bell / Amnesiac

Oh hey...its that time again. Time for the second semester to begin, and with it, all of the trials and tribulations of constructing my first acoustic guitar! WOO HOO!

To bridge the gap from roughly the last month between posts, I obviously finished my first semester of guitar school (4.0 GPA, might I add...). I found out that bound fingerboards are a pain in the kiester to do, but golly, do they look nice when all is said and done. It is primarily all of the prep work that needs to be done to both ends of each fret. cutting the tang off (aka the thing that holds the fret in place), filing where the tang was completely flat, then installing and most likely gluing the loose fret ends down because there is nothing holding them down, because you cut their holder off....GAH!

All gripes aside, it was nice to have a few weeks off to relax and not have any deadlines facing me. It was also nice to not have to grocery shop/free laundry/home cooking for that time period, too...but like all things, they get boring and monotonous, and I found myself longing to be back at my workbench surrounded by my tools and the environment of the workshop. (Notice how I specifically said workbench and not the apartment in RW? Those who have conversed with me in the past few months know what I am getting at...)

It was a little tough getting back into the swing of things, which isn't the best, because we jumped into the semester head first with both feet into the deep end, sink or swim, in over our heads, until the cows came home, and the fork ran away with the spoon...that got away from me a little bit.

If you understood the reference...nice job...and DON'T BLINK!

We got right to it. First there was our workboards, otherwise known as the platform where we will be building out guitars for the next semester. Then there is our plexiglass templates for our guitar body shape and neck profile (that stuff is a bear to work with). Next was creating various jigs and fixtures to assist in the building process; followed by sanding our guitar tops, jointing, gluing, sanding some more, flexing/testing the wood's strength, sanding again, before we lay out out body outline where we want it and start cutting away and installing the rosette (the fancy bit around the soundhole).

getting a rough idea of the body shape

planing the center edges flat and square to each other

We check for gaps using a light box. We need to be even more accurate than we typically do, to the .0001 (TEN THOUSANDTH) of an inch.

 

 

Once that is all jointed and glued,

they are sanded to right around 3mm thick...luckily there is a machine that does this and I'm not forced to do it by hand.

then we can start laying out our body outline and where the rosette will go. I still need to rough cut the body shape out and draw out the rosette and sound hole location tomorrow...