I’ve been really bad at keeping this up to date. There are probably about 15 posts I could make at this point, but I’ll keep it short and post a pictoral update.
I actually made a test guitar body to try a few things out. I’ll skip all that stuff and move to the real guitars.
For these two, I wanted to try laminated linings, made of basswood and walnut in this case. After one other attempt in laminating right on the guitar form, I made some simple fixtures and roped them together. This worked really well.
These will be my first cutaways. The sides were thicknessed, primarily with the drum sander, then switching to a scraper. The bass side was a simple bending operation. The treble side was a bit more complicated. I bent the waist and lower bout, then cut the side at the start of the cutaway and bent the remainder in reverse. All this to get a good match on the wood grain and ambrosia stripe.
The match was good enough that I decided to try to miter the point and skip binding it. Worst case is if it didn’t turn out, I could resort to binding.
Mitered the tip.
Came out nicely. I even wrapped the side over the neck block, simply because I didn’t decide on a final style for the heel yet.
Back to the linings. Rather than just radius the inside corner, I had a scratch stock that I made. I used it to dress the profile. Came out well and probably didn’t take any longer than a simple radius.
Inside detail of finished rim.
Finished rim. Minus soundport.
The tops and backs were joined.
The bracing was split and prepped.
I did a fairly tight radius on the backs. This led to a rather unorthodox clamping method, both for the changing radii and for a quick glue up with hot hide glue,
Trial fixture.
Better final fixture.
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I also made all the binding from raw wood as well as the rosette.
Here is the binding.
And purfling.
I’ll make a separate post on the rosette.
Thats about it for now. Short post for a lot of work.
MaterialAlchemy 