sMg Guitars

April 21, 2011

The first bent side is out of the bending machine.

The resulting bend is accurate yet not tight enough.  I’m resigned to the fact that I also need to apply more bend with the bending iron.

I’ve had limited success with the bending iron, mostly due to wood being too thick and preloaded with tiny cracks.  The machine bend of the first side did produce two minor cracks, which I filled with CA glue.  I took a first pass attempt at increasing the tightness of the bends with the bending iron, and found I could make some headway on tightening the bends and not introducing new or wider cracks:  all due to the nice .070″ thickness of the sides.

I will complete the hand bending just prior to installing the sides onto the work board, which is still under construction.

The workboard will be finished with sliding cauls along the outside border of the sides.  The sliding feature will allow me to use this workboard for dreadnoughts, OM’s and this Macaferri style body, along with others in between.

I usually build in a mold, which is only appropriate for guitars with dovetail or mortise/tenon bolt on necks.  The workboard is necessary for the spanish heel type construction.  This will all become obvious when I get to the step where the sides are glued to the top which has been attached to the neck.

I will have to provide a small radius bowl in the lower bout area of the workboard to accommodate radiussed X bracing.

April 20, 2011

Palo Escrito is a pleasure to work with.  I first planed the sides down to about .075″ with the Safe-T-Planer then passed them through my newly repapered drum sander to smooth them and bring down to .070″.  This is very thin, but not so for a cutaway bend.  I bent the non-cutaway side first to practice bending this stuff for the first time.

This photo shows the setup before plunging the waist press, then drawing the spring bars down across the bouts.

I’ll let this sit for a couple of hours, reheat then let sit overnight.

April 16, 2011

Using the same setup for planing the uke sides, I brought these sides down to .070″ in preparation for bending.

I’m tempted to thickness the cutaway side even more, as there is a sever bend in the upper bout.  Both sides will go through the drum sander tomorrow to clean up the planer marks left behind from the Safetee Planer.

April 10, 2011

Guitar 903, the Walnut OM, and Guitar 1001, the Koa Dreadnought, have received their fair share of lacquer coats (12 to 20) and are resting for two weeks to cure.

The lacquer needs at least two weeks to develop a hardness which is appropriate for the final knockdown and buffing.  Neck install, bridge install and setup will finalize.

March 27, 2011

Jim asked if I could tend the fretmarkers toward the bass side.  Here are a few options.

First, markers moved left and up.

Second option is to skew the diamonds and double up on 5 and 12.

March 20, 2011

We c0ncluded that paua diamonds would be the choice for fretboard markers after the experiment with wood dots went south.  The next decision point (as simple as it may seem) is whether to go with the single marker pattern or to fancy it up a bit with double markers on 5 and 12.

This is the single diamond configuration with markers at 3 5 7 9 12 15 and 17.

This configuration simply doubles the diamonds on 5 and 12.

I fully tapered the neck/neck block today using my taper jig and the table saw.  Before I remove any more stock from the cutaway side of the neck block, I’ll need to know the exact dimensional thickness of the sides coming out of the cutaway.  I added the serial number to the inside of the neck block.

March 19, 2011

Rachel returned from China/India Tuesday and she brought me a present.

She’s not sure what it’s called, so what’s it called?  I need to restring, and I’m not sure what the bridge orientation should be.

Today I added more lacquer coats to the koa dreadnought (6 of 12) and the uke (9 of 12).  The uke is a disaster.  It became dislodged from the spray booth bracket and fell to the cement causing a reasonable amount of damage, including pebbles throughout the wet lacquer coat, a chip out of the headstock, and a segment of binding with road rash.  Oh well, file it down, keep going.  Thank god this is just a “test uke”.  I’m sure it will sound lovely, but it will look like shit.

I’m also refinishing a headstock on an eBay purchased Fender koa uke.

I have some aerosol nitrocellulose that I am using to refinish this headstock.  It’s got 4 coats now, and I’ll probably go as far as 10.

I devised a little jig for drilling holes in my uke bridges.  I’m going to use bridge pins with strings secured inside the body with bone beads.  I’ll get a picture up later of the string beads.

March 18, 2011

Today is a day off school, so I’m spraying.  I’ve applied the 9th coat to the uke and the walnut OM, and the third coat (of 12) on the koa dreadnought.  It’s looking fine, after an exceptionally well executed pore filling step.

March 13, 2011

I knocked down the pore filler on the koa dreadnought.  After sanding and scraping the binding to clear off the pore filler haze, we’re ready to start the lacquer application regimen starting tomorrow.

I must say, this pore filling process worked beautifully.  The surface is mirror smooth.

March 11, 2011

Spray day today.  Added 3 more coats to Guitar 903, and Uke 1001 bringing them to 6.  Striving for 12.

Applied the first three coats to the neck for Guitar 1001 while the pore filler dries on the box.

Between coats, I spent a wee bit of time inserting a temporary piece in the truss rod channel for Guitar 1002.  This is to assist in finding the centerline for the neck as I work on the taper.