How about an end wedge?

(if you’re viewing this on facebook go to http://wp.me/pgvzg-3H so you can see the photos in this blog)

Hey folks. Hope your weekends are all going well… just got back from the shop so I thought I would post some more.

First off, here’s the back of my guitar again. I spent some time cleaning it up with a card scraper and some sandpaper (I used 80 grit and then 150 grit). This is the side that will be facing the inside of the guitar.

I tried to get a good shot of this end wedge, but it always ended up being fuzzy. It’s a piece of flamed maple I cut out and goes on the bottom of the guitar where the two sides meet at the end block.

Here I traced where the wedge is going and used a dovetail saw to cut the lines.

I then used a chisel to take off that excess bit of side and I cleaned up some of the glue.

I then glued it on, tapped the wedge in to place and put some clamps on it to make sure it didn’t pop back out of place.

I cut off the excess length with the ban saw and here I am using a card scraper to bring the thickness of the wedge to the thickness of the sides. I ran out of time so I still need to finish doing that.

Next up I’ll be making the braces for the back of the guitar and more. Yippe!

Let’s make a guitar back

It’s been a long day, so I’m gonna speed through this

if you read the last post i did i talked about the sanding disks we use to radius the sides of the guitar. This one is a 15 foot radius and used to radius the back side of the guitar.

So among many things, I worked on the back of my guitar today. I didn’t grab any pics of thickness sanding the back (woops) but here are the two pieces that willl make up the back of the guitar after running them through the safety plane. I joined the two edges facing each other with a #7 lee Nealson hand plane and a shooting board (I can explain more if anyone is interested) and next step is to glue them together.

Here is our shop’s brand new nifty gluing jig with the back of my guitar in it. It’s kinda hard to see clearly, but this has three wedges that are driven in under those ropes effectively putting even pressure both downward and pulling the wood together. We have some simpler ones that work on a different concept but I couldn’t resist using the fancy one.

Here i am tapping the wedges in. You might also notice a peice of paper on top of my wood, there’s one underneath too… this is so I don’t glue the back of my guitar to the jig. That would be bad.

Here she is, all glued up (I cleaned the glue off too). I’m really hoping that little gold streak in the wood will stay, I still have to thin it down to the final thickness with a card scraper, and there is a chance that the color doesn’t go very deep.

Many appologies

Alright everyone who I abandoned some months back…

School has started up again and I had planned on skipping the whole blog thing because I was so busy last semester. But Audrey has pleaded with me and her sheer awe in me building a guitar this semester has changed my tune. So I will blog my progress like I tired to last year in my classes. I really don’t have a lot of time, so a lot of my posts might be heavy on the pictures and light on wordage (yeah right… you know I’m a bit of a chatty Kathy).

I apologize that you don’t get to see everything from the very beginning… I just didn’t start taking pictures until a little bit in. No worries though… if you have questions please leave a comment, send me and e-mail or whatever you want and I will try my best to get back to you. So I guess I’ll just jump right in. (by the way, if you click on the images you can see a bigger resolution)

Here I am sanding the the sides of my guitar down. I have the top side of the guitar facing down on the sandpaper (the red stuff). Guitars, generaly speaking, have a slight curvature to the top of the guitar (it’s a 30′ radius). So the sandpaper I am using is actually on a big disk that already has that radius in it.

This is what the inside curve of the sides of my guitar looks like. I am using Indian rosewood. It originally came in two straight pieces that were about a quarter of an inch thick (about 6 millimeters) and book matched (this means they were cut in a way that made them mirror images of eachother). I had to bring the thickness down to about 2 millimeters and then I bent them using heat and a form. It’s not actually possible to attach them to eachother in the orientation I need, so they are attached to a heel block and an end block (you can see those in the 1st picture… they are mahogany and I had to cut them and shape them as well)

This is the inside again. I needed to clean everything up so that it wasn’t so rough. I used a tool called a card scraper to do the job. Make’s it look nice… I think this is the bend at the head of the guitar… the previous one was towards the end.

Next I installed the kerfing on the sides of the guitar. I will have to install this on both the top and back. These make the sides much more sturdy, vibrate less (which helps the sound) and provides surface area so I can attach the top and back. Right here i actually am bending the kerfing without any glue so I can cut it to legnth and get it to hold shape. I had to wet the side of the kefing that faces away from the guitar sides with hot water, so it would bend.

Here I have glued the kefing on the sides. I am using to high-tech claming devices to keep pressure on evenly (yes they are clothes pins with rubber bands on the end)

Here it is, in place. I have a good bit of glue to clean up… especially on the side your looking at. I also would like to mention the form the guitar is in. Right now the guitar is still very fragile and this can keep it from cracking. as you can see there al spreaders holding it in place… although it fit’s snug enough it’s not going anywhere. You can also see the end block and heel (or head) block’s pretty well in this picture (The head is to the left)

And this is just a closeup of the kerfing… cause it’s pretty.

White oak and hatchets too

In some ways it feels like I’m starting all over in my woodworking project. I know it’s not as simple as that because much of what this project is supposed to do is produce experience, skill an knowledge. One could argue that the physical object I end up with when I done is probably just icing on the cake. With that in mind I don’t mind showing pictures of the new wood I got for the panels I managed to turn into sawdust and veneer.

A rough board of my new white oak rests on a workbench at school. I have some marks laying out where each panel is coming from. I personally really like the golden color of the wood... I don't think I really had appreciation for the look of white oak before starting this program.

You can see the beautiful color and grain now that I've milled these up a bit more. Some of the walnut I bought I am still going to be able to use and I think these two woods will really compliment each other.

In Drawing we are finally done with the conte crayon exercise. I think i posted a picture to point that I deemed complete on my twitter… let’s see… here we go:

if you click on it, it will take you to a larger resolution.

Now we are onto a new medium entirely. That would be cross hatching and stippling. I’m sure most of you are familiar with these methods… cross hatching is creating a tonal drawing with crossing lines and stippling is doing the same with dots. I chose my hand at stippling… not sure why, just seemed appropriate at the time. The teacher had a handout with a bunch of examples and allowed students to simply copy one of the examples (this would still be quite challenging). Not that i wanted to give myself more trouble, but I felt like I would rely too much on mechanically matching each stroke that the artist did, so i chose to draw something from life.

I not only appreciate the look that this produces, but it was one of the least stressful drawings I've done in class. Personally I can get really engrossed in drawing this and it can be really relaxing. A lot of the other students were annoyed at how slow-going and tedious this method is (in fact most chose cross hatching instead because it's not quite as repetitive) Maybe this doesn't bother me because everything I draw takes a long time right now... or maybe I have more patience than some.

We have a bench

So last week I managed to get my little bench glued together. It was a fairly crazy process. It took two people to do it, and even then we were scrambling to get it all together before the glue set. We Put the dovetails together first… which was not wise in hindsight, because the stretchers went in next… and that requited a good deal of bending (yeah that wood is way to thick to bend… it was pretty difficult). After that we clamped it up causing lots of creaking sounds and me cringing. About then we noticed that there was not enough glue in the dovetail joints. We had to pull these apart to put more in, which involved banding on the underside of the top with a mallet (used a scrap piece of wood so i wasn’t actually hitting the wood of my bench directly). The rest went pretty smooth and in the end it turned out quite well. I’m really happy with the result… it’s not perfect, but I didn’t expect it to be.

The Sunday Score – October 18th 2009

A good while back I had proposed the idea of making a segment on this blog called the Sunday Score. It didn’t really take off, but I still like the idea.. so I thought I would try again and see how it goes. Obviously this blog has changed a lot since I proposed that idea so I think the idea of what I want out of this segment has changed too. Basically I just want to share some awesome things that I’ve found in the week.

I also welcome submissions by people who are doing something they want to share (maybe a blog, maybe artwork, music, writing… I’m gonna leave this vague on purpose). So yeah, send me an e-mail from the address on my contact page and put Sunday score in the subject line and your stuff might get featured on the score.

The Google Trike

Most people have probably long ago discovered the street view feature in Google maps. One of the developers on the street view team decided it would be fun to make some street views of places where cars cannot go. They created a trike with a big camera mounted in the back and started rolling. You can submit ideas of places they could make a street-view map of on the trike as well as view some of the views they’ve made already (including Legoland in California and the Monterrey bike trail).

This is Your Paradise

User Hoodwatch on livejournal has an amazing blog called This is Your Paradise.  It contains tons photographs of different places he visits. These include abandonded buildings, museums, festivals and more. Definitley worth a look.

Picture is from his flicker photostream and the property of Hoodwatch.

Memories of the Future

I’ve been following Will Wheaton’s blog for a while now and he just released the first volume in a new series of books called Memories of the Future. It’s sort of a humorous cometary on startreck the next generation, going through each episode one by one. He also has been kind enough, or awesome enough, to make a podcast about the book aptly named Memories of the Futurecast . The podcast is really fun to listen to, he reads exerts from the book and… well it’s just really great to listen to. Here’s the first episode of the podcast (link to download it is at the bottom of the post before the comments).

Well that’s it for this week. See you next time.

Can’t help but join in their passion

The idea for this post was prompted by the a wonderful thought provoking post my friend rose wrote on her blog.

I am taking a design course at school and one of the things we talked about a lot is every artists worry that what they create might not make them money or be successful. The advice my teacher gave was… it will do what you want it to do.

What is important is not if your creation fits what other people are looking for, what matters is that it fits what you want to create. If it is true to your vision and you can hold it up to your vision and show people why and how it resonates with you, then people will get on board with you. It doesn’t mean everyone will go out and buy all your work… but if you can show people that you care about and love what you have created, and why you do then they can’t help but appreciate what you’ve done. In fact I think that that love and care you have for your work will shine through much of the time even if you don’t get to talk to people. I look at peoples work and I don’t need them to tell my why the care about it… I can see it.

I guess I’m not really sharing this to give anyone advice, as much as I want to share that it is a concern that I and many other “artists” and “craftsmen” I am in school with feel (teachers and students alike). I look at their work, and they are talented and skilled and create wonderful things, but the reason I appreciate it is not because of that… but because they are so passionate about what they have made. I can’t help but join in their passion.

90% of learning how to do something is screwing up

ot to sound negative or anything, but I believe 90% of learning how to do something is screwing up. I have been working on those re-sawn boards of walnut, trying to get them squared up so I could glue them up into a panel. They were relatively thin to begin with after the re-saw, and as I mentioned it wasn’t a very good cut. So I tried a variety of things to square up my boards. First was hand planning, which I may have mentioned already. The trouble I ran into there was the downward pressure I was exerting on the board made it bend and therefore keep the big bow I was trying to get rid of. My next plan of action was to build a sled for the planer so my board could run through it without shattering. Then I made little wood shims so that the planer would register the bottom face of my board as flat. This worked after some amount of fidgeting with the first board (my picture turned out blurry.. I’ll have to take another one). The second one would not cooperate and I ended up taking off too much wood for it to work. The third one quickly stared acting like the previous so I consulted with my teacher. I then went back to the hand plane and tried to make one face even enough for the board to register alright. I got it to work… but…

this beautiful walnut veneer might make a cool back for a ukulele some day, but it will not work for what I'm building. Measuring at a whopping ⅛ inch thickness, my teacher was actually impressed that I had managed to get anything through the planer at that thickness.

So the bad news is that none of the four boards are usable to do what I had planed. Good news is that I get to go buy some new wood!

In retrospect here’s what I learned:

• Do everything you can to ensure your board is against the fence and will stay on the fence when cutting with the table saw (using a fence obviously)
• You cannot make an accurate cut if you can’t see the fence from where you are standing (I feel pretty dumb that I had to learn that one)
• If you are planning to use a sled to plane thin boards use a hand plane as much as you can on one side first
• When doing this hand planing, square up the cupped side… it’s easier
• A block plane is a good tool for this type of job
• You can pick the lowest spot and use a marking gauge from that point to give you a rough idea where you are headed. (hope that makes sense)
• Remember… it’s just wood

I’m still here

y apologies for not posting anything new in a few day. Just wanted everyone to know I have not given up on posting, just didn’t take much for pictures and didn’t move very far forward in my projects. The boards I did the re-saw for my new project are giving me nothing but trouble right now. The re-saw was not a very good one so I am loosing a great deal of thickness… hoping that I can get them squared up and still have some amount of wood left. Trying to come up with some designs for my design class and I’m a bit stumped at the moment… I’m glad I started working on those today instead of Friday.That’s about it really.

reaching an end

reat googly moogly, am I ready for my bench to be finished. Lucky for me the end is very near. I spent last night cutting the last set of pins and they turned out great. I also spent some time with a card scraper cleaning everything up (I didn’t grab any pics of the scraping because it’s not really easy to see a difference with my camera). I think I enjoy nearing the end of a project as much as I enjoy starting one. It’s fun for me watching some big block of wood, that really doesn’t care about your project… or how much you’d like it to be arranged as as a useful object, transform into what you had wanted.

Here are the dovetails lined up. Hurray they look pretty darn good to me.

Not together yet, but balancing. yeehaw!