Not too much news on the guitar front, but here’s an update anyway.
I actually finished making this side bending form a week or so ago.
It made for an interesting project.
Embarrassingly enough, I had to relearn everything I had forgotten about electrical wiring.
I got it all wired up properly though, even put a timer switch on it as an added safety precaution.
3 150W bulbs in this box lined with foil tape.
And here’s the completed bender.
There are clamping cauls at the waist of the guitar and at either end.
The general idea will be to use the lamps to get the temperature inside the box to around 250-300 degrees. The individual sides will then be moistened (with rosewood some people even soak them apparently) and then placed between the two aluminum slats that are laying across the bender in the photo, and slowly bent around the form, clamped and left to cool.
I’m pretty eager to give it a try, but I need to take the sides down from their present thickness (0.100 inch) to the final thickness (0.085 inch). I intend to sharpen some scrapers and try my hand at scraping them down, but may also end up sanding them.
It’s been absolutely beautiful here the past week or so. We’ve been making the most of it, not with anything in specific, just spending a lot of time out and about, playing and working in the yard, riding the bikes, that kind of thing. Certainly haven’t been sitting around on the computer updating the blog that’s for sure, and as a result, we’ve got quite the backlog of pictures piling up…so here goes.
Here’s a photo of Anna climbing through some big tractor tires. I think this was during a trip that Nicki and Anna took to the pumpkin patch with Dawn and Kadin.
Here’s Anna “feeding” the raccoon at one of the parks we ride to. There’s also a duck, and we take turns riding on them and feeding them the wood chips that are all around.
She’s also gotten into riding on this thing (which I’m not even sure what to call). The thing really spins though. It spins faster when you lean in and then slows down when you let your body hang back like Anna is in this picture. I can ride it for about 45 seconds but Anna really likes it. She’ll even lean back and let go with her hands, the little daredevil.
Here’s a kind of random photo that I took in the late afternoon sun, included here because it shows Anna’s hair looking like her Mama’s.
Anna at Woodstock park in the playhouse. She likes to sit at this little table and “make breakfast”.
We went to the feed store for some chicken food and various supplies. We thought it might be nice to get a treat for the chickens , so we bought a small bag of sunflower seeds. We ended up giving Anna the bag when we got home and told her that she could take some handfuls to throw to the chickens. She couldn’t have been happier, and she spent a good part of the afternoon emptying at least half the bag onto the ground in a big pile at her feet. This picture has her busting out her patented fake smile, and you can also the little dimple on her cheek that she inherited from Nicki (Nicki has the mirror image one on the other cheek).
Here’s Anna offering up some more seeds for the chickens or whoever else might want them. She was talking to each of the three chickens the whole time, saying “Rosie, I can give you more” “I can give you some more seeds, Kim chee”. A $5 bag of seeds never provided more happiness I don’t think.
Yes, this picture was taken last week, and yes, the sky really was that blue.
Here’s our Saturday project this past week. Fencing in one corner of the yard for the chickens to have a fenced run. We harvested our winter squash, and the last of the onions and some radishes, and gave that corner of the yard over to the chickens, at least for the winter.
Anna helped, when she wasn’t busy distributing sunflower seeds.
And here’s the final result. We wanted something fairly temporary and easily removable, but sturdy and nice enough to leave be if we decided to leave it. I think we found a pretty good compromise. The chickens took to it, that’s for sure. They now get a lot more freedom, as we can leave them out most of the afternoon without having to be back there. Although, I have to admit, on Sunday Anna and I came home from a short trip to find Rosie and Kim Chee in the driveway. They apparently can flap right up onto the gate.
I think we’ll be making some modifications to make it more secure, but nevertheless, we and the chickens are pretty excited about our new chicken run.
Sunday we took a trip up to the Salmon River on the west slopes of Mt. Hood, in the hopes of seeing some salmon spawning. It was another great day and we had a nice walk along the river. We didn’t see any spawning fish, but we did see some baby coho fingerlings.
Anna was collecting leaves and pine cones and lichen along the way and sharing them with us.
The rest of this week should be fun. We’ve got a pumpkin to carve, and Anna’s pretty excited about her halloween costume. Hope everyone is well.
Here’s a few pictures from our (mostly) rainy weekend. Yesterday morning the rain was really coming down in sheets here in Portland, but we just didn’t feel like staying cooped up inside. We got ourselves all bundled up and headed up into Washington to an alleged chanterelle patch. The place was about an hour and a half from town, up in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest. We never did find any chanterelles, but we had some fun anyway.
Here’s Nicki and Anna, at the little campground just into the National Forest. We still don’t really have any real rain gear for Anna, so this snow suit is serving that purpose for the time being. She actually really likes it, and it kept her good and dry and warm, so I guess it works just fine for now.
Anna, smiling about as much as she is willing to when a camera is pointing at her.
We did find a few mushrooms (quite a few actually), just not the kinds we were hoping for. These were growing on the trunk of a moss covered big-leaf maple.
This is Moulton Falls on the East Fork of the Lewis River. We saw several groups of kayakers heading out for the day. Fall is kayaking season in Oregon, a wetsuit is not-optional.
Soup weather is upon us. Here’s Anna helping shred cabbage for the soup. We have been getting cabbage from the farm, and we have quite a few potatoes, so we made some colcannon soup. It’s an Irish potato and cabbage soup that we first had a year or two ago in Bemidji. Anna liked helping make it, but wasn’t so hot on the soup (and normally she loves any kind of soup).
It was actually pretty nice this afternoon, and Nicki and Anna went to the park. It looks like they spent some time playing in the leaves.
A cute self portrait, Nicki and Anna.
Hope the fall weather is treating you all well, wherever you are.
Hey folks, I wanted to put a few photos up while I have a second.
I’d say I haven’t been spending a bunch of time working on the guitar, but that wouldn’t be entirely true.
I spend at least an hour or so down in the basement every night after we’ve got Anna to bed and have had some time to wind down a bit.
Often times I don’t really get much done besides a bit of reading or putting together a small piece of some jig or something, but I guess it’s all useful time spent.
I have made some progress though, and with any luck I may bay be ready to bend the sides in the next week or so (we’ll see).
Here’s what’s been done so far. Here’s the guitar body mold all finished up. IT took some doing to come up with a system for opening and closing it, but I think my method will work pretty good. Also in this picture are three spreading clamps that I built that will hold the sides tightly in the mold once they are bent. As with everything so far, I worry that they aren’t built to the level of accuracy they should be. The sides of the mold are very smooth, but not perfectly smooth. I should probably be cutting with a bandsaw and sanding with some sort of spindle to keep things in square, but I’m making do with a skil saw and an orbital hand sander. Not ideal, though I think everything is working out pretty good so far.
Here’s the latest project, the top half of the side bending form. I’ll build a box underneath it with two 150 W light bulbs to serve as a heater. The wet sides will be clamped to the form while being heated. There are also silicone heating blankets that some people use, which are supposed to be a bit better/easier, but they are also pretty spendy. This will be a pretty cheap form when all is said and done.
And lastly, here’s a shot of the go-bar deck. This is also serving as a work table, but eventually it will be used to clamp up braces, and attach the top and back to the sides.
I still need to work out how best to go about putting together some radius dishes for clamping purposes. It sounds like a laborious, dusty endeavor, especially with my laminate router, and I am considering just purchasing some, but we shall see.
More updates will be forthcoming, as soon as I actually have something interesting to take a picture of.
We’ve been pretty busy on all fronts around here. It seems like the past week or so we’ve just been trying to stay ahead of one thing after another… Rather than dwell on any of that though, I thought I’d just put up a few photos while Anna’s upstairs napping.
Fall is here! Anna and I stopped and kicked the leaves on a recent bike ride to the park.
Another photo, because you just can’t beat a pile of leaves in the fall, especially out here where they usually just turn to mush.
Our pal Michael playing at the Farmer’s Market on a cool afternoon.
We’re still getting some tomatoes, zucchini, summer squash, and onions out of the garden. We haven’t harvested the winter squash yet, we picked one early and it tasted a bit bland so we’re waiting for a frost to hopefully sweeten them up.
Here’s Anna and Kadin running around the yard with the chickens.
This past Sunday we went out to the Portland Nursery Apple Festival with Steve an Keri and their girls. There was apple tasting and cider, music, games and painting etc. so Anna had quite a bit of fun. Here’s a shot of Anna and Nicki painting a picture. Anna decided that it needed quite a bit of glitter before the picture was finished.
Another shot of the artiste at work.
And, a photo of Anna all bundled up and ready to head out on the next adventure…Actually this was from this afternoon. We went up to the children’s museum. Nicki and Anna have been up there a few times now, but I had never been. It was a ton of fun for Anna, we were up there all morning and I think she tired herself out pretty good.
Oh, I think it stopped raining for a minute, I better go get the eggs and take care of the chickens. See you soon.
Howdy folks.
Here’s a couple quick photos and a rundown of our past week.
Last Saturday, the day after we rolled back in to town, we went down to a big 30/40/50 birthday party at our friend Rick (the Stick)’s place down outside of St. Paul, OR.
Rick’s turning 50 this year.
Another friend, Russel, is turning 40.
I already turned 30 this year, but somehow I managed to get another birthday party out of the whole deal.
It was a whole lot of fun. We had the band down there, set up in the barn.
Now, the very worst part about playing in a band is that it almost never sounds like it should to the people up on stage. You always get too spread out, can’t hear the fiddle, someone’s guitar is too loud, can’t hear the vocal…
Well, somehow the acoustics in that barn were just right because everything sounded great, therefore we could relax and just have fun. It was cold and rainy, but everyone bundled up, embraced the rain, and had a good old time.
There were quite a few kids running around earlier in the evening. Anna wasn’t too into running around and playing with everyone, until she caught sight of Bodie’s little four wheeler. She got a pretty big kick out watching Bodie cruise around on it, and then he was gracious enough to give Anna a chance to ride on it too. She was grinning ear to ear, cruising up and down the driveway.
I’m going to try to put up this quick little video of me showing Anna the little noisemaker/throttle for the 4-wheeler. She got a big kick out of it. We’ll see if it works…
Of course, the biggest news is that we now have two chickens laying eggs. The first egg-layer was positively identified as Kim-chee, when we caught her coming out of the nest box. But we didn’t see a second egg until early last week. We were pretty sure it had to be Rosie, and sure enough Anna and I caught her sitting on the nest box and refusing to come out of the coop. Kim-chee and Sol were squawking at her and making such a general racket that Anna and I went outside and let them out of the coop. Rosie wouldn’t come out though, which was highly unusual. After 10 or 15 minutes though, Rosie began to cluck loudly, and when we looked in the nest box there was a tiny freshly laid egg in there.
Now Sol is the last holdout. It’s hard to say when she might lay. She’s the biggest of the three by far, but still not looking mature. With winter coming on, supposedly egg production should drop off some, so I wonder what happens if she finally gets ready to lay in December? Not exactly prime egg laying season I don’t think. Then again I’m not a chicken.
Also, here’s a quick side note. I started building a guitar. This is a picture of the full scale plan sheet laid out on our living room floor. This is something I’ve been talking about doing, reading about, dreaming about for a long time and it always seemed sort of impractical and impossible. Well, I said to hell with all that and decided to just go ahead and go for it. Nicki, as always, is super supportive which has made the whole thing all the more enjoyable. I’m lacking the fine woodworking skills, the proper workspace, the proper tools etc., but I hope to make up for it with determination and the tortoise mindset. If it takes 10 years to finish, that’s fine by me…Maybe Anna will need a guitar by then.
Oh. I also started a blog (go figure) where I hope to post updates on the process (So I guess I have two new projects…). There’s not much in the way of stuff over there yet, but I did put a few pictures up there last night.
I cheated a bit.
That first post was actually made almost a month after those pictures were taken and the wood was sitting in our guest room.
Well, it’s a month later and that wood is still sitting in the exact same spot.
But there are good reasons for all of that.
See it turns out that you don’t really just start building a guitar.
No, you start with a small pile of 3/4″ birch plywood and you start making jigs.
Woodworkers love jigs, and they dream up some really beautifully ingenious ones.
I have begun working on three important pieces of equipment that I’ll need to have before I can really get down to the real work of making a guitar; 1) a guitar body mold 2) a side bending machine/template; and 3) a “go-bar” deck for gluing up braces.
They of course sell all of these things commercially, but they are expensive and it has actually been a large part of the learning process to figure out how to go about making these things.
A few photos before I get too tired to type any more.
First, a shot of the “workshop”. Everyone posts a pictures of their awesome, well stocked, super efficient workspace and all of their tools, so I figured I had to do the same. This is my little corner of the basement. Things may improve some if I get a chance to do any organizing, but for now this has actually been working out pretty well so far. I keep the guitar wood upstairs still, where the humidity and temperature are more favorable.
Here’s one new tool that I did acquire, which is already proving itself in spades. A little laminate trimmer, which is serving its purpose as a poor man’s router. It’s worked wonders for truing up the sides of the mold.
Most shops would have a bandsaw, and I may still need to find one. But for now, my trusty $49 skil saw is doing my rough cuts on the plywood. It works just fine, if maybe a little slow.
My main consideration, in all honesty, is noise. I’ve so far been really only getting any time ot work on the guitar in the evenings after our 2-year old daughter Anna goes to bed. I run the skil saw, the trimmer, and an orbital sander, and listen for any sounds of her waking up. No problems so far.
And, last but not least, here’s my progress for the week! Doesn’t look like much I know but trust me…I got an accurate template cut out into some hardboard (not as easy at it sounds), then transferred that template to the plywood, cut out six of these half shapes, routed them all flush, and finally was able to glue them up tonight. These will be the two halves of the body mold.
Like I said. This is probably going to take a while.
As anyone who knows me knows, I happen to be interested in musical instruments.
Especially, stringed musical instruments, and especially guitars.
As long as I can remember, I’ve been fascinated with lutherie, but it always seemed the territory of a) expert woodworkers/craftsmen with decades of experience; b) people with a lot more money and time on their hands than me; and c) people with a fantastic array of specialty tools and a 2000 square foot, climate controlled shop in the backyard.
This bothered me. For a long time. Then one day a month or so ago, I just decided that even if it took me ten years from start to finish to build just one guitar, I was going to go ahead and get started.
I ordered some wood.
Now before I get started, I’d better get a few things out of the way. there are a lot of people out there building guitars. And there are a lot of people doing just what I’m doing, with little in the way of experience but with more than enough curiosity and determination to make up for it. And a lot of them keep a record of their building process on a blog or website (how do you think I got the idea that I might be able to pull this off)?
So it seems there are a few required photos that everyone has to take to get started so here goes…
Here’s a shot of everything that came in the big box o’ stuff that I ordered from LMI. Some small tools like clamps, a chisel, a plane, but most importantly, the wood that will become the guitar. A chunk of Mahogany for the neck, East Indian rosewood for the sides
Here’s a shot of the blueprint. It was (and continues to be) a bit of a mystery how I will be able to get accurate measurements from this thing, but so far so good.
Here’s the East Indian Rosewood back plate. I decided (after a lot of back and forth) to have the plates joined and roughly thicknessed by the shop, rather than try to do it myself. In retrospect, I kind of wish I hadn’t because those would be good skills to learn, but with my minimal tool selection I though it might prove problematic.
A close-up of the Sitka spruce top, also joined and thicknessed. This thing is very, very light, and it seems to have some interesting figure to it.
Stay tuned, and feel free to leave comments if you have any questions (or better yet advice). I have a feeling this might take a while.
Not too much news on the guitar front, but here’s an update anyway.
3 150W bulbs in this box lined with foil tape.
And here’s the completed bender.
