Four Part Harmony

Howdy folks. Hope you all had a nice, relaxing holiday weekend.

It’s winter now (officially), and the longest night of the year is behind us. You can practically hear the crocuses and daffodils popping up through the soggy ground (well, maybe not quite yet).

We spent the weekend down in Central Oregon with Gabe and Maya, at Gabe’s parents’ place just outside of Bend/Redmond. They’ve got a nice little place within walking distance from the Deschutes River. We walked down there on Sunday morning and spent a little time wandering around. It took quite a few tries, but we finally got this group photo.

Here’s another photo of Nicki and Gabe looking out over the river.

We celebrated Christmas with their family on Sunday morning. As you can see from the picture, Anna was pretty excited about the whole deal.

For no particular reason, I just had to put this picture up. Anna pouring some tea for Adobe, Gabe and Maya’s dog.

We also watched a few football games over the weekend, as Gabe and Nicki were in the finals of our fantasy football league this year. Nicki’s team (the Banjo Bombers) ended up victorious!

We woke up to snow on Monday morning, and had a snowy drive out of Redmond back to Portland. We avoided the pass, and took the beautiful sunny scenic drive up 97 through Madras and Maupin, and then down the gorge back into Portland, where it was raining.

We made popcorn Monday night, and I showed Anna how to throw it up and catch it in your mouth.

Christmas morning, Anna helped Nicki make some gingerbread, and we had gingerbread and pears while we set to opening presents.

It took quite a while, as Anna had to open each present and play with it for a while before moving on. She really liked this doll that her great-grandpa Taffe got for her. We did a lot of hair combing and braiding.

Happily, Anna seemed to have the most fun with this big box. We set it up as a bed and as a car, and she played for hours in it. I guess eventually we’ll have to put it away, because it takes up half the living room, but for now, it makes a fun thing to play with.

Just about the time we finished opening presents, it started to snow! This picture shows it about as heavy as it ever got, but it kept up for a couple hours. Unfortunately, Anna was in dire need of a nap after the mornings excitement.

When she woke up, I bundled her up and took her outside to play, but it had mostly turned into a rainy slush at that point. Still, we had two snowy days for our Christmas weekend, which was much more than one can really hope for here in the Pacific Northwest.

I put a few more photos up on our photo page too.

Hope you all had (or are still having) a nice holiday. See you soon.

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Looking back, the last time I put anything up about the guitar project was back at the end of October! I have been working on it some since then, although the major progress has just come in the past couple of weeks or so.

Since building the side bender, I had to spend a bunch of time getting the sides, back and top down to the appropriate thicknesses. The sides had to get to ~.085 inch, the back to ~0.090 inch, and the top to ~0.100 inch. It’s amazing the amount of difference that actually exists between those measurements, especially with the different species of woods. I ended up doing most of the thicknessing with a random orbital hand sander…not necessarily the best way in terms of keeping everything uniform, but I think it worked OK. I used scrapers quite a bit too, for smoothing things out. I actually thicknessed the sides almost exclusively with the scraper (lots of work!).

I checked my progress along the way with this little thickness caliper that I made.

I’ve been too nervous to actually bend the sides yet, so I distracted myself by moving onto the bracing on the back. I got to use the go-bar deck a few times, and everything seemed to work pretty well.

The first step was to glue a narrow reinforcing strip along the center seam of the back.

Next, I cut the brace blanks from a billet of spruce. The brace billets that I have are nice quartersawn stock. I used the bandsaw to cut them roughly to the proper dimensions, then planed and sanded them to true up the edges. The back of the guitar isn’t flat, but actually has a slight spherical radius to it. I use a radius sanding dish to get the braces to match that contour, and then clamp everything up in the dish.

I glued up the braces 2 at a time. This photo shows the back two braces already glued on, and the front two being clamped up. When I did the back two, the glue squeezed out everywhere, and I ended up with a big mess to deal with the next day. I did better with the front two.

Once the braces were all glued in and cleaned up, I set to work with a chisel and plane to carve them down to their final dimensions. This was the fun part. It took some getting used to, as I’m still very new to the idea of woodcarving. But by the end I felt I had a feel for it, and I think the final shaping turned out pretty well. I may have to take them down a bit before I finish everything up, as I tried to err on the side of caution, so I think I left them a bit thick. In general, the lighter you can keep things like bracing, the better the acoustic properties of the instrument will be. The challenge is in balancing that lightness with stability. I read somewhere that the theoretical ideal instrument should be just on the verge of imploding upon itself.

Another shot of the back bracing. After getting everything finished up, I cut the outline of the guitar out (leaving about 0.5 inch all around at this point).

And here’s the “finished” back, all cut out and actually looking kind of like a guitar! When I get a chance, I’ll start on the bracing for the top, which will be significantly more complicated.

Oh, and here’s a picture of Anna hanging out with me in the workshop. She asks to come down at least once a day. She likes to sit on the workbench, play with the measuring tape, and collect wood shavings mostly. Papa’s little helper!

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Howdy folks. I thought I’d take a minute now that the rest of the family has gone to bed to do a quick update, and post a few new-ish photos. It’s been tough to find time to sit down and keep the blog up to date, what with all the other projects going on, and the big holiday season upon us.

That’s actually mostly what we’ve been up to of course, is making preparations for our Christmas and winter solstice celebrations. After going back and forth on whether or not to get a tree (I lobbied against a cut down tree, but Nicki really wanted a tree) we went ahead and got a living tree. It seems like a pretty good deal. We have the tree delivered and keep it for a few weeks. Then, rather than tossing it out at the curb, they come back and pick it up and take it off to be planted (ostensibly as restoration, but the tree is a non-native fir so I don’t know how suited it is to restoration work). Still, it’s a handsome little tree. Here’s a shot of Nicki and Anna doing the decorating.

Another photo of Nicki and Anna getting the decorations ready for the tree.

Of course, Nicki did most of the actual decorating. I was taking pictures, and Anna was busy with this bubble wrap.

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One thing we’ve been doing this month is using this neat advent calendar that Nicki made for Anna. She’s got it filled up with all kinds of interesting and fun things us to do. Anna really has enjoyed getting to go and pick the little slip of paper each day (usually she wants to pick more than one). One day we went to a puppet show. Another day we made pictures with stamps. Another day we made popcorn and strung some up for the tree.

We also made some holiday cards to send out. You will all hopefully be getting one. We cut stamps out of potato halves, and then dipped them in paint. It was pretty fun and messy. Anna had fun with it for a while, but then moved on to other things.

I hope this one looks as difficult as it was. We had to use a sweet potato for this one, because we didn’t have any potatoes long enough to carry the whole word. Also, it’s a good thing a sweet potato has two halves, because I carved the word forwards the first time before Nicki pointed out that it wasn’t going to stamp properly…Well, this should look good on my resume anyway.

In other news, I think I’ve got all the posts documenting my guitar building project migrated over here now. There’s a little tab up in the menu bar where they will all live. I think they’ll all show up here on the front page first though, so now you all will be subjected to them, like it or not. I’ve been working on it here and there, and making some actual progress. I’ll see if I can put a post together in the next day or two.

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I think by now we’ve gotten the news out to most of you that might be reading this, so I thought it was about time we posted our first picture of the newest soon-to-be-member of the family! This is is a picture of the ultrasound that we had taken at ~8 weeks. In the picture, the whole baby is about 1.36 cm long. While marveling over that notion, and playing with some acorns that we had collected with Anna at the park, we decided that the baby wasn’t much bigger than an acorn and the name has stuck.

So now, we are telling Anna all about the baby Acorn in mama’s belly…which was met with some pretty disbelieving stares at first. She plays along now though, and seems to understand for the most part. We draw family pictures now with Mama and baby Acorn, and Anna, and Papa, and the chickens and Floydie.

Hope you all are well. More posts forthcoming, as time permits.

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So, in my ongoing efforts to learn new and exciting things and tap the full potential of the new blog, I’ve been working at trying to come up with an easy way to share the short little videos we take with our digital camera. It seems there are a million ways to do this, but I was finally able to make this one work. I’d be interested to hear if you were able to get it to play, and if it was pretty straightforward or if it took forever to load etc.

This video was taken just this past weekend…it cracks me up.
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