Four Part Harmony

Got some old photos that I’ve been taking as I’ve been (very slowly) working on what has been the toughest part of the guitar so far…carving the neck.

It started out easy enough. I had a big old chunk of mahogany, from which I sawed off a ~1″x~3″ blank. I did my best to square it up with a hand plane.

I opted to do this as a multi-piece neck, though my piece of mahogany was large enough to cut as a single piece. The neck joint is stronger this way, and it saved quite a bit of wood. I’ve got enough wood left for at least one more neck. This photo shows the scarf joint being glued up, which establishes what will be the headstock of the guitar. It sits at approximately a 15 degree angle from the fingerboard. In hindsight, this all went pretty smoothly, but I had to be very careful in making the cut, truing up the surfaces and gluing everything up perfectly square.

Here’s the finished joint. Everything worked out great, stayed square etc.

Then I needed to glue up the heel block, on the end of the neck that attaches to the guitar. More squaring and agonizing over what really should be pretty straightforward. Still, when you’re messily spreading glue all over a piece of wood you’ve been sort of carefully fretting over, you can’t help but be a bit nervous.

Again, everything worked out pretty great though.

This is where it’s gotten interesting. I’ve started carving on the back of the neck. Here I’ve roughly sawed off some excess wood from the back of the headstock, and have started carving what I hope will become a diamond volute where the headstock transitions to the back of the neck. I could have chosen something much simpler, but I really wanted to do this diamond volute thing (again, like the old Martins). I have to admit I don’t really know what I’m doing. I’m just sort of slowly working, reading, and waiting for enlightenment.

But, as enlightenment can sometimes take a while to come around, I decided to move on to other parts of the neck. I needed to rout the truss rod, and was in desperate need of a router table. I had some brief grandiose plans of building a really nice fancy one, but realized I really just needed something quick and simple. I saw a plan for a similar setup in a book, and just decided to whip this thing together. I basically just routed a shallow slot for my laminate trimmer to mount underneath a sheet of 3/4″ plywood, and used a straight section of 2×2 pine for a fence. It’s ugly, but it worked like a champ.

Here’s the freshly routed truss rod channel.

And here’s the neck so far.

I’ve subsequently managed to glue on the ebony veneer for the peghead, and make a template of the peghead shape. Soon, I should be able to cut out the peghead shape and begin carving the rough profile of the neck. First though, I need to do some work fitting the neck to the guitar body which is now all glued up.

I know, I never got around to taking any pictures as I glued the top to the back and sides. I didn’t even get a picture of it prior to trimming of the excess material (messy job). Still here it is, the nearly finished soundbox. All that remains is to do the binding (a big scary job…the last thing I feel like doing is taking a router to this thing now that I’ve come this far.)

Here’s the back. You can see where the brace ends stick through. These will be covered by the binding.

Oh yeah, before I glued everything up I had to sign the inside of the top too. It almost seemed a little pretentious or silly or something, but it’s tradition and I figured I might as well. I gave this one serial #001. I thought three digits would be better than two, just in case I become prolific in my old age.

[Read more →]

Here’s a couple of photos we took tonight of Nicki (and Acorn) at 19 weeks.

This next one’s a bit blurrier, but you can see Acorn a bit better. (I can’t take a low-light picture to save my soul with our camera, but the flash is worthless indoors. The hack photographers eternal dilemma I suppose). I digress, here’s my beautiful wife and baby to be.

For the record, Anna seems to be leaning towards thinking that Acorn is a boy. She’s not 100% consistent, and switches up from time to time, but for the most part when we ask her which she thinks it is she says “boy”. I think we mostly refer to Acorn as a “he”, so that might have something to do with it. It’d be interesting to see what you all think, so I’ll let this be the “speculate wildly as to gender” post. If you’ve got the notion, put your guess in the comments.

[Read more →]

Wow, it seems I’ve been making a decent amount of progress on the guitar project recently. I’d better get a quick update in here, as I’m starting to get behind. I actually took many of these pictures last week, and I’m kind of playing catch up here, so I’ll have to be brief.

I was able to get the heel and tail blocks all glued up last week. This was a big step. I thought I had a problem, as I ended up with some small gaps at each end, but everything will be covered, and everything stayed square and centered. I was worried at first, but hindsight says everything is a-ok.

With the blocks glued in, I was able to start shaping the sides. I used a small hand plane to take everything down close to the final thickness, then sanded everything in the radiused dishes to arrive at the final dimensions. I think I’ve mentioned before, but the top and back of the guitar aren’t flat. The back is formed to a 20-foot radius, and the top is shaped to a 28-foot radius. This work took some time, but planing is fun. I had a big pile of fine rosewood shavings when I was done.

And here’s the guitar sitting in one of the dishes, with the rough contouring all finished up. I sanded both sides in the dishes until the radius was uniform around the entire perimeter of the guitar. Then I started in gluing up the kerfing. the kerfing is a strip of wood that forms to the contour of the top and back, and provides the bulk of the surface that the top and back are glued to. To glue it on, I needed to make a bunch of these high-tech clamps, which consist of clothespins with rubber bands wrapped around them. I had Nicki help make them one night while we were watching a movie.

Here’s the top kerfing all glued and clamped up. I then did the same thing for the back.

Here’s a shot of the sides with all the kerfing installed. I also had to install some thin spruce braces along the sides. It’s almost ready to be joined with the back. First I had to deal with the end wedge.

Here’s a shot of me mid-way through chiseling out a slot for the end wedge. I had a piece of plastic, and some plastic bindings that I had originally ordered for this purpose, but it just looked funny. I couldn’t bring myself to do it, so I got some wood bindings and a small piece of koa veneer, which I cut the end wedge from.

Here’s a blurry picture of the koa and two thin strips of purfling that will be the end wedge. It was a lot harder to get this to fit tightly than I thought it would be. I spent a few hours, over two or three separate trips to the shop to get the fit tight enough to glue in. Then once the glue had dried, I had quite a bit of scraping to do to bring the wedge and binding down flush. This took a few more hours. I thought this was going to be a quick and easy step.

Here’s the finished product. I think it came out pretty nice, and I’m very glad I decided to scrap the plastic bindings.

With the wedge installed, the back and sides were ready to be glued up. I was pretty nervous, and it took me a while to actually get up the nerve to do it. I had to rout some shallow channels for the back braces to sit in, so the back would sit flush with the sides.

After a fair amount of trial and error, and a dry run, I glued everything up and hoped for the best. This was at 12:30 last night. I snapped a few of the wooden dowels that I’m using for clamping bars, so I was worried that I didn’t have enough clamping pressure at the back end. There wasn’t much I could do though, so I pretty much crossed my fingers and went to bed.

Here’s how it came out though. Everything looks pretty good!

Here’s another view.

I’ve also been working on the neck…but that will have to be covered later. So long for now.

[Read more →]

Today was a really beautiful day in Portland, which more than made up for the past week (or more) of rain. I usually think of February as the month that we really start to see signs of spring, but today it seemed they were everywhere. The picture above is the tree just over our back fence, in our neighbor’s backyard. I think it’s a cherry, or some sort of crabapple, it’s been blooming for a few days now. Most of the alders and hazelnuts have their catkins out too. Ah spring!

Our fava beans are coming up too. We’ve never grown them before, but we’ve loved getting them from our CSA. They’ve come to be synonymous with spring for us…I hope we get a decent crop.

Here’s some exciting news, we’ve officially got three egg-layers in the flock! Sol, started laying about 2 weeks ago, and has been laying like clockwork. Her eggs are lighter in color than Kimchee and Rosie’s. We’re so proud of her, and thankful too, as we hadn’t been getting that many eggs recently until Sol started laying.

Part of the reason we haven’t been getting that many eggs is because Kimchee is molting, (and looks really funny these days). I first noticed her losing some feathers on her neck about a week ago, and started to freak out that there was something wrong. The internet had me nearly convinced that we had some kind of mite infestation or something equally horrible, but after reading for a while I realized that she must just be molting. Chickens molt, usually once a year, but not usually during the winter. She’s mostly lost all of her head and neck feathers and her tail feathers. Her comb is also shrunken and lighter in color. In the picture, you can see the quills of the new feathers, which have already started growing back. She should be back to normal in no time.

Also, I’ve realized I never put up a photo of our newest family member. This is traderjoefish. Traderjoefish is a betta that we inherited in a white elephant gift exchange last month. He came in a little box with some little rocks and a little fake plant. It’s been a long time since we had any fish, and to tell the truth, we really didn’t know what to do for the little guy. But, we changed his water, cleaned his little box and rocks, and keep him fed. He seems reasonably happy, so I guess we’re doing ok. We asked Anna what his name should be and she said “traderjoefish”. Hey, who am I to argue?

Not much else in terms of news…here’s a few more photos:

Sol and Kimchee taking a dust bath after I cleaned the coop and put down a bunch of fresh straw. It’s been raining so much lately, that their coop has been pretty wet and muddy. They were very happy for the sun today.

A cool picture Nicki must have taken this afternoon. Shadows on our back fence.

A recent loaf of sourdough bread. I haven’t been using the sourdough much lately, and I should be. This loaf, although it looks a little weird, had a nice flavor, and a pretty good crust. I didn’t have the dough right though I don’t think, which caused the top to crack apart. Still, it was pretty tasty.

And lastly, this is the squirrel who quickly found the bird feeder we just hung up. At first I tried to shoo him away, but he was pretty persistent. Anna gets the biggest kick out of watching him try to get up on there, so I guess for now we’ll just let him have his share of the seeds. Hopefully we do get some birds coming by too though.

[Read more →]

Hello again gentle readers. I’m continuing to make progress on the guitar project. Here’s the big accomplishments for the past week.

Let’s see, I had the rosette all glued up, so I was able to go ahead and cut the soundhole out and start in on the bracing for the top. As I have a tendency to do, I’ve made some slight deviations to the plan set I’ve been working from. I had been reading some things about a bracing design that Martin used on their 1930′s and 1940′s dreadnought guitars. Martin created the concept of an X-brace, and used it to make guitars that were strong enough to withstand wire strings. Their early designs were very lightweight, tonally responsive, etc. etc. They are the stuff of legend.

As those guitars aged, however, some of them began to show signs of buckling and distortion of the top, issues with neck set, etc. Also, with the need for production came a need for sturdier, more reliable construction. So they shifted the positioning of the braces away from the soundhole bit, according to some at the expense of some acoustic and sonic characteristics. This became the standard for guitars in production settings, sacrificing tone for stability (or so it is said). Of course, they also had plenty of high quality red spruce and brazilian rosewood to make guitars with, which are in short supply these days…that might have had something to do with it.

All this is a long-winded way of saying, I decided to use the forward shifted X-bracing setup. I figure, I need all the help I can get in terms of the acoustic properties of the instrument. And if the thing suddenly explodes 5, 10, or 20 years from now, at least I’ll likely know how to fix it.

As with the back, I cut the brace stock from a stick of spruce. Rough cut on the band saw and then planed to width and height. I also sanded the bottoms of the braces in a radiused dish. The top will have a 28-foot radius. It’s very slight, but it does add a noticeable amount of strength. I had to do these braces over the course of several days. Here are the first few, rough cut.

And here they are being glued up. I chose to do these first, so I could carve them without the big X-brace in the way. Also, this way, I was able to tuck the carved ends of these braces into the X-brace.

In this picture, the big X-brace has already been glued in, and now the last few braces and the bridge plate are being glued in. You can see the first braces have roughly carved to shape.

And here is the top, as done as it’s going to get for now! Carving the braces took quite a while. Carving away material from the braces is actually one of the most significant things that affects the tone of the finished instrument. Books have been written on the subject. The general idea though, for someone like me who doesn’t really know what they are doing, is to frequently pick the top up and tap it and listen to the tone. As material is removed, the tone changes, and at some point, you hear a good sound and you’re done. Sounds easy! But it’s pretty subjective, especially when you have nothing to use as a frame of reference. Mine right now sounds kind of “tight”. Not really “ringing” much, but it does have some resonance. I may end up doing some more shaping of the braces, but for now I think I will leave them, and trust that I’ve done all that I need to.

With this step mostly done, I’ll probably focus my attention back on getting the sides ready. I also need to begin the neck carving process.

[Read more →]

Well, it was kind of wintery and wet this weekend, so we sort of spent a lazy weekend around the house. We did, however, have a pretty fun Saturday morning when Rox and Matt and Em and Ryan called to invite us to go roller skating at the Oaks Park roller rink. We were busy playing a bit of dress up when the call came in, so Anna was already well prepared to hit the rink in style.

Unfortunately, Anna and I had to take our hats off to skate. Anna took a little while to warm up to the idea, and at first she didn’t really want anything to do with it. But by the end we had managed to make a complete lap around the big track. She mostly tried to “walk” with the skates as opposed to sliding on them. In this picture we were trying to glide together. Mostly, she liked it if I held one hand and Nicki held the other hand.

I wish we could have gotten some better pictures, but the lighting made it kind of difficult.

Other than that, we mostly spent a nice lazy weekend around the house. Here’s Anna and Nicki relaxing in the guest bed on Sunday morning.

[Read more →]

Howdy folks. Time for a quick update on the guitar project progress.

It’s been several weeks, but at some point recently I got up the nerve to try to do the side bending. You’ll recall I built this contraption, which was supposed to make the process fairly foolproof. This picture shows the bender with the lights on, heating up.

I took one side, sprayed it lightly with water, wrapped it in some paper, and sandwiched that between the two aluminum slats you can see in the picture. Then I slowly brought the center clamp down tight, followed by the lower bout clamp, and finally the upper bout clamp. It was a little nerve wracking, but everything worked perfectly. No cracking or splitting or explosions or fires.

Here’s a closeup, in which you can kind of see the side clamped between the aluminum slats. This is at full clamping pressure. The fit was pretty good. I left each side in the bender at full heat for about 15 minutes, then shut it down and let it cool overnight.

Then I took the side out and clamped it into the mold to help it keep its shape. I ended up using a lot more clamps than this, as it was important to keep the sides square all around, and very tight to the mold.

The drawback of the bender is that I think I needed to exaggerate the curves to compensate for the woods tendency to want to spring back. I’ve subsequently had the sides back in the bender three times (I re-bent them again last night). They hold their shape pretty well, but still want to splay out at the ends. At this point, I wish I had gone the old-school route, gotten a blowtorch and a length of pipe, and bent the sides that way. More room for error, but much more control.

Here’s both sides bent, cut to length and fit within the mold. In terms of the fit, everything seems just fine. At this point, if they would just hold their shape, I could glue up the end blocks and start working towards joining the back to the sides. I still have plenty of other work to be done though, so I have to keep reminding myself that there is no hurry.

One of the other things I have managed to get done is to glue up the soundhole rosette, which needs to be done prior to bracing the top. I decided to use a herringbone purfling and rosette, which is similar to (but not exactly like) what they used to use on classic old Martin dreadnoughts. Here it is being clamped up and glued into the top.

Another photo of the clamping. When this was all dry, I used a scraper and a big sanding block to get rid of any dried glue and get the rosette down flush with the rest of the top.

And here’s the finished product. That gap at the top is supposed to be like that. It’ll be covered by the fingerboard eventually. This picture also really shows the figure in the top as well.

Next up: gluing up the sides (eventually) and bracing/voicing the top.

[Read more →]

Happy New Year everyone! Hope you all had a nice end to 2007 and beginning of 2008!

Here’s some photos from our first day of the new year…

After a nice pancake breakfast, we bundled up and drove out to the Portland Audubon Society’s bird sanctuary. We weren’t really sure if there would be anyone up there, being New Year’s Day and all, but we figured it would be a nice place for a hike if nothing else. It was clear and cold and windy, which was actually a nice change of pace from rainy and gray.

As it turned out, there were some Audubon volunteers up there, and they were bringing the birds out and giving little interpretive talks . Here’s Anna and I with ‘Julio’ the great horned owl. We also saw a peregrine falcon, a red-tailed hawk, a spotted owl, a pygmy owl, and a turkey vulture. The great horned owl was “hooo”-ing a lot, which we learned was because this is the time of year they are staking out their territory.

We checked out the birds for a while, then went for a little hike on the trails surrounding the sanctuary, which backs right up to Forest Park. Anna, as always, found a good walking stick early on. There are a lot of trails up there to explore, and we checked out leaves and mushrooms and trees and mud for quite some time.

We left there pretty tired and hungry. After a few thwarted attempts to find a place to eat, we finally ended up back at home and everyone got what they needed most…a nap for Anna, a pseudo rest/nap for Nicki, and some guitar tinkering for myself.

Then Anna woke up, and she decided that she needed to go to the beach.

First she pulled out her little beach chair. Then she convinced me to go upstairs with her and help her get her swimming suit on. Then she needed a beach towel. Then she convinced Nicki to go upstairs and get her sun hat and glasses.

It’s a shame I couldn’t get a better picture, but the light was no good and I just couldn’t get her to hold still. Still, the juxtaposition of christmas tree and summertime decked out Anna was just too much to pass up.

If the rest of 2008 is half as much fun as today was, I think it’s going to be O.K.

[Read more →]