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R the F
Luthier / Guitar Maker
Posts: 1,135
My main instrument is: bandsaw
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Post by R the F on Aug 17, 2017 16:25:05 GMT
Sorry, earthbalm. I'll be back on air as soon as I've got something to show/say.
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R the F
Luthier / Guitar Maker
Posts: 1,135
My main instrument is: bandsaw
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Post by R the F on Aug 17, 2017 16:23:57 GMT
Nice area. Would be on my list of places to move to.
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R the F
Luthier / Guitar Maker
Posts: 1,135
My main instrument is: bandsaw
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Post by R the F on Aug 16, 2017 23:02:58 GMT
Have a trouble-free move (if that's possible). Where are you going? (Nearer Halifax, I presume).
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R the F
Luthier / Guitar Maker
Posts: 1,135
My main instrument is: bandsaw
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Post by R the F on Aug 3, 2017 18:00:05 GMT
I'm off on holiday for a week tomorrow so I thought I'd do a bit of a catch-up to end the week. I fiddled around with the neck block with a few tools and then glued it into place, first one side...
... and then the other:
This is how the result looked - sorry about the dust:
There's not that much brass left but at the top you can see the little extension which supports the extreme end of the fingerboard and, at the bottom, there's a bit of wood glued in so that the bottom cross brace has got a reasonable glue area to hang on to.
Next I spent a period of time thinning the soundboard with a plane and latterly with my sander-thicknesser. It has to bend into quite an extreme corrugation and also the idea is to take it down quite thin so that it takes full advantage of the added strength given by the corrugation; I took it down to just under 2mm (about 1.85 in fact) having trimmed it to shape with the bandsaw. I used my router to take out the soundhole:
By this time there was only marginally more than 100 grams of European Spruce left but I still wasn't entirely convinced it would bend to the required shape. I girded my loins and put it on the go-bar deck but not before I had given the sides of the corrugation a bit of a blast with a steam-iron to remind it what was expected of it. I then pressed some "shapers" into the central part to bend it gently into shape. Yep, the crack was quite loud - but nothing I can't sort out with a bit of glue! It's actually gone just at the edge near the neck join but the split doesn't go in very far and will be supported to the rim/side once everything's glued up.
Now I needed to glue in some vital shaping braces but I didn't have any so I set about making them. Like the soundboard they are of European Spruce. They are shaped on the same board upon which the soundboard is at present pinned down by go-bars. Thus you will guess that I am telling fibs about the order in which this happened. Nevertheless, it did all happen so you'll just have to give me a bit of latitude. Here, to distract from my lies, are pictures of the production of three simple braces:
The last one's a little more complicated since it's at a slight angle. However, with careful positioning of the guide rails and careful dimensioning of the brace-blank, it was a piece of proverbial. Then I glued them on:
(Bet you'd been waiting for the go-bar shot, hadn't you?)
Now I decided to leave than lot to settle down for a week so - and here comes another flexing of the truth - I then used the same sanding trough again to prepare the contours of the top and bottom of the rim/ribs/sides. Here are the impossible pictures:
Nice job, eh?
Well, there were still a few minutes left before Mrs R-the-F returned from work on her new bike so I turned to the neck. In the true milky bland style of this guitar I went for oak and maple - better known as pale and paler. A bit of sawing and a bit of planing later I was ready to glue. So glue I did:
And that's how it all stands. I'm not keen to leave it all in the go-bar deck for a week because the pressure may start to show on the face side of the soundboard but there's not much else I can do because I don't want to take it out with only partial bracing. I don't know. I'll think about it in bed tonight...
See you in a week and a bit.
Rob
ps I might have just thought of a solution.
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R the F
Luthier / Guitar Maker
Posts: 1,135
My main instrument is: bandsaw
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Post by R the F on Aug 3, 2017 12:46:51 GMT
It's not real, Ged.
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R the F
Luthier / Guitar Maker
Posts: 1,135
My main instrument is: bandsaw
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Post by R the F on Jul 31, 2017 8:15:12 GMT
To be honest, that was only the lid, Leo. Here's the box itself.
Now what was in that box?
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R the F
Luthier / Guitar Maker
Posts: 1,135
My main instrument is: bandsaw
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Post by R the F on Jul 31, 2017 7:51:35 GMT
Shoe-boxes, Leo, from Ann Summers? Tell me more...
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R the F
Luthier / Guitar Maker
Posts: 1,135
My main instrument is: bandsaw
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Post by R the F on Jul 30, 2017 22:33:23 GMT
Sorry about the delay; I'm not sure what my excuse is. Anyway, I did start making this guitar and here's a quick guide to what's been going on.
I glued two pieces of European Spruce together in my usual way:
and then put the potential soundboard to one side for the rest of the week.
Since I'm using a proper side and back set this time, I was able to sand the sides to thickness - about 2.5mm - in my homemade sander/thicknesser (see elsewhere for details) - and then bend them to shape in my trusty hot thingy. I thought I'd better do the right thing and use linings, laminated linings to make sure the sides were pretty twist-proof, so I set about cutting and bending strips of 1.5mm sapele (constructional veneer) ready to laminate:
I was about to glue these to the sides when I realised I don't actually possess a mould to keep the guitar in shape any more having attached the two halves together over a year ago to make the mould in which I make my laminated sides. So yes, first cock-up. I had to switch plans to another heavy-weight guitar with thick laminated sides. More bending and laminating
until I finally arrived at this:
A bit rough and ready at this stage as the following picture shows:
But there's a good 7mm of side there which should make for a pretty stiff box.
I worry about collapsing guitars at night especially when the last one shows nasty signs of a cave-in and is only being coaxed along so that Leo can have one first-and-last play on it in Halifax. With this in mind I set up a scientific experiment. I think the pictures explain everything that needs explaining:
What did this prove? Well, actually, it proved that River Island make bloody solid boxes (and I'm thinking of using one for the body of my next guitar). But it finally did what you'd expect and collapsed around the weak spot; yes, that's it, just where I'd cut a big hole in it. Funny really. So on the basis of this evidence, I re-designed the bracing of this guitar and now it looks like this:
I've put conventional braces on the corrugated part north and south of (and touching the edges of) the hole and I've shifted the longitudinal braces so that they touch the sides of the hole. I have also shifted my so-called UTFB so that it actually crosses under the middle of the hole and supports the two longitudinal braces at this point - see bottom diagram where the UTFB is the big blue shaded area. You'll notice that there's a brace across the bottom planned to be directly underneath it, too.
I'm further planning to have another brace on the bottom (back of the guitar) running side to side up against (and glued to) the neck block to help prevent the rotation of the heel/neck-block; this will go together with the flying buttresses which, at present, are drawn at 6mm diameter so that I can use carbon fibre as davewhite does. There's not really enough room for big wooden ones with this large cross-member in place.
Fascinating as that may be, it's getting late and tomorrow is Monday so I'll just show you the tail block being glued into position:
and, finally, the neck block under construction, though I notice one of those screws and the end of the brass plate will have to be removed to accommodate the neck-end-support:
You may think that the brass plate is there so that the bolt heads and washers will have a good surface on which to spread their load - and so they will. But the truth is that I was day-dreaming and made this channel in the neck-block when it is meant to be in the heel so that the inserts for the bolts can lie lower than the surface which attaches to the body (see Dave's neck design). Having spent time on the block, however, I made the best of it and put a nice bit of brass in there. Hi-ho. Dave would be proud of me.
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R the F
Luthier / Guitar Maker
Posts: 1,135
My main instrument is: bandsaw
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Post by R the F on Jul 22, 2017 14:28:36 GMT
"Bryn" being the shape I always make and "Sensible" meaning that I've cut down on novelty in an attempt to make it a bit less challenging and time-consuming than the last one, though there may be one or two points of slight interest. I've spent a couple of weeks sorting things out and here, for those of you with a graphical eye, are the results, starting with an overview and then zooming in for a little more detail:
The first thing to observe is that there is no fancy adjustable neck. Nothing wrong with it but it takes quite a time to sort out mainly the accuracy of drilling required and the fiddling about trying to get the thread to catch when you put it together! The top view looks much the same as the last one and I'm going to use the same strange binding which avoids the router. However, this time and for the first time I'm not using old door and constructional veneer; no, I launched out into the brave world of luthiery and actually paid for tonewood for the soundboard and the back and sides! Nothing fancy, you understand; in fact it's all extremely bland and this thread very nearly became "Bland Bryn". In fact, I think I will change the name to "Bland Bryn" now and make a nonsense of the first line of the thread just to confuse the matter. The reason it's bland is that the top is going to be European Spruce, which is very white and smells like, well, wood. The sides and back will be made of Sycamore, which was just about the cheapest acceptable set I could find on-line. When I realised that the result would be creamy all over, I thought I might throw in a maple neck and even go for some kind of a blondish fingerboard. Any bits of trim can therefore be odd bits of mahogany I find about the place.
Here's the bracing pattern:
Yep. The same as last time so that I don't have to recalculate all the curves; yes, indeed, it still has a cylinder top (aka bulging top, aka corrugated top, aka Howe-Orme top...) so all my templates and sanding troughs etc. should fit without modification.
New this time and about to come as a surprise to davewhite (guru of this forum) - I'm sure you won't mind Dave - is a Dave-White-bolted-on-neck-with-neck-block-support-piece-under-neck-extension. Yes, I've looked at lots of his pictures and come up with a design which copies his as closely as I possibly can. Imitation = flattery. I like this design because, although it's not adjustable without a fairly big upheaval of strings and things, it still allows the neck to be removed with very little fuss and affords plenty of sites for shims and shaves if the angles aren't quite right. Below are the various components (though the bolts don't actually appear on these drawings!):
Now for one of the biggest climb-downs in the history of modern cod-luthiery: I'm going to have a UTB! If you were reading earlier build-threads on this forum, you may remember I came out firmly against Upper Transverse Braces in one of colins 's excellent build threads: it began with me saying this: "I decided UTB must mean "Ugly Thick Bit" when I was trying to understand how bracing worked. So, perhaps foolishly, I decided to miss it out and see what happened on my first build! I've nearly finished the guitar now and I still can't quite see what it does so... can someone (point me at something that will) explain. It is big and it is a bit ugly so I'm sure it does something or other but it just seems to be doing it in the wrong direction. No doubt I'll come to understand why it's there when I put strings on the thing..." (Read more if you're interested at: acousticsoundboard.co.uk/thread/4544/new-walnut-oo-fret-gits#ixzz4nZNzcy9w). Anyway, I've avoided them throughout because I don't like the idea of fencing off the upper part of the soundboard with a hefty brace glued from side to side. As Dave White says in explaining his flying buttresses, "Many builders dismiss the top’s upper bout area as having no role to play tonally – they couldn’t be more wrong." (Read more: acousticsoundboard.co.uk/thread/177/design-construction-steel-stringed-guitars?page=2#ixzz4nZPfDnOq). So, anyway, having had a bit of a dipping-hole problem with my last build, I decided to bite the bullet with a UTFB, an Upper Transverse Flying Buttress. It's marked in blue below and only provides support where it's needed, I hope, transferring the stress to the sides of the guitar and leaving the flat parts of the soundboard free to vibrate till the cows come home. I think it'll be made of something stiff like a piece of oak, slotted between vertical guides glued to the sides and wedged up tight against the centre of the corrugation next to the hole:
Well, that's it for now. I'd better start building it (on Monday).
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R the F
Luthier / Guitar Maker
Posts: 1,135
My main instrument is: bandsaw
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Post by R the F on Jul 20, 2017 21:41:59 GMT
They are real little beauties, Dave. I enjoyed the adventure very much.
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R the F
Luthier / Guitar Maker
Posts: 1,135
My main instrument is: bandsaw
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Post by R the F on Jul 20, 2017 9:11:55 GMT
HORROR AT HALIFAX HOTEL "LUTHIFER CONVENTION"
FEMALE IMPERSONATOR DISAPPEARS UP BLACK HOLE
POLICE SUSPECT FOUL PLAYING
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R the F
Luthier / Guitar Maker
Posts: 1,135
My main instrument is: bandsaw
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Post by R the F on Jul 19, 2017 18:04:35 GMT
Leo seems more interested in good looks than in what's really at the heart of a guitar - typical guitarist - so I'll tart it up for him before Halifax. I think the photos show that it's not really been polished properly yet so I'll take it apart and polish it to a high degree. Then it'll be a beautiful white elephant and worth praying for.
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R the F
Luthier / Guitar Maker
Posts: 1,135
My main instrument is: bandsaw
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Post by R the F on Jul 19, 2017 17:31:14 GMT
Thanks for your concern, leoroberts. I'll just loosen off the strings till I get to Halifax so that you can have one quick pluck before it implodes!
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