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 25, 2015 18:36:51 GMT
An old friend visited from Bath. He usually plays a Fylde Alchemist but had a little mess around on this guitar and here's a bit of his messing around. He's not going to swap it for the Fylde because it lacks the bite he likes in the bass - but was very complimentary.
https%3A//soundcloud.com/rthef/andy-cut-1
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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 16, 2015 21:39:26 GMT
Commentator's curse.
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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 16, 2015 19:15:36 GMT
I'm no expert and definitely an amateur but, in defence of guitar makers I would say that violin making appears, in part, to be a rather similar process to making a carved top (and bottom) guitar - but there's a lot less of it to carve!
Slightly more fiddly (!) I'll grant you but rather less sweat. The funny thing is that my first two guitars were carved archtops and, when I then started making a flat-top, I thought it would be a lot quicker and a lot easier but making the sides fit the slightly curved top and gluing in a lot of carefully shaped bracing and getting the neck angles exactly right etc. etc. involves a lot of time and care.
I also have a friend who is a top violin maker and, on the odd occasion I've talked to him about it, he seems to be rather more caught up in the finishing process - trying to replicate the exact varnishes that the old masters may have used and tanning the violin under ultra-violet and so on.
Not sure I've moved the argument on but at least I'm rooting for the guitar makers! - especially since this is a guitarists' forum!
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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 15, 2015 21:47:52 GMT
Just looking at one of the doors in the house (which are the same style and wood as the doors I use for guitars) I noticed that the muntins consistently have exceptionally close grain - 37 lines to the inch in the one I bothered to check. The only problem is that muntins, as we all know, are quite narrow, varying between 65 and 70mm in width on the doors I've checked. The go to waste at the moment but it occurs to me that we frequently use narrow pieces of decorative timber to make up the back of the guitar so would it be possible to use this very high quality timber in narrow strips for the soundboard itself, though it clearly performs a very different function from the back. I, obviously, don't see why not. Does anyone else have a thought on this? It's a terrible waste of great timber and there are no dowels in it. here's how 65mm strips would come out on my current guitars:
and here's a picture of the toilet door muntin (sorry about that):
or am I making a muntin out of a mullion?
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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 15, 2015 10:45:51 GMT
I believe I left off when gluing in the last of the linings with my precious new fish glue… A cautionary tale: never put a large open bottle of fish-glue on a traditionally stuffed dining-chair seat while you turn away to cramp up your glued surfaces. You will find that the bottle will gently and silently keel over and glug more than half its contents on to the floor before you turn back to replace the lid. (I didn’t have the presence of mind to take photos, I’m afraid, but) I managed not to panic, scraping up most of it and leaving the bits to settle to the bottom before decanting it into a spill-proof container. (I did say this would be a warts-and-all account).
Back to the business in hand. Although the sides are already shaped to accommodate the arching of the top and bottom plates, the edges of the new linings still need sanding down to the precise angle and profile and this was done in a “trough” knocked up from ply and hardboard and then covered with 80 grit providing the right arch for the top and bottom (on opposite sides). The lined guitar sides were then slid up and down the trough till the dimensions matched the plans:
I then glued in the side-braces/split-stoppers but made them rather slighter than usual (about 6 x 2.5 mm) – I’m trying to be very weight-aware and I’ve noticed that some respected makers seem unconvinced that they are really necessary.
The sound-port sites were also reinforced with a couple of layers of veneer – maple, I think.
I also took the chance to photograph the edge of the side/lining while waiting for the glue to go off:
That's walnut - douglas fir - douglas fir - douglas fir - mahogany from outside in.
Moving on to the soundboards. Here are the remains of the door (now a motion picture), before and after butchering:
The bits I’m interested in for soundboard are the middle and bottom rail and you may be able to see that they are not perfect; people always have to put screw-holes and nail-holes in these and nature is happy to split the ends, given half a chance, not to mention imperfections in the wood itself. These problems will need dealing with – or I could move on to another door, I suppose. Here is the end of one of these rails:
80-year-old quarter-sawn Douglas Fir. The main problem is that you can’t use much of it because the dowels intrude so I only get 2 half-width boards (= one soundboard) from each rail. These ones only just provide enough length, as well; I need to use the side where the joint-moulding has left most wood (i.e. the part near the surface of the door). I run these through my table saw and then handsaw the bits the circular saw hasn’t reached and end up with this:
Then I plane the dowels out on one side and plane away the paint on the other:
(For those who like to know these things, it’s a Record 04 ½, probably just post-war). Having got them down to the meaty part of what I need, I run them through my sander-thicknesser a few times and they are ready for gluing edge to edge. First, though, how to get the edges nice and straight. Now I know I should be able to “shoot” them with a (t)rusty old plane but I’m afraid I put together a jig and a router and a straight-edge to do the job for me. The fact that it was inspired by an entry in Stefan Sobell’s “news” blog gives it some credence, I feel! Here are some pictures; I hope it explains itself; the two halves of the soundboard are book-folded together along their join and cramped on top of everything:
And then they are glued together. A fairly traditional tent set-up with a large weight (about 25-30 kilos which I found in the garden when we moved into this house) on top to make sure the good side (i.e. the side you can’t see) is flush; I’ve had bad experiences with this in the past since the boards are a bit thinner than they really should be at this stage and 1mm out of kilter means doing it over again. Hot hide glue, by the way, because that’s what people seem to use for this job. I taped both sides of the joint to keep the mess from spreading too far.
If you're eagle-eyed, you'll have spotted 2 holes in one board and even a repaired split at the end of both. The holes have been lined up with the hole in the soundboard and with the bridge area so I should be able to make them disappear. The repaired splits will have to become a "feature".
Not much progress, I suppose, but you should see the amount of furniture I’ve fixed and polished in the meantime! Actually, since it's not really possible to make a proper living from the furniture restoration business, I am tempted to see if I can’t sell a few guitars… so I’ll be looking for advice from the marketing experts on the forum when I’ve finished the build. You have been warned.
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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 14, 2015 13:07:23 GMT
Problem solved! A quarter turn of extra relief and the buzz has gone. Where are the experts when you need them? Right here! Thanks davewhite. Much appreciated.
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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 14, 2015 11:28:12 GMT
That's the problem isn't it? Does it need more or less neck relief either to clear the frets or be pressed against them slightly so that the string can't vibrate? Bottom line is, I don't really know, either! Thanks for the suggestions anyway and you are now absolved from any blame.
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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 14, 2015 10:21:25 GMT
I've come upon a slight problem with this guitar and I blame ocarolan.
With a view to improving my guitar playing, I have been trying to learn to play Hymne a l'Amour from his Youtube collection - lovely music, lovely arrangement, lovely playing. However, at one point I have both the third and the sixth strings fretted at the seventh fret and I pluck the third string (and open D). This causes a buzz which I finally tracked down to the sixth string between the nut and the seventh fret sympathetically resonating the D on the third string/fourth string and buzzing against, presumably, the fifth fret. It's not going to be a problem very often (!) but I need to fix it so anyone any thoughts or do I just polish down the offending fret (if I can find it)? Also, does this often happen or have a got a very sympathetic guitar?
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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 11, 2015 16:11:17 GMT
Once you start, you don't stop, do you? Keep it coming; excellent stuff.
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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 Jun 29, 2015 14:17:20 GMT
That's a relief! For a moment there I thought I might be doing a distance course in french polishing! - not that I'd mind, of course.
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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 Jun 27, 2015 15:52:50 GMT
About time I explained my temporary disappearance. Nothing more exciting than a workshop full of other people's furniture, I'm afraid. The guitars have been pushed well aside for a couple of weeks but I'm hoping to make room for them again soon. Meanwhile, I've been keeping up my interest by designing a label to stick inside. It's based on a running-group T-shirt I designed a year or two ago (Cafe Runners) but only three T-shirts were ever printed so why waste a lot of hard work?!
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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 Jun 24, 2015 13:26:09 GMT
Can't help you there, I'm afraid; french polish mine myself.
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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 Jun 14, 2015 10:44:33 GMT
Can't stop tinkering with bracing layouts. At the moment I'm going with the following (the one on the left hasn't changed but the one on the right has evolved somewhat from earlier form - but is it stable? This time it may corkscrew instead of folding!):
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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 Jun 12, 2015 6:20:07 GMT
Why? Have you got some more in your loft?!
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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 Jun 11, 2015 22:21:01 GMT
2 weeks today I started building these guitars so perhaps time for an update.
The sides have been bent on a bending iron. I’ve not done very much of this and, though I realise this is one of those things which succeeds much better if you get it right first time, I often don’t get it right first time. Furthermore, the bend at the waist is quite severe and the mahogany was particularly reluctant to go that far. After a lot of gentle (but firm) coaxing, I got both sets pretty close to the shape of the mould:
You’ll see that I’ve trimmed them back approximately to shape in the photos above so that they more or less fit in the “trough” which will be used to sand them to their final profile. After that I glued in the neck- and tail-blocks with some difficulty. It’s the first major operation I carried out with fish-glue and I found it does tend to live up to its German name (“Fischleim”); trying to keep the block straight and the ends tight together whilst applying pressure was a slightly slippery experience.
Next time I’ll see if I can tack them in place somehow before cramping. I had a similar experience with the linings but the open time of the glue gives plenty of scope to reposition if things don’t go perfectly straight away:
(You’ll observe that the tail-block in this picture above has been stained with bichromate of potash as a colour test and the one below hasn’t).
More generally I’d say that fish-glue is close to perfect for construction of this kind with, of course, the added bonus of the righteous glow it gives you. I would, however, like to know how long to keep it cramped for; the fact sheet from the manufacturer says 12 hours, which makes gluing on 8 linings a rather time consuming process and explains why I have to stop writing at this point since I’m still gluing and waiting…. Lucky I have a day-job to revert to. You may get blurred images in the background of half-polished tables and half-repaired chairs from time to time. Oh and I have also recovered the roller in my sanding machine; doesn’t it look smart and dandy:
All ready to thickness the back and front plates when they’re prepared.
I’ve also (as previously mentioned) ordered my carbon-fibre and 2-way truss-rod for the neck and the machine-heads. This time they are Gotoh SE-700s – yes, you’ve guessed it: they’re a bit cheaper than 510s especially when you’re buying two sets at the same time! (As I write this I’m becoming aware of the fact that I’m a terrible skinflint; or maybe I’m just a shrewd businessman.) All that’s outstanding now is fret-wire and strings. I don’t think it’ll be finished by the weekend, though.
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