Beefy Bryn Flat-top

Hmmm, nice, looks like you saved yourself a few quid too!

Keith

Getting there...

As for the guitar, well I have made a little halting progress. I've been doing the soundboard purfling and binding. The trouble is I kept making purfling which was no good. Here is the purfling being made. It starts with constructional veneer (maple and sapele) which is about 1.5mm thick. I slice off narrow strips and then glue these together in the order you can see in the picture; I think I described exactly the same thing in my previous thread ("the Bryn Production"):



Having glued these together, I then slice diagonal pieces off the sheet using my tiny table saw:






These are then arranged into nice chevrons to go around the border of the soundboard.  Unfortunately, the first batch I made refused to bend without breaking, with or without heat, so I had to ditch them.  I think I used the wrong glue.  So then I made a batch with hot hide glue, which I knew would bend nicely with a little heat from the side-bending iron.  Unfortunately, I cut them slightly too shallow so that they would have lain slightly below the level of the soundboard.  No good.  Ditched.  The third batch I somehow managed to cut about 0.1mm too wide so that, when paired into chevrons, they were perceptibly too wide for the channel I had cut for them.  This was becoming a bit silly.  I finally made a batch that bent nicely and fitted into the channel correctly. Here they are being stuck in with hot hide glue:



(They're under the tape)...



You can see some of them in this one - caked in glue.  And here they are all in place, awaiting the addition of strips of maple and sapele to bind them in:



Added the binding and then cleaned them up with hot water first, then a scraper and finally sandpaper:



I know it's been a while since I wrote it (and you read it) but you may remember that the idea here is to fit the bridge and polish the front before finally putting the back on so I plunged straight into the liberal application of a few fads of shellac:



I decided this time to try taping over the footprint of the bridge rather than scrape the finish off later:



I might have to tidy it up around the edges but it should help to make sure that the glue gets a good grip.

So here is how it stands tonight:



Looks a bit like a guitar, doesn't it?  Don't be fooled, though;  it's like a stage set:  smart and shiny on one side and shabbily propped up on the other:



I intend to tidy up the insides when I do the final voicing of the soundboard before closing the box so don't despair.  Standards will be maintained.

Rob

Yes.

K

I would have liked to have gone straight on with the polishing over the weekend but fancied I could see a hairline crack along the grain running near the join south of the bridge position.  I decided a little thin wicking glue (and maybe a little reinforcement on the other side) should sort it out but didn't have any thin superglue.  A quick order to Axminster and it arrived today.  It was well packed:



In fact, this picture makes the bottle look bigger than it is in comparison to the packing.  Remarkably, they only charge £1 for postage and packing these days.  I hope this doesn't mean they're about to go out of business.

Anyway, back to the crack.  I wonder if it's the result of polishing pressure;  there's not much support under this area and french polishing requires some force.  I should have supported it underneath with a pile of old clothes but, as usual, I wasn't thinking.  I hope this will solve the problem.  I also detected a hairline in the laburnum I'm using for the bridge so I gave that a splash while I was at it....

...which leads me nicely on to the bridge.  Since I'd had to leave off polishing the soundboard, I decided to get on with the bridge, which is the next step in this oddly ordered build.  My lump of laburnum is beginning to dwindle and I'm frantically searching for more but there's enough left for this and another guitar or two.  I started by slicing 10mm from a lump:





That's not a special shape;  it's just the shape the lump happens to be.  I planed this slice down to a fairly precise 10mm so that I could apply all my plans to it.  Then I cut out the bridge shape:


 
Pretty standard bridge shape, I think you'll agree.  Drilled and chiselled out the channels for my three saddle pieces.  The next step is to mark and then drill 1mm guide holes straight through so that I can relate what's on the top with what's on the bottom:



On the paper template the guide-holes are in red, the tops of the string-retaining holes are in black and the recesses into which the ball-ends nestle on the bottom of the bridge are in blue.  Here I have just let the drill bit mark out where the tops of the holes should be:



You can just make out the guide-holes on the edges of the circles, like little planets.  Next the bridge is turned over and the recesses for the ball-ends are drilled to a depth of about 3.5mm with a 5mm drill bit:



Over again and the main holes are drilled right through at an angle of around 70 degrees to help with retention of the ball-ends:



When you've done this the other side (i.e. the bottom) looks like this;  you have to imagine it glued tight to the soundboard to get the idea of the little recesses:



Believe me, it's easier to actually do this than it is to keep tabs on which photo is of what and where it comes in the series.  Anyway, it only remains to cut the slots to guide the strings into their retaining holes.  First mark them out:



and then start to saw them at a slope from the saddle position down to the recesses at the bottom:



Next you have to stop because people have started coming home from school and work and Jack (the Jack) needs feeding - but there's just time to pop what you've achieved so far on to the guitar-so-far and take a snap:




And what could be prettier than that?