Beefy Bryn Flat-top

What you're about to see may be a shock to the system.  My work is appallingly scruffy compared to the impeccable stuff you will have been looking at on any number of other builds which surround me - or maybe they take their pictures from further away or photoshop them or something.  Suffice it to say I'm more than a little embarrassed but I can't retire gracefully so far into the build.  Not much progress, I'm afraid.  Just drilled some holes, sanded some bits of laburnum into toothpick-sized pieces and glued them through the bridge.  The glue is Cascamite (wash your mouth out with soap and water) tinted with a little raw umber, a little yellow ochre, a little chrome yellow and a little chrome orange.  These went in one side and came out the other.  They are only thin but there are lots of them.  I can't see this bridge launching itself across the room.  The strange blocks occupying the saddle slots are very overheight "sub-saddles".  They are a good fit but are easily pulled out.  When cut to height they will be slotted accurately on their tops to take bits of fret-wire which will be the final departure points for the strings.







ps  You may have noticed that one little dowel came up where it shouldn't have.  I'll sort it out later...

Nothing wrong at all Rob - echo Dave's words entirely. Just enjoy what you're doing and keep posting the piccies...

Here's the new cleaned up look!

As promised above, I have taken a snap of the fingerboard shaped to near final outline:



It's not actually attached to the neck yet mainly because I'm having a few issues with the width of the neck where it meets the body and beyond:  i.e. the bottom bit of the photo above.  You can possibly see that I've had to glue a bit of extra mahogany from about fret 7 to fret 13 because I appear to have gone a bit narrow hereabouts - very professional, I hear you cry.  Anyway, I'm sure I'll get away with it;  I've done worse - much worse...  I think the problem stems from my habit of redesigning bits of guitar - or, at least, slightly re-dimensioning - on my computer drawing and then never really making it clear to myself which version I have settled on.  Thus I have a huge page of drawings which I can zoom in on to see details of design or measurement but I tend to forget that the bit I'm looking at might not be the final version.  Why don't I show you the whole page to give you the idea?  Here it is:



Now God knows how many necks, for example, there are on there so how am I supposed to know which is the one I'm building?  This is further complicated by the fact that one of the drawings is of the neck and bridge position as they actually turned out on this particular guitar;  some of you may remember I decided to follow Somogyi's advice on attaching the neck at a slight angle and that I went a bit far.  So I've got drawings of a straight neck, a slightly off-centre neck, and a slightly more off-centre neck and they're all on the same page of drawings.  You have to keep your wits about you with my drawings I can promise you!

Anyway, I decided to attach the fret-markers to the fretboard before gluing it down because the process would involve cutting right through the fretboard, which is more easily done when it's in a vice rather than fixed to a guitar.  Of course, my mind immediately went to RosieTGC 's build and her exceptionally striking markers - not forgetting her interesting layout:  frets 3, 5, 7 and 12.  Could I challenge her skill and originality?  No, I couldn't.  I did get as far as making up a strip of licorice-allsort-inspired mahogany/maple inlay but decided it wasn't very impressive and you would probably not be able to see it in a dimly lit room - the only place you would want to play one of my guitars.  Anyway, here's the bit I didn't use:




It's only 4.2mm thick in reality so you'll have to excuse the bear's-arseness of it in this photo.  In the end I decided that, if I was going to go minimalist with my layout, I should also go minimalist with the markers - especially since this is the way to avoid unflattering comparisons with Rosie's work.  I went for camel bone, of which I have a stock (and which needs to be kept well away from Jack the Jack Russel who feels that any bits of bone lying around the place are clearly there to supplement his diet).  The first guitar I made had markers copied from a British-made Westone Cutlass guitar and were quite nice if somewhat invisible:



So I reached for a little round file and made some little rounded slots to receive bits of rounded camel bone in the appropriate places:



I was wondering what to do about marking the frets beyond the 12th and noticed my wife doing a bit of gardening just outside the workshop, it being Sunday.  She knows nothing about guitars and has even less interest in what I have to say about them but I held her attention for long enough for her to say, "Don't bother" after I had explained the choices.  So anyone with the temerity to play way up there is on their own, I'm afraid.  Besides, the markers would clash with the chevrons which run alongside the fretboard here.

I've also been contemplating a slightly radical - can you have "slightly radical"? - modification of the soundboard bracing.  Here's a reminder of how things stand (and, incidentally, this is just a tiny bit of the big drawing up above;  we could have a little competition to see if you can find it! but we won't):



The plan could be to stop the two braces which run up from the bridge to the waist short of the cross-over point with the /\ braces.  I somehow feel that this whole area is rather over-engineered.  I've taken the ends of all the braces around the periphery down to nothing before they reach the sides in order to free up the soundboard as much as possible and it's only these two braces which still seem to pin it down.  I was further tempted to thin down the /\ braces to open up even more of the soundboard, which is why I was contemplating davewhite 's flying buttresses on his thread.  (He might even like the idea if I promise to include his UTBs, which (you may have noted) I have forgotten to attach so far....)

Oh the thrill of it all!.

More work on the neck and environs today.  There is a bare patch of soundboard between the sound-hole and the neck



which remains untainted by polish in readiness to receive the upper end of the fretboard.  This would appear to offer a simple process of gluing up and sticking down but things are never quite that simple.  In this case there are two little things to do before the sticking can go ahead:  to remove a sliver of softwood at the side of the patch and replace it with mahogany since this edge will show on the side of the neck of the finished guitar;  to glue a shallow wedge to the patch which can be sanded flush with the back-angle of the neck so as to provide a truly flat surface to support the upper portions of the fretboard.

I started by removing the piece from the edge of the patch and gluing in a small piece of mahogany:



I then cut a piece of constructional veneer sapele (about 1.5mm thick) to fit the patch;  this should, I suppose, be mahogany again but I don't think anyone will notice the difference from the tiny wedge appearing between the fingerboard and the soundboard since they're both reddish:



(Could you please fail to notice the ugly gap I seem to have between the neck and the soundboard adjacent to this patch;  it'll disappear once the fingerboard in applied and won't cause any structural problems.)  
I searched the floor of the workshop for a piece of wood the right shape and size to spread the force of the cramp over the surface of this piece but to no avail;  the floor is far too tidy.  (Irony).  But I did have a piece of wood the right shape and size to do the job so I used that (with hot hide glue, I hardly need say):



Once the glue had gone off enough to support the piece while I worked on it, I planed and sanded it flush with the face of the neck as you can see in the picture below:



At this point I should have been able to glue the fingerboard down to the neck but one or two other little matters needed to be cleared up first:  I had decided it would be better to insert the fret-markers before attaching the fretboard to the neck and, as usual, I had become disenchanted with the way in which I had finished the face of the machine head much earlier in the build.  I took my carefully prepared pieces of bone and glued them into the slots (hot hide) and then sanded them flush to the surface:



(Bear in mind that this isn't as rough as it looks;  the slots are only 0.6mm wide).  I then took a hottish iron to the sapele veneer on the head and levered it off when it was warm enough.  I replaced it with a layer of maple followed by a thin veneer of something that looks a bit like sapele but is a bit more interesting and came in a selection of veneer off-cuts I bought a long time ago:



True, you can't see it anyway in this photo so I'll try to feature it in my next post.

True to the spirit of my attempt to voice the soundboard in what is effectively a finished guitar, I have begun to wonder if I could string it up without a back on it.  Oh, I know I will have shocked some amongst you with such idiocy but I have a cunning plan:

There are quite a lot of 6mm plywood panels (taken from my 1930s doors) lying around in my wood-store - don't start imagining anything with racks and such-like;  it's just a few piles of wood and mdf and things.  I am wondering if I could cut fairly precisely dimensioned slots into the side of a piece of this ply so that it would fit tightly and supportively over the side of the guitar (which is, you will remember, very sturdy) at the side of the neck join and then again at the far end alongside the tail-block.  If I added another at the other side of the neck join and then, perhaps, linked in a similar piece going across the waist and another across the lower bout, I would probably have something which would replicate the structural performance of the back but would still allow access to the back of the soundboard for shaving and sanding - voicing - with the strings on.  This is quite possibly a daft idea but it's not the first I've had.  I'll ponder it while I get on with gluing on the fingerboard tomorrow.