Multi-scaled Triple O - build started

First two coats of waterbased lacquer applied today to the back, sides and neck - front will be French polished.

Aim now is to leave it now for 24 hrs to let the lacquer harden sufficiently to cut it back before applying further coats.

Looking very nice indeed Francis.

R the F - I use a router (DeWalt trimmer) mounted on a parallel arm arrangement to keep it vertical and rotate the guitar body around under it. The router bit is a down-cut shape 35mm diameter from Axminster: www.axminster.co.uk/axcaliber-rebate-cutter-set-ax802211 It came with a couple of bearings and I turned up some additional brass rings to fit around the bearings, sized to give me the depth of cut needed for the bindings and others for the purflings. I think DW has a similar arrangement to keep the router vertical on a long arm - mine has shorter arms and it's clamped to the end of the workbench when needed.

I place the body in a radiused dish i.e. when routing the front the back sits in the 15 ft radius side and when routing the back the front rests in a 20 ft radius. Doing it that way keeps the sides vertical. I have routed the channels with the body held in the body mould but some of the body moulds are too big to let me rotate them under the router as they foul the router supports. Keep meaning to make a router support with longer arms to overcome that problem...

R the F : the important thing with binding/purfling rebates using this router support is the 'land' that sits on the top or back surfaces - too wide and the height of the rebate suffers due to the router being raised by the body's curved areas, too narrow and you get loading problems as the router's weight causes compression of the softer soundboard fibres. Oh yes no sharp edges.

Doing the channels on this guitar I had some problems with the bearings sticking slightly. When you see film of an aircraft landing and the puff of smoke as the tyre hits the tarmac - bit like that without the smoke as the bearing comes up to speed - it has caused some small depressions in the cherry sides. I'm going to redesign mine so I have stationary bearings under the router bit that I can adjust laterally to give the correct cut depth using as bigger sized bearing diameter I can get away with. Like you design time.

Certainly sticking with the 35mm rebate cutter the shearing cut produces a nice clean edge.

I'm also sticking with the idea of rotating the guitar body under the router assembly as using an adjustable bearing under the cutter you need to keep the centre line joining the bearing and cutter normal to the point of cut.

Neck virtually finished now. Machine heads fitted, lacquer cut back and buffed up, some tape to remove from the neck joint area and make a truss rod cover.

The body needs another day for the lacquer to harden before I start cutting and buffing that. What I will do though is build-up the French polish to the soundboard first.

Good day today...

Headstock images now the machine heads are installed