The next one

Thanks, scripsit , for the jarrah insight.  I believe jarrah may be a bugger to work but, believe me, mora is also a bugger to work  - and maybe even a bigger bugger - because it blunts your tools but worst of all it smells bad and makes the whole workshop smell as if you haven't changed your socks recently.  Not a nice working environment.  Even worse when someone pops in to see you.  Also mora isn't very pretty;  I suspect jarrah at least has a nice redness about it;  mora is just bland.  It's not horrible;  it's just mora (less).  Nonetheless, I have made a large bridge out of mora so I am stuck with making a fingerboard out of it, too, though there is no edict which says the fingerboard and the bridge must match.  But it will make a very practical fingerboard since it is so hard-wearing according to all accounts.

I managed to get the bridge down to just under 70gms and, although I know that colins , my luthier guru, advocates 20-25gms and I myself have managed that kind of range on my last few guitars, I think we have to take into account two things here:  firstly, the fact that mora is extremely dense (as in over 1000kg/ m³) and, secondly, the fact that this "bridge" is really part bridge and part soundboard.  In fact, as it stands, I reckon only 16gms of this will be bridge protruding above the level of the soundboard, though the weight of the soundboard itself will be increased marginally by having the denser wood partly replacing it.  Don't worry about all this:  the point is that I don't think I've added too much weight to the soundboard, which might inhibit vibration, while I will definitely have strengthened it considerably, which will inhibit collapse.  This carving and rasping and chiseling and sanding has cost me finger-skin and has deprived my wife and a son of my company for hours on end - especially since this is my third attempt at it.  But now it is done and I feel this is emblematic of the victory of the indomitable perseverance of the human spirit over the calamities of life....  It doesn't smell nice, though.

Here is my progress in photographic form:





 







  

It still needs to be sanded flush but I'm getting there at last.

A large amount of hand-sanding followed.  I sanded the top hard for a long time and now it's not far off the projected 2.5-3.0mm that I was aiming for, this being the combined thickness of the bridge-plate and the soundboard.  I also lost about 0.5mm of skin from my hands all round in the process.  Of course, during all the thinning of the front, I was keeping a keen ear on the tap-tone of the soundboard. It was improving but then started, well, rattling! You may or may not remember that I earlier had to re-glue the minor braces because the fish-glue refused to hold them. Well, this time, one of the very long braces had come away and, with very little help, it eased itself off all the way to the top. I've re-attached it with yellow glue. I could do without this sort of thing. The obvious question is, what about the other major braces? Are they about the detach themselves or will they wait till I've put the back on? I'd better give them a good work-out to make sure they're all secure before closing up.

I also realised I had to remove some of the soundboard bulk on either side of the bridge unit, since the whole of the central part of the soundboard had been left at about 4mm (or more) to accommodate the recessed bridge.  I also wanted to taper a little towards the edges to free up the soundboard a little more.  Having done this, I realised I had cut into the depth of the binding-housing and it would need re-routing before I tried to glue in the maple binding.  With this in mind I also remembered that the sides (sapele veneer) were very rough and would need serious sanding before they would take polish.  So I then turned to energetic reduction of the sides until they no longer showed the excessive banding caused by the ripped out interlocking grain of the sapele.  I probably had to take half a millimetre off all the way round.  This, of course, cut into the width of the binding channel so, with both the depth and the width compromised, I ran the top edge against the router once more and cleaned it up ready to receive the binding.  

Now, the binding is solid maple and, as such, has a bit of a mind of its own;  it would need more than a bit of sticky tape to hold it in place even though I have done my best to bend it on the bending iron.  So yesterday I bought some cotton rope - a great length of it - which I will wrap around the guitar tightly when I come to put the binding on.  However, with the back open and even though the sides are strong, I think it would be wise to wait till I have a complete box before I start heaving on rope to pull in the bindings.  

So what else could I do?  Well, next on my list is the fingerboard.

The fingerboard is going to be jarrah-cum-mora.  However, I can't move the sleeper on my own so this morning I got out my handsaw and lopped a good half meter off the end.  I can move that much of it so I hoisted it onto my table-saw and set about taking pieces off it:



I started by taking enough off the side to make sure that I was through all the splitting and cracking and into solid wood (above).  Next I went for a thinner strip which could be used for a fingerboard or two:



Here's the piece I cut off:



Most of it's in pretty good nick considering it's been trundled over by thousands of trains.  It's smelly but sound.  Next thing was to plane, rasp and sand it down to the sort of thickness I need - around 6mm:



I must admit I had to resort to my home-made sander-thicknesser and it did a worthy job but I finished everything off by going through the grades (down to 240 grit) by hand.  Here's the finished article - a fingerboard blank:



I even managed to cut some slots in approximately the right places, though my jig goes for a slightly diagonal look if left to its own devices:

 

It's not actually attached to the neck yet, by the way, but good progress all the same.

Yeah, Leo.  I did wipe the back of it to remove some double-sided tape and it was quite pretty;  reddish-orange with bands of purple-grey.  It'll soon be all the rage!

Hey, Rob.  Are you expecting to get this one finished for Halifax?

Not sure. You should know.

Well, it's a stressful time and who knows what mistakes are lurking round the corner ready to jump out and slow me down?

When I said there would be no more pictures of go-bar decks, I wasn't counting on the excitement of this morning.  Got the lad out of bed and took him to his Saturday job at the garden centre and went and found some nice thin cane (3 foot long for 12p).  Bought 30 - big spender - got home and put the last piece of the back puzzle into the go-bar deck.  Poetry, pure poetry.