Here are the pictures of the inlay after it was glued in. There were lots of little gaps (as seen in the first two pictures) so I did the whole gluing process again to fill those holes. The last picture is essentially what it is now, I have since sanded the CA (super glue) out of the pores.

Bailie Guitars, that is.

I got a preliminary headstock design done. It didn’t take very long to design, which I am surprised. I only did about a page of sketching. Immediately I started hacking into the headstock of the kit guitar, I like how it turned out. It doesn’t leave a lot of space for a fancy inlay or logo, but I think its pretty unique.

Who knows, I may change it again later.

on the guitar.

-Marcus

I got a couple packages today. I’m expecting a few more this week so I’ll wait until then to spill the beans.

I don’t know if this constitutes and actual “jig”, but I made it and damnit I’m gonna use it.

This is a neck thickness jig that i made off of my Taylor 714ce. The guitar kit that I am currently working on now needed the neck sanded to thickness. I didn’t have any bearing on what to sand it to, so I made this Masonite jig with the help of the contour gauge.

Pretty nifty, now I just have to drill a hole so I can hang it on the wall….

THIS is the piece I’ve been waiting on. It came in awhile ago, but I never got around to taking a picture of it with me moving to the new house and all.

It’s a lovely set (back and sides) of Black Limba. I’m definitely going to wait to make it #3 or #4 because I dont want to ruin it.

This is the last day of the class. The guitar is now playable and sounds pretty decent. The neck still needs to be shaped and quit a bit of setup needs to be done. After that, i have to final sand it and figure out what sort of finished i am going to put on it.

Hopefully the next post i make will be a post about my next guitar!

Almost done!

Today we scraped the @#&$ out of our binding! I did a pretty decent job of keeping glue off the wood part of the guitar, so I didn’t have a ton of work to do. We scraped and scraped, and when we were sick of scraping, we scraped some more. We drilled pilot holes for our tuners machines. After scraping, we sanded down the glue and gunk on the soundboard. Somewhere in there we put the side markers in the pre-drilled holes. We sanded and fitted our bridge and saddle. After that we used the supplied jig to set the location of the bridge. Next, we drilled holes for the bridge clamp and glued the bridge on.

That was pretty much it! Now for pics.

Next week is the last week. We’ll fret the fingerboard, install the tuning machines and string it up!

I am starting to notice a pattern. Every time I come home from my guitar class, I am sore! Making a guitar is rough on your body, especially your hands and fingers.

Today was day 3 of my guitar making class! A summed up version of what we did is:

-Fine tuned fretboard straightness
-Glued in Ablam inlay on fretboard
-Final polish of fretboard
-Routed channels for binding and purfling
-Glued in binding and purfling

Now for the pictures!

Arg, since seperating out the site, I’ve been wrestling with it right and left. I finally got the pictures working, but I dont feel like re-captioning all of them. So you’ll just have to settle for semi-pretty pictures with no explanation.

Toodles,
-Marcus

So as soon as I got into the shop today, I got started. I started by routing the neck tenon channel from the soundboard. This was done with a router and a small flush cut bit.

Next was to dry fit the neck to the body. My guitar needed some shimming, two shims got it just about right but was low in a few spots. So I added a new shim and just used a block plane to take down the material on the top.

I radiused the fretboard next. I don’t have any pictures of that, but what a mess! It’s a ton of work and I was coughing up rosewood snot for a few hours after the class. It’s quite a bit of work, but I ended up with a good looking fretboard. After that, I flipped the fretboard over onto a flat piece of sandpaper and made the back of the fretboard flush for gluing to the neck.

Next up was to ream the tuner holes. The holes were already drilled in the headstock, but i had to ream them out so that the tuners would fit correctly. This also was a long, strenuous process.

Last for the day was to glue the fretboard to the neck. One picture is of the dry fit and measuring, the next picture is of it clamped onto the neck.

Now for the pictures!

Until next week!

-Marcus