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

Just testing out the app I downloaded onto my iPhone!

Double Woohoo!

I recieved my lot of fingerboards and bridge blanks today. 2 of the fingerboards are Indian Rosewood and 1 of them is a Pau Ferro wood. The bridge blanks are all Macassar Ebony.

<- fingerboards | bridge blanks ->

Waiting on one more shipment!

-Marcus

Woohoo! Another shipment!

This lovely wood is called Macauba, also referred to as Amazon Rosewood, though I don’t believe it is a true rosewood. It’s quite rigid and lush. I can’t wait to work with it!

Nice red color

Hawt grain

So add that to the stash, I’m expecting a few more shipments!

-Marcus

I got some cool things last week! I figured I would post about them because I don’t have much else to post about.

I got an Engleman Spruce and Western Red Ceder soundboard. Also two Black Walnut backs and sides.

yay, wood.

And thats not all! More to come probably later this week.

-Marcus

So I started my first guitar today. It’s a kit build from www.usguitarkits.com.

The kit is like 75% finished already. All you really have to do is shape the soundboard braces, cut the kerfing, glue on the soundboard and assemble the neck. Today I got all the way through glueing the soundboard.

It’s a standard dreadnought guitar. It has a spruce top and sapele back and sides.

Now for some pictures.

So far so good! I’m enjoying the class so far and I really look forward to the knowledge that I get from it.

Next step is to get a garage somehow so I have someplace to do this on my own!

–Marcus