Bending The Sides Part 4 - Day 12

DAY 12 - (HOURS 1.00, TOTAL TIME 28.30HRS)

Here's a pic of the 12inch crack running down the grain:

- it should be behind the kerfing hopefully, so that will give it some strength when it's all together.

- the top of side two had warped a small bit, but I'll be cutting most of that bit off at the top, and the small bit of warping left will be glued to the neck block, so it's still a finished side to me!

- finished!

After spending waaaaaaaaay longer than I had planned on the sides (About a third of my time so far on the guitar) I finally packed up the bending iron, and stuck it back on the shelf.

Damn it felt good.

Bending The Sides Part 3 - Day 11

DAY 11 - (HOURS 1.00, TOTAL TIME 27.30HRS)

A very, very short day:

- I got the second side finished! It wasn't perfect, but I don't believe the wood could take anymore torture.

- after spending time getting the ends right, I realised side one had buckled in the middle. I knew I was going to have to start from one end again, so I just went home and had a cuppa.

Bending The Sides Part 2 - Day 10

DAY 10 - (HOURS 2.30, TOTAL TIME 26.30HRS)


So with the sides half-bent, or so I thought, I continued up past the waist to the shoulders:


- the bottom half had warped back a bit so I had to start from the base again. Always start from one end, I started in the middle at one stage and sure the all the other curves went out when I did that.



- finally I have the complete side sitting into the mould! Granted it's not really touching the mould all the way around, but it's in.

- I returned to working on the side I started on, I had been neglecting it since it got a 12inch crack down the grain up near the shoulder. I actually took this photo believing it would be a "look-how-far-I-got-before-I-broke-it" photo. Thankfully, this wasn't the case.

- on the last curve, a second crack, across the grain this time, appeared and had me going very gentle for the last curve, which slowed things down.

- and there you have two sides in a mould!

- hehe, not exactly done yet!

- I ran the bridge under the band saw to do a rough cut around the template, and then headed home.

Bending the Sides Part 1 - Day 9

DAY 9 - (HOURS 4.30, TOTAL TIME 24HRS)

- Now these hours are a little over, as I'm building a Mountain Dulcimer along side the guitar, it's a kit(And a present from Annie to me for my birthday!) so I'll give it it's own post when it's finished.

Bending the sides.

I was dreading this process, as the wood I have is one of the densest used for sides, but it's also thicker than it should be - not by much mind you, but if you can plane it down to 2mm, and mine is at 3mm, that's 50% extra workload already!

I've heard of the side bending process taking 30 minutes a side, even for a first timer. This was not the case for me. The wood wouldn't absorb water as it was too dense, so I was forced to use a cloth to wet it intermittently(which made the process way longer due to the cloth cooling it down every time) and use the iron to push a bit of steam through each time, eventually the wood would give, and I could bend it.

Well enough chat. Here is a few pics:

- the bending iron. You can get one online for around €150-€180. Quite expensive!

- the sides were soaked in the bath for 20minutes. A fruitless endeavour really, as they didn't absorb any water or become limber.

- this is actually after about 10-15minutes of bending. Granted it was my first attempt, but I could tell it was going to be a really slow process. I think at the start I was a bit afraid of applying the correct pressure, it's when you think the wood is about to break that the bending occurs. Keep the pressure on evenly, rocking the wood slightly to stop it burning on one point. The bending iron had 7 settings, I used the 5th for this wood.

- I was catching the hang of it, this is at about 30 minutes.

- I think this was around 2 hours. A crack appeared down the grain very early in the bending process. It was obviously a weak spot as not a lot of pressure was being applied at the time. I'll show all this and the repair work in a later post.

- the second side came on a lot faster, I thought maybe after 4hours in the bath the wood would be as supple as those yokes Rolph Harris uses, but no, it wasn't. It was down to me being familiar with the bending iron. I never practised on scrap wood with this tool - foolish really. i would strongly recommend doing so, especially if you've got nice wood, or no other wood to use if you break the piece you're working on.

- I left the sides at this for the day. the wood had suffered enough!

- I filled in the small hole in the routing channel of the rosette using two pieces of wood that had been cut out.

- it was a crude job, that will require sanding and a glue/wood paste to fill in the rest, but it makes the hole a lot smaller.

- I had to make two wedges as well...

- as the ends of the mould were not aligning properly.

I called it a long day after this.

Rosette Routing Contd. & Fixing The Hole In The Soundboard - Day 8

DAY 8 - (HOURS 2.00, TOTAL TIME 19.30HRS)

So after along time of trying different ways to get the sides down to some sort of usable thickness, I decided to take Tony up on his offer of a friend up the road with a machine sander. I had tried all sorts of ways to bring it down; belt sander, hand sander, hand planing etc. There's only so long you can do it!
Have a look at how the wood came up:

- even without it being fine sanded, the back and sides are shining.

- a bit blurry, but you can see the contrasting colours in the Madagascar Rosewood.

I started straight into getting the wedge down to size that I put in the top. I just used the hand planer on both sides, as I will be sanding it at a later stage.It brought it down from this:

To this:

I set back up the soundboard on the routing pin and got back to routing out the channel for the rosette:

- the first sweep got rid of most of the channel. I just needed to trim the edges...

- you can see the small difference there in the centre where the second circle is about 1.5mm too far away from the line.

- beautiful! One 0.9mm channel routed.
It went an awful lot smoother this time around, I was sure to keep checking depths and the like, and made sure the depth-setter was tight!

With the channel finished, I dry-fitted the rosette in place, then used a thick superglue to stick it in place:


- The fit was a very snug one, I was afraid of breaking the rosette as I was forcing it in, but it has to be snug, so take your time, but not too much or the glue will have dried! Wax paper and some weight and it was left for an hour or so. Thick superglue is a longer drying time, so the window for getting it right is greater.


The next step now is to cut out the soundhole, you don't need it now that the rosette is in. When the rosette dried in place, I tried a few methods that weren't the best idea for gouging out the wood. Have a look:

- using the routing bit on the drilling machine I tried to use it in the same manner but it didn't work. It caused some chipping on the underbelly.

- I tried the same machine with a rounded routing bit, but it was obvious the revolutions weren't enough.
- after a delicate job with the router held by hand, I managed this. I wouldn't recommend this method, one slip and you've ruined your soundboard!

- with the thin piece of wood left, I used a scalpel to cut it out roughly.

- I then sanded the edges a small bit...

- working my way down from 60 to 100grit.

- as you can see from the next photo, the centre line of the soundboard isn't really in line with the gap in the rosette, but this is because the first piece of Mother of Pearl in it is cracked, so I moved it around so that the fretboard will hide it.

Close enough for me! I've left about 0.5-1mm of extra wood around the edge of the hole, just in case it gets hit by something, or a clamp pinches it when we'll be putting on the bridge at the end. It never hurts to be cautious!

Ruining The Rosette & Rigging The Router - Day 7

DAY 7 - (HOURS: 4.00, TOTAL TIME 17.30HRS)


Day 7.

Where to start...

OK a small bit of chiseling was done on the mould to cut back the pine pieces to size:

- one of the end pieces hadn't really stuck that well, so nails were promptly hammered in to keep her in place. The beauty of the mould is that it can be made quiet quickly in parts, as every stage doesn't require the neatness of the actual instrument itself. In other words, you can be a bit slack in parts if you want!

- all edges are level now.

- the end pieces took a good hammering at this stage. They'll get over it though!

So that all went fine.

But the rosette didn't.

I should start by showing you how the router was rigged to fit the rosette routing tool, which it didn't actually fit.

Have a gawk:

- when you buy a soundhole/rosette routing kit from stewmac(at almost 37euro) this is what you get. A we piece of metal with an adjustable length for routing different sized circles. You get two screws to attach it to the standard sized router. You also get a small 3/16" bar that acts as the fulcrum.

- it's not the worst price I suppose. A lot of the speciality tools are usually extremely expensive. But the problem we had with this is that the dimensions for the holes that join it to the router were of an incorrect width. Maybe you have to buy a certain brand, or maybe you have to buy stewmacs one. Either way, we had to create a makeshift connection between the two. It's not a good idea to do this, I wouldn't recommend it. But if you find yourself in this situation, maybe you can learn from the way we did it, and tips would be greatly appreciated on another method!

- a thin wedge was made to screw the rosette tool into on the bottom.

- measuring up the holes.
- the tool was affixed to the wedge.

Tony had to take apart the bottom of the router to allow the surface to be flush with the wedge.

- once we had that done, the top came off to screw screws into those two holes you see either side of the drilled hole.

- one rigged router coming up!

- the depth was set at 0.9mm to create the bed for the rosette to sit in. The rosette I bought was 1.2mm thick. We tested it on an off-cut of the Mastergrade Cedarwood to make sure it would go swimmingly. It's worth mentioning here to keep all pieces of wood you cut off, no matter how small. OK not wood shavings! But even pieces a few millimetres thick can serve as wedges for joint etc.

The last thing to do today was mark the top for routing and proceed with doing it.

This, I'm afraid, didn't go according to plan.

Check it out:

- I had the template drawn on the opposite side, but then I opted to make this side the front. I pushed a pin through where the centre of the soundhole was and went about making circles.

- I made three. One for the exterior of the rosette, one for the interior, and one where the soundhole edge will be. It's worth pointing out that the rosette I got was too small to facilitate the soundhole size in the 'OOO' plan, so I just went and made my own size. It won't affect the structure as it is a smaller hole.

- a 3/16" hole was drilled through the soundboard, and through the piece of MDF underneath. This left approximately 11mm of the bar above the soundboard - more than enough for the tool to rotate about.


- or maybe it was more like 18mm! It doesn't look straight up in this photo but I assure you it is. It's important that it's straight as the tool won't rotate properly if it's to one side.

- beautiful!

- So everything went grand until now...


- somehow the setting for depth slipped. It went straight through the soundboard and even into the MDF. The reason so much was done before it was seen, was because of the rigged tool obstructing the view.

- the good thing about a serious error like this, is that the rosette will cover it anyway. So going back to the off-cut of Mastergrade Cedar, a piece was cut out and shaped to fit the hole. Note that the grain is running in the same direction on both pieces. Don't forget to do that, especially if it's not going to be hidden.

- doing a dry-fit check on it.

- sawdust from cutting the shape of the top is used to create a paste. A mixture of roughly one part glue to two parts dust was used. It creates a nice thick gritty paste somewhere between toothpaste and blu-tack. I know I said before to not keep wood shavings, I should've said keep the dust from what you do as well. Hopefully no one was hurt ;)

- with a piece of wax paper left underneath. The 5mm thick wedge is placed in, protruding on either side.

It's left to dry, and I'm left to stew!