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First, these pictures show
the back and top being glued together. The top is an adirondack
spruce top that I got from Lance McCollum:
The back and sides were mad
up from three side sets I got from an online seller of Indian
Rosewood backs and sides. These started out 6" wide by 37"
long by 3/16 thick. I sanded them down to about .125" on
the drum sander, then cut the center one to a tapered shape about
22" long, 1-1/4" wide at one end, and 6" wide
at the other end. Then I jointed the mating edges of all three
pieces, and glued them with D35-stryle backstrips from LMII:
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This is the completed
back with the back reinforcement strips and braces glued in place.
The back braces are made from 90-degree vertical, straight-grain
Douglas Fir:
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And this is the top with
the braces and rosette already installed. The top is Adirondack
spruce. I drum-sanded it to about .140" then did the rosette
inlay, then took it up to Hank Mauel's shop and used his big
(and more accurate) thickness belt sander to sand it to about
.115" thickness. Then I installed all of the bracing.
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Here's the bracing for
the top - only the reinforcing braces around the soundhole are
missing at this point:
And a closeup of the rosette:
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Jumping forward a few
weeks, these three pictures show the top being glued to the back
& sides:
Note that the sides have been
bent. I was planning to schedule a time to use Hank Mauel's side-bending
machine, but got impatient, and decided to try the curling iron
trick on the sides and bend them myself. As you can see, it worked.
It's slow going--the curling iron doesn't have a lot of power,
so the wood cools it off rapidly. It took me an hour per side
to bend them this way.
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The Neck: I forgot to
take pictures of the neck as I was building it. Here's what it
looks like after all the inlay work is completed:
   
The neck started out as a rough-cut
neck blank from the Martin Factory. The headstock and the diamond
scarf-joint thingee had been partially shaped, but I did the
rest of the shaping on the oscillating drum sander. Here are
the specs for the neck:
- Mahogany neck blank
- Indian rosewood fingerboard
- Paua abalone position markers
provided by DePaule Supply
- CYR logo in Paua abalone and
white mother-of-pearl provided by DePaule supply
- Fingerboard and headstock
binding is curly maple with walnut and maple purfling
- Floral headstock inlay provided
by Bruce Wei Arts
- Mortise and tenon neck joint
with barrel fasteners and 1/4" x 1-1/2' Allen head cap screws
The neck will be finished with
a mahogany stain, filled with SystemThree SB112 epoxy, then finished
with Minwax satin polyurethane |
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Here's the neck during
final assembly:
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One more of the fingerboard,
showing the hex abalone inlays and the flame maple binding. To
the right is a close-up of the sound hole and bridge:
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Two more pictures of
the body ready for final assembly:
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May 22 2006: Now the guitar is complete. The next four pictures
show it in it's completed state. The action has been fine-tuned,
and the K&K Sound pickup system has been tested.
 
The folks on the REC.MUSIC.MAKERS.GUITAR.ACOUSTIC
have discussed a phenomenon they have observed: that the sound
of a new guitar improves significantly over the first few weeks
of its life as the wood "breaks in" and gets used to
the vibrations caused by playing it--that somehow the regular
playing of the guitar modifies the structure of the wood in a
way that improves the overall tone of the instrument. When I
built the first guitar last year I was unaware of this phenomenon,
so I wasn't listening carefully to see if that guitar improved
with age, so to speak. So with this one I'm listening carefully
to see if the sound does or doesn't improve as the guitar gets
more playing time. So far, I haven't really observed any change,
but the guitar has only had strings on it for about a week so
far. |
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This picture shows the detail
of the area around the sound hole and bridge. Pretty. :-)
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