The Rim

Planing down the sides to the right thickness. About 2 - 2,5 mm. Note that this is done in our kitchen.. my wife is really patient! But she didn´t find it very funny, when she found rosewood dust in her morning cereal... ups.

Shavings.

Scraping. In the kitchen. Leaving lots of dust..

My homemade bending iron. It consists of a aluminium tube with a 100W lightbulb inside. It take about 10-15 minutes before its hot enough to bend on. I soaked the sides in water for 30 minutes before bending them.

Sides bent and in the mould. Next build i´m going to spend more time making sure that I bend a more accurate shape than i did here. I rushed it too much and the shaped was very far from accurate. I will have to buy a commercial bending iron, to replace my homemade one. I had alot of trouble bending the tight waist curve.. I think the radius on my homemade iron is too big. The commercial irons are teardrop-shaped giving you a variety of curves that you can bend.

Shaping up the neck and heel block . On the kitchen floor...

Gluing blocks. In our living room..

Gluing kerfing.

The Soundboard

Joining the 2 plates using the tape metod. You can also make a plate joining jig, but i really like the simple solutions!

Planing down to the right thickness. The plates came in around 5mm thick and I planed them down to around 2,5 mm thick. My plans didn´t say anything about thickness, so I researched a bit and found out that the standard thickness is about 2,5 mm. Here is my new vintage Record #4. I bought this to replace my other cheap stanley... This one is so much better quality.

Routing the rosette channels using my dremel knockoff and the StewMac guides.

Channels routed for the main part of the rosette. I justed a twin flute router bit, instead of a spiral bit which cause the woodfibers to be torn instead for being pressed down. Lesson learned!

Rossette ready to be glued in.

Rosette glued in scraped flush with the soundboard.

The rosette done and soundhole done.

On my plans, the soundboard was braced with a ladderbracing, but since i wanted to have steel strings on the guitar, I figured that it was best to use a more stabile x-bracing. I found a photo of the bracing of a old Washburn parlor and used this as guidelines for my x-bracing.

Laying out the bracing pattern on the soundboard.

Cutting the braces to size.

Gluing braces.

Carving braces.

The finished soundboard ready to be glued on the rims. I used a 25´ radius for the x-braces to make the soundboard dome-shaped.