The Neck part I

After sawing the neck blank in 2 pieces, I planed down the headstock part down to the right thickness.

Gluing the scarf joint.

Neck block glued. After this I routed the trussrod channel. 

Tenon cut and rough shaping the heel. I be using Cumpiano´s bolt-on method for attaching the neck to the body.

Heel shaping.

Headstock veneer being glued.

The result.

Headstock rough cutted.

Holes for tuningmachines drilled.

Headstock slots drilled out and being shaped.

Cleaning up the slots.

Done and looking good.

My last name cut out in Mother of Pearl. The little curl underneat is taken from a inlay from the Larson Brothers that im very inspired from.

Routing the cavity.

Inlay being glued. I´m using thin viscosity CA glue, activator spray and a black magic marker. A trick I saw in one of John Halls youtube videos. The idea is that you lay down your inlay, put black marker on top, spray it with the activator so it removes the glue and only leaves the black paint back. Then you flood it with the CA-glue, that picks up the black color and fills up the gaps. This way your cavity dosen´t have to be 100% since the gaps are filled afterwards. This works especially good on ebony since its so dark.

Bindings and Purflings.

Routing the purfling channel using my dremel knockoff with the StewMac routerbase and edgeguide. Worked really good! It took a lot of courage to make the first cut though.

Routing the binding channel.

Binding the back using lots of tape.

Scraping bindings flush with the sides and back. Next time I will cut the channels deeper..

Back done.

Binding the soundboard.

Tape off. Ready to scrape off excess.

Soundboard with bindings and purflings ready to be scraped down.

Closing the box

The Soundboard, Back and Rim ready to be joined together.

Gluing the soundboard to the rim using bungee rope and clamps. The rim is secured in the mold with screws in the 2 blocks. I also added shims in the bottom of the of the mold to keep the rim from popping out from the pressure of the rope.

The soundboard glued to the rim. It´s starting to look like a guitar now.

Sanding the rim the accomodate the radius of the back. 

Signing the Soundboard.

Label glued in the back.

Gluing the back.

The box is closed and looking good.

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.