Due to some other issues, I didn’t have much time today, but I did make some progress. I roughly shaped the join between the neck and the head with a large file.
Then, using a French curve, I marked out a shape which Mr Campbell cut for me on the band saw. This is where the neck will meet the.body. I then blended what he had cut to the neck with a file.
Mr Campbell suggested that I find myself a picture of a head that I liked the shape of. So after a while scouring google images, I found a nice simple shape, that I thought would look good.
To get it onto my head, I made a stencil. To ensure that it was symmetrical, I laid it down the centre line and then flipped it over to the other side.
The next step involved the band saw. I hate the band saw – luckily Mr Campbell is a band saw master of the 10th dan, and he quickly cut the head to a rough approximation of the shape I wanted.
The next step for my guitar was to begin shaping the back. It was rectangular, which is not ideal for guitar playing, so I was to shape it to a nice rounded shape, more conducive to playing. To begin, I used a large metal file to get close to the shape I required. Next I was handed a butterfly shaped plane to get a nice rounded edge along the back of the neck.
It has been a long time. A very long time. Things have changed. Mr Morrison has left us for the sunnier weather of South America. I now teach more maths than Physics. And I have been neglecting my guitar.
So I have set myself a time each week when I will work on the project for an hour. Hopefully, that way I will actually achieve something. It would be nice to get it finished before Christmas (although I said that in 2008)
I am currently working on my second neck for the guitar. The first one, after much work, was deemed so wrong that we binned it. I now have another one. It looks like a long bit of wood, with some blocks of wood glued to one end, not much like the neck of a guitar. But give me time and a chisel and I will shape it. Photos to follow.
So, the timetable has not been nice to us. We have been faced with endless CAT and DAT sessions which have prevented us from giving up our Friday afternoons to make guitars. Hence the two month hiatus.
But we are back… with the front. Once we had glued together the strips of wood for the front, the next task was to create the rose which will surround the sound hole. It is possible to buy pre-made fancy roses, but we decided to make our own simple patterns to adorn the front of our guitars.
THe rose is constructed by taking a number of thin strips of different colours and moulding them around a circular slice of wood. The colours I chose were red and black, whereas Mr M. went for orange and black.
The rose is formed by alternating between layers of different coloured strips, gluing them back to back on the mold until the desired thickness is achieved. This stage took me as while as the stips of wood kept insiting that they were striaght, not curved, and snapping. But with the application of some heat (difficult to come by in Edinburgh in December) I made them pliable and soon had my completed rose.
The rose is then inlaid in the front of the guitar, surrounding the space where the sound hole will eventually be cut.
As with everything in the CDT department, there is the right tool for the job
. In this case, a very heavy duty pair of compasses does the job. Two thin grooves are carved with the compasses and a channel is then dug out between them using a scalpel. That all sounds very straight forward, but I managed to break a blade and not cut my channel perfectly along the lines I had marked on the soundboard. But finally on Friday I managed to dig out the required channel. I knew I had gone far enough when I held the soundboard up to the light and was able to see through it.
I filled the channel with glue and pressed the rose in. Then, on instruction from Bert, I taped itdown and clamped two boards on it to make sure it didn’t move over the weekend as I let it dry.
Today I used a cabinet scraper to remove the exess wood from the rose that was higher than the channel was deep. And then sanded off any excess glue and was left with a beautiful rose inlaid in my soundboard.
The central sound hole was cut out by using the compasses again to carve a deep groove – all the way through the wood.
Progress is being made.
There has been very little progression. I have glued together pieces of wood to make the sound board on the front of the guitar. The sound board is dfferent from the back somehow, but I can’t see how… yet.
I had problems though. The front will be made from two or three boards glued together. Neil cut some nice pieces for me to use from some enormous – truely enormous- beams he had. The enormous beams were fed through the band saw, of which I am terrified. I stood back and watched the action and took photos.
I ended up with two lovely lengths of wood from the original thick black chunk of tree that Neil had started with.
black and white
The next day I planned on gluing them together to begin to form the soundboard for the front of my guitar, but when I returned to my wood, one of them was bent. It looked like a very long thin rain gutter. I was gutted. However, the Zen master had an idea. We soaked some paper towels in water, then laid them over the buckled length of wood, before clamping it firmly between two boards. The plan was for the board to absorb the water, take on the flat shape provided by the boards, then have the paper removed, be re-clapmed and left to dry out.
A week later I had a perfectly flat board to construct my sound board with.
I have made a board that will become the back of my guitar (any suggestions for a name for her?). After gluing together the strips, I needed to sand them to remove the bits of glue that leaked out the side, so I got to use the random orbital sander again and in the process make a great mess which covered the walls floor and my suit is great piles of fine sawdust.
Having made it, I needed to cut it to shape, to do that, I set the mould on top and drew a pencil line round the inside. Cutting it to shape would require the band saw and I have a perfectly rational fear of using the band saw, so I enlisted the assistance of Bert, our resident ninja. He roughly followed the line I had cut, but made the whole thing bigger, so that I can attach it to the sides I have already moulded.
That all sounds like it should take 5 minutes, but it took me an hour.Then I realized that I had drawn the shape for the front on the back, and it was cut wrong. There would be a large gap where the neck will meet the body. I was worried, but Bert calmed me and explained that we’d make it a
“feature” so no worries there.
The back of a guitar needs to bend out slightly to make it look flat (no idea why, some sort of optical illusion, I suppose) and this is achieved by attaching slightly curved supports on the inside. These are made from thin strips of wood with a gentle curve carved into them using a plane. Once carved these are attached with more glue and clamps and the whole thing is left overnight to dry.
The next step is to remove some of the extra weight that the supports have added, by gently planing them into an inverted “V”.
The next step will be to glue the back on. GM has already reached this stage. To ensure that there is even pressure holding the back board on, large thick boards are clamped to the top and the bottom after applying glue the whole way around.
A few days later and the board can be removed with the back securely affixed…unless it doesn’t work. It didn’t work for GM and now he has tried clamping the back on after applying more glue.
Summer has passed. The leaves are turning. And sadly, school’s in.
On the plus side, we are making some gentle progress on our guitars. Before the end of last term, GM had managed to put together the wood that would form the back of his guitar.
The back of a guitar is made from a flat board. But the wood that we are working with comes in long strips about 6 inches across, not wide enough to cover the back of a ucalale, never mind the axes we are making. So the strips need to be glued together. It takes three or four strips, depending on the width of your guitar mould. These strips are laid out flat, with their edges glued (more glue… I still feel like it’s cheating) and then gently clamped together.In order to prevent the cruching force from the clamp causeing the strips to pop up, we place clamps both over and under the wood. 30 minutes later, you have a board that you can cut to the shape you need
We now have the sides of a guitar. This is all well and good, but to be honest, we need a front and a back on our guitars. This poses a problem. You see, we have planed our wood down so that it is thin enough fo us to bend it without breaking it. But at the same time we have reduced its thickness so much that it is pretty impossible to attach a bit of wood to the front and to the back.
The way round this is to glue a strip of wood, 1cm across, along the inside, at the top and the bottom which supplies a lip to glue the front and back onto.
That all sounds very easy, but getting a strip of wood to bend into a guitar shape is not an easy task. As ever there is a way round this, and in typical CDT style, it involves a power tool – the Band saw. This should be called the Banned saw. People should not be allowed to use it – it is the most dangerous thing I have ever seen.
Imagine an enormous metal saw, maybe 6m long, now bend the saw blade around in a loop (or a band if you will) and attach a motor to it so that the band rotates round. This is a band saw. There is only one tiny section of the band visible, the rest of it being accelerated inside the big machine but the thing still looks lethal. However after a thorough safety briefing from the (science) Award winning CDT staff I was let loose with it.
First I was given some long strips of wood which were rectangular. Apparently they were far too rectangular and I was to take a plane to one edge of them and make it rounded a bit.
My next task was to cut horizontal slits across the long bit of wood. These slits would make the wood more bendy so that I could fit it round the rim of my guitar.
I had to cut these slits with the aforementioned band saw and I must say I was terrified the whole time. I was certain that I would lose at least the tip of one finger, if not, then a whole one. However my training was more than adequate and I came away unscathed and with a fine looking bit of bendy wood.
I then glued the wood around the inside rim of my guitar. I feel a bit like I am cheating when I use glue, it seems somehoe not the real thing, but this is what I am told to do, so I do it. The wood, although more bendy than it was before it had the cross sections cut, still wants to be straight, so it is held on with clothes pegs over night. I really thought that there would be some more masculine way of fixing these things to it, but no, it would seem that the CDTeam has just appropriated the best tool for the job, even it is normall to be found holding a pair of bloomers to a washing line.
Now that we have managed (after many weeks) to get the sides of our guitars thin enough to shape we were let loose with the Bender.
The bender is an enormous bit of metal that heats up. Imagine the shape of a normal iron that you would use to flatten your clothes, then extend that shape up in a column – then you have a bender. It was explained to us that the heat from the bender would melt the fibres in the wood allowing us to shape it without it snapping.
To do the actual shaping, we soaked a piece of (very dirty and smelly) cloth and draped it over the section of wood that we wished to bend, then pressed it against the side of the bender. The cloth prevented the bender from scorching the wood. Lots of steam comes off and the wood becomes more pliable. The hand that you press against the wood is protected by a glove. Of course this glove gets soaked by the wet cloth and then the water heats up and fills the glove with steam, not a pleasant experience. However it is more than made up for by the feeling of satisfaction when you shape a piece of wood to what you want it to look like.
Eventually I fitted one side of my guitar into its mould and fixed it in place with clamps:
Many hours, burnt hands and clamps later I had the whole thing in the mould, finally this was starting to look like a guitar.
We planed and planed. Eventually I even got into it and managed to get those little spirals of wood to come off my side panel:
FInally though, I gave in. The wood had to be shaved down to between 2 and 2.5mm over the entire length before we would be able to bend it to the required shape without breaking it. At my current rate of progress I would be there till Christmas (I will still be trying to build the thing by then, but I hope to have got past the stage of planing.)
So we brought out the Random Orbital Sander
G.M went first. The sander produces a tremendous noise and vast quantities of dust – so you know that you are doing something useful. It produces so much dust that we had to strap a vacuum cleaner to it to make it possible to breathe. When you are using the sander your hands vibrate so much that when you stop and touch something that is still, you feel like you are not really touching it.
After many afternoons attempting to stop anyone hearing or seeing anything through the dust, the sides of our guitars were thin enough for us to move on to the next stage – the bender.
