Clothes Pegs? Are you serious? Clothes pegs?
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.
