Week 5 - Saturday Morning Class

First of all, I apologize for not posting sooner.  Thought I lost the camera, travel for work and nasty cold virus has made it an interesting 2 weeks.  We have completed the back of the guitar, joining, gluing and putting the bracing together.  We then fitted that onto the back of the guitar, cut the sides with a router to allow for the back bracing to come through.  We have now focused our attention to the front.  But before I go there, a couple of pictures of what we have completed.

Here's the inside of the guitar as it stands now.  Notice the mahogany kerfing on the bottom, spruce on top.  The center strip is a very thin piece of spruce, the cross bracing is mahogany also. 

Just a birds eye view.  We were very lucky with our wood.  It had extremely nice coloring to the Indian Rosewood.  We got our kit from Luthiers Mercentile Incorporated  (LMI).  I would highly recommend them, they have been a pleasure to deal with.

Here's a picture of the joined back.  The shape is cut roughly to size.  We will trim it to the guitar once we have our top completed.  The coloring is really magnificent.  I have not seen much rosewood with this amount and hue of reds.  I think once polished up it will look magnificant.  It is a feeling of joy to walk around the shop and watch everyones project start to look like a guitar.

And this is where we started this morning!  You will notice the white looking wood in front of Cian is actually the joined top of the guitar.  The top, like the back, came in two pieces.  We planed the sides until they matched exactly and then glued the together.  The first thing we need to do is install the Rosette.  The Rosette is the decorative trim around the sound hole of the guitar.  There are actually two 'accompaniments', perfing, which we will be two cirlces, one inside the rosetter and one outside.  In order to do this we use the measurements from the plans and plot out the center of the sound hole.  From this we draw a circle which forms the outline for the soundhole, then we measure and mark the rosette, and the accompanying rings.

We then drill a hole in the center and sink a post which will anchor our circle routing jig.  We then set the diameter to the diameter of the rosetter and off we go.  The outer rings we did in one pass with an 1/8 inch bit which was exactly the width of the perfing.  The rosette took three.  The last one we did was because the rosette could almost fit.  We probably should have tried working it in by running a steel ruler inside to compress the wood.  So ours actually was not a really tight fit, but it was snug.

Cutting into Spruce is very interesting.  It is a very soft and fibered wood, rather that a grain.  It tends to splinter and fuzz.  So after each route we needed to recompress the fibers or remove them so the channel is clear. 

Heres a close up.  You can see the pencil outline of the guitar to the sides.  Notice alos that the top of the Rosette is separated.  This allows some flexibility when fitting it in.  It won't matter because the fretboard from the neck will be on top of this when it is finished.

Here Cian is fitting in the outer ring.

Here it is with two rings placed around the rosette.  Now we need to glue them in place.  We simply took tight bond white glue and spead them in the routed channel, place wax paper over it and a block of wood on top.  Then it was placed in the go-bar apparatus to apply pressure while it dried.  I dried for thirty minutes and then it was removed.

We installed the rosette and rings just a "skosh" proud.  In other words a little above the top of the guitar.  Now using a cabinet scraper we scrapped the front until it was smooth and flush.  We will then run the top through the drum sander once all the glue is removed.

The final sept was cutting the soundhole which was really just routing another circle.  We made sure the router bit would pass through the entire top of the guitar.  Above is the result.

Here is where it stands presently :-)  Next week we will begin work on the bracing for the top.

Notice the inlaid tail piece...