Build Update #4

Progress has been slow, but things are taking shape. It looks like a guitar. I have yet to thickness sand the maple veneer for the top and back, so most of my attention has been put on the sides and center block.


I've swapped the 2' x 2' MDF-mini-bench for a perfectly-level-slate-from-1/3-of-a-pool-table I happen to have. Here you can see the mold unbolted and joined with MDF. The 3-ply sides were fit into the mold and trimmed near the bottom of the guitar. A turnbuckle was employed to push the guitars contours against the mold.

I reached a problem when planing the sides. The plans i purchased from the interweb show the sides having a thickness of 1", while the Gibson factory final thickness of the entire guitar, according to a webgoogle search, is 1.75". With the top and back of my guitar being .2", the thickness of the these sides should be 1.35". I chose an even 1.25" for the thickness.



A visit to Rockler gave me my $8 maple center block. It is 1.75" thick, so it needed to be thicknessed to 1.25". I done did it with a router.



But first, the majority of the material was removed by making this cut to the maple with a table saw. It could be the fact that the table saw i have to use has a crooked and dull blade, but that was the most terrifying cut i have ever made. Rhyme. I used a hand saw to cut that small bit of wood out.



Thicknessing the maple to the exact dimension required some dangerous out-of-the-box thinking. The router was attached to a sled, which was passed over the maple. The block was held in place by hot glued bits of wood. The resulting surface was perfectly flat.



The final thicknessed center block, 1.25" thick, 5" wide, 12" long.



Small wings were cut out of the block, and filed precisely to fit, as shown in the picture below. I used blue chalk to mark where the block is hitting the sides.



The block is clamped and glued in with a single bar clamp.



Excellent.



After drying overnight, it was removed from the mold. A mahogany end piece will be placed at the bottom joint in the picture.



Those extra side pieces poking out will be removed later on. The maple block exposed between them is where the neck of the guitar will sit.


I ordered a big block of mahogany, enough for 2-3 guitar necks, off eBay. It will be a while until i can build the neck, but it's good to get the wood early so it can acclimate to the humidity in my home. The next step is to plane the sides completely flush to the center block and install the kerfing. I'm going to use spruce for this. Hopefully i can get the maple veneer thickness sanded and finally start pressing the top of the guitar.