Build Update #6

I got a lot done lately. The body is basically finished (except for the binding channels and pickup cavities). Here is the final process.



I pressed the front top of the guitar better than i did the back (i kept the veneers aligned between presses). The result is a profile closer to mold's profile. here is a picture of the contours of the front top at an angle. The spruce kerfing has also been added and routed flush.



I traced the shape of the f-holes off of the blueprints and transferred them to a piece of MDF and cut it out with a jigsaw and finished it with a few files. I used a 1/4" router bit to transfer the cut onto the top. The shank of the bit was used as a bearing to ride against the MDF 'stencil'. I again used files to clean up the sharp corners.



I installed the mahogany kerfing as i've done before. The front top is cutout. I wrote some notes inside the guitar, including the date, my name, and materials used. I (hopefully) will never again have to read what i wrote down.




Time to say goodbye. I was thinking of embedding a penny with today's year inside the mahogany tailpiece, but i stopped myself. No need to waste more time.




Smells of rich mahogany.




again.




After some dry tests, i clamped the top on (finally). The spool clamps worked wonders and were worth making for this specific purpose. For those making acoustic, semihollow, or archtop guitars, i recommend stopping at the Home Depot and picking up $28 worth of materials, and making your own spool clamps. Much cheaper. Very simple.




After drying for 24 hours, the clamps were removed. From the beginning, i've always looked forward to giving the guitar a tap. I've created an acoustic box.
I made a jig to hold my router above my workbench. I put a flush trim router bit in and routed flush the sides. This will be the same process for when i route the binding channels.




It felt good to be able to rest the guitar on my leg as if i were playing it.




Contours look great. Notice the reflection of the flash on the walnut. Once i sand and finish it, the effect should be much more noticeable, and beautiful.





I will order most of the parts listed in my previous post sometime this week. I will be in Virginia next week so no work then. I hope to get back and have the parts delivered and ready.

The neck blank got a trim yesterday. I used the same method for routing flat the maple centerblock. Routing into the blank released a violent scent of flowers and lemon. I've worked with mahogany in the past and never encountered this smell before. I guess it's a variety of mahogany i havent used yet (i hope it is mahogany). I might make a rough cut of the neck before i leave this saturday (probably not).


-Andrew

Build Update #5

Big milestone. I picked up a 4' stick of mahogany and cut some 9 mm x 11 mm triangles using a table saw. Using a homemade sliding jig with a stop, i cut about 108" of kerfing with a bandsaw. The specific piece of mahogany was much more brittle than the others i've gotten in the past, and the kerfing kept breaking. No problems though.




I bought a 24 piece set of clamps for $5 from Harbor Freight (a magical place, full of wonder and amusement) and used them to clamp the kerfing to the guitar sides, with the help of a number of cauls (shown).




I then took a piece of aircraft grade spruce (from www.aircraftspruce.com) and kerfs horizontally and vertically on it. This would allow me to glue it to the inner contours of the 4-ply top with the vacuum press (clamps there to apply some extra pressure).




The next step was to level the freshly attached spruce to the same level as the border of the top. A router was attached to a sled and passed over the spruce.




Eventually, after removing a ridiculously large amount of spruce, the top was ready for trimming and attaching.




The trimmed top is ready. The kerfing is all in place.




I bought a 1-1/4" dowel, 24 bolts, 48 washers, and 24 wing nuts and made 24 spool clamps for only $25 (compared to stewmac's $21 for 6). Along with the spool clamps, i used a $10 deep throat clamp from HF and 2 irwin clamps to apply pressure to the centerblock.




The guitar sides and back joined together.




This will look lovely.





My next step is to repeat the spruce cutting and shaping process for the front of the guitar, along with routing the f-holes. The extra laminate extending outside the sides will be trimmed off using the spindle sander. I will soon need to order these parts/tools: rosewood fretboard (pre-slotted), fret-wire, holly veneer (headstock), binding, plunge router, router bits, machine heads, ToM bridge, stopbar, pearl inlays, pickups........

Hopefully I won't spend too much money on that.


I posted a video on my YouTube channel showing my process for pressing the guitar tops. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Agj-PRrwWZQ

Build Update #4.5

Small update yo.



Here, i've cut a small 3" mahogany block and glued it to the tail of the guitar. After doing this, the entire section in the picture was planed down to 1.25" exactly.



The >1/16" maple veneer i will use for laminating the guitar tops is too thick for the contours its supposed to form to, and too thick for the final thickness of the top. I needed roughly 1/20" for each maple sheet. I stressed over finding a thickness sander to do the job for me. The problem with using a thickness sander (also known as a drum sander) is that the already thin veneer could easily get caught by the 1,000 RPM sanding drum and torn apart, never to be seen again. My solution was to creat a jig to sand the veneer to thickness. This is just a piece of MDF, on hinges, held very close to the round end of my belt sander via a sliding adjustable square. I went two passes on each side. The jig worked perfectly and the resulting veneer was much more pliable.



The thicknessed veneer. They are presented in the order they are pressed, with the grain going vertical, horizontal, horizontal, vertical.



I was skeptical on whether or not the Roarockit Thin Air Press (TAP) would apply enough pressure to get the maple to conform. When pressed, however, i was surprised at how much it really conformed. There was no spot that needed extra pressure. According to my research, the TAP can pull a vacuum at 18-21 lbs per in^2. With the veneer sheets measuring 18" x 20", there is a total of about 3.5 tons of force pushing down against the laminate. The above picture is the final walnut veneer being pressed. The red mesh is there to help prevent air bubbles from ruining the vacuum.



The TAP kit uses a wine bottle vacuum pump (white thing in pic) to pull the vacuum. The spruce board is shown as well. This will be used to fill the gap between the pressed tops and the maple center block (http://www.es-335.net/laminations.html). Shown to the left is the mahogany neck blank i will use to, well, build the neck.



A quick wipe with a damp cloth shows the crazy insane figure on the blank.


I will press the other side of the guitar later. Until the next update, i will have the tops cut to size and the spruce kerfing in place.

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.

Build Update #3

I got home from college for the summer Wednesday night, and began building Thursday. I had ordered the necessary parts and tools beforehand so I could begin building once i got home. This included the 1/16" (turns out to be more 1/20", which is great) walnut face veneer and Roarockit's Thin Air Press. The press was available at Rockler for $35 when i checked last time (from previous post). I checked one weekend i was home and they said they don't even carry it anymore. This meant i had to order it online from the store in Canada for $56. No big deal though, i should get my money's worth. The walnut veneer was purchase from eBay for only $8, enough for the entire guitar.


To start the build, i knew i couldn't get 1/16" veneer in sheets wide enough for the entire guitar, so i had to do some joining. The flimsy veneer needs to be flattened and pushed together. For this, i purchased a sheet of MDF from El Depot de Casa and made a joining jig. It allows me to press the veneer flat and allow twine to be wrapped around it to apply clamping pressure. Before placing the maple/walnut veneer into the jig, i needed to true the edges to allow a perfect joint. This was done with two aluminium drywall squares clamped together, with the veneer in between. A plane was utilized (my first time using one, actually) to bring flush the veneer to the square. The veneer was placed into the jig, where twine was wrapped and weights were placed to hold the wood together. This process was especially difficult for the walnut veneer, for it was thinner and more brittle than the maple. The resulting bond turns out to be stronger than the actual wood!

Here are some pictures of the process (the walnut is going to look so nice):


Walnut in T-square to plane straight the edge.



Walnut in joining jig. Weights hold veneer flat; twine to pull the veneer together. The wax paper prevents the veneer from being glued to the jig.



The same is done for the maple. Glue of choice: Titebond III



I forgot wax paper a number of times (the joining process needed to be done 8 times [2 walnut, 6 maple]), so i snapped a pic of the joint, showing good signs.



Awesome join. Great job.



A joined walnut veneer (front, pre-sanded) + cat. The lighter center is not as noticeable in person. Such a nice piece of wood, i'm very glad it turned out well.


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Moving onto a different part of the guitar: the sides. At first, i was going to have it be 4 layers of 1/16" veneer, but that would have been too thick (to bend, at least). So i had to find a way to get the 1/16" (heavy) maple down to roughly 1/20". A random orbital sander worked, but proved to be inefficient and inaccurate. A power planer worked in the end, shaving the thick 1/16" maple down to a heavy 1/20". A thickness (drum) sander, of course, would have made this process simple, but i'm not made of money.

I took the already thin walnut and the thinned 2 maple pieces, steamed them, and clamped them into my mold from build update #1. Wondering mindlessly throughout my garage led me to a solution to steaming the 40" strips of side veneer: a 48" level case. Made of strong plastic, the case was only slightly modified to accommodate steam, which was supplied by a pressure cooker via a vinyl tube. The rig worked flawlessly. The veneer was rotated every 10 minutes for a total of 45 minutes in the steamer. Afterwards, they were placed into the mold using a couple clamps, and set to dry completely for 24 hours. This allows the 3 veneers to roughly hold the shape of the guitar prior to gluing. To glue, the veneer was first planed to an even width of 1.5", then a judicious amount of Titebond was spread on one piece, which was placed into the mold. 2 veneer strips were glued at once, to ensure even clamping pressure. Using a combination of twine and clamps, pressure was distributed along the mold. The system dries for 24 hours. This process was repeated to finish one side of the guitar, 3 veneers thick.

Pictures:


The steaming rig, showing the pressure cooker, vinyl tube, and 48" level case.



Hot water gas stuff. Very peculiar. Don't breathe this.



3 veneers clamped in the mold after steaming.



After steaming, the veneers were prepped for gluing by planing them flush with the mold (width of 1.5")



The gluing process. Wax paper was again used to prevent the bonding of the veneer to the mold. Spindle sander rubber piece used for the guitar cutout. The twine was pulled as tight as i could. Any spots needing extra pressure were clamped.




Unfinished result from gluing. When the second half is finished, the pieces will be planed to their final thickness.



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For the top and back of the guitar, i will need to thin the maple as i did with the sides. However, a power planer will not work. With the help of my dad, we tracked down someone who owns a wide enough thickness sander that i can use to thin the 1/16" maple down to 1/20". At this time, they will be ready for the vacuum press. Until then, i will continue to glue the sides and possibly get the maple center block installed.



Do it.

-Andrew

Build Update #2

Spring break. I ordered 20pcs of 1/16" Canadian Maple veneer off of Roarockit for $76, and won about 19 sq. ft of 1/16" walnut veneer off of eBay. I went to Rockler to pick up one of Roarockit's Thin Air Press's. The 26"x28" version was not available at the time, however, so building stopped that Thursday, and there was no rejoicing.

The veneer. 11"x50.5"x1/16"



To begin, i built a male mold for the top and back of the guitar. To get the correct profile of the top's curvature, i used the 335's blueprints and 3D modeled the profile of the guitar in 3ds Max. I applied a contour material, rendered, and print the profile (shown below w/Pepsi).



The blueprints show a .394" (1.00cm) increase in 'elevation'. To compensate for some laminating 'springback' (and to make things easier), I drew out 7 contour lines. With each 1/16" veneer measuring roughly .066", 7 layers gives a total thickness of .462" (.068" difference).



The contours were then transferred to the wood , cut, and glued to a wooden base.



The contours were then smoothed, and the final profile is seen.



I will layer 3 pieces of maple, and 1 piece of walnut atop the mold, glue, and vacuum press the veneer together. The laminate will (hopefully) take the shape of the mold.

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In other news, i gathered some branches.

I will let the ash, ash, and pine branches season for a few months and carve them out to make some didgeridoos.


Updates whenever.

(-$76.00)