Saturday, October 31, 2009

Classical Beginnings


This was the first week of the new term here at guitar camp, which means I started my classical while 11 new guys showed up for their first term.
This is the pile of wood I got on the first day, minus the brace material that I must have already put in my bench drawer. In the picture is a set of Indian rosewood sides rosewood back, and a sitka spruce top. Between the spruce top and my coffee cup there, you can see my headblock blank ontop of my tailblock blank. They are both mahogany and are the same idea as was with Barbara the baritone.







I didn't take pictures of all of the steps of course, but here is my spruce top after the bookmatch has been joined. The line you can see is just that, a pencil line. The actual joint is pretty well invisible. I have also cut the rosette here which we did on the drill press with the fly-cutter. This is essentially the same process as we did on the simple baritone rosette, but this is a three step process. First you cut the outside edge, then the inside edge, and then with a wide chipper bit, you knock out all the material in between.




You've probably seen a picture similar to this with my last guitar, but here is how we glue the center graft to the back. This is actually not the back I ended up using. They gave me a new, better one since this one had a lot of bug damage. The graft is cross-grained spruce and here you can see that we have a go-stick placed over it to spread out the pressure from the functioning go-sticks on top of that. It works quite nicely.





I got my sides all bent and glued up to the end blocks. This is the mold we use which is easilly made from a few pieces of chipboard. The sides do not have to fit perfectly in the mold on their own; We use these jacks you can see here to press the sides the rest of the way tight to the mold. Once the blocks are glued in place, the sides will hold the shape better, and the sides are also glued to the top and back while clamped in the mold. So the shape is kept true without too much trouble.






I have also glued in the kerffed linings just like was in the last guitar. These linings just provide more gluing surface on the edge of the sides for when you glue on the back and top. And... they look kinda cool when you peek through the soundhole.




Here is the rosette that we did on our classical guitars. I would recommend clicking on this picture to enlarge it as the quality will be much better. This rosette consists of a burnt maple ring with strips of black/white/black purfling on either side. It looks pretty cool when it's all finished up. I saw a few that were done from the class ahead of me.







On the classical guitars here, we do this lattice bracing system. It's kind of a pain with all of the joints that are involved but it is interesting. I would like to do some experimenting with this brace pattern compared to the more traditional fan brace pattern usually seen in classical guitars. I feel like this top is much stiffer than it needs to be.




Here is the back plate as well with all the braces to their final height and profile. These braces are also left long and will be tucked into the kerffing too.


Well I suppose that's about it for this week. I'll start putting the body together on Monday, and then I'll tear into the neck. Things are going pretty well with it though. It's really moving along.

The class ahead of me is finishing up with their archtop guitar bodies, and they are just starting the necks now. The new bunch of guys in the cabin next to me all seem pretty cool. Some of them can REALLY play guitar. One of them, Parker, is building a baritone for his next guitar, and has been playing my baritone a lot. He really likes it and just can't set it down. My cousin, Andrew, is patiently waiting for me to finish writing the blog here so that we can go do more entertaining things. ...Like eat breakfast at 1:00 PM. He drove up for the weekend to hang out.

Hope all is well back home. Talk to you later.

Thursday, October 22, 2009

Baritone Completed



We Finished our first acoustic guitars this week, and I must say I'm glad to be done with it. I think I will always be slowed by the pace of the rest of the class, but as I move on in the program, and the folks in the shorter program leave, we should be able to work a little faster. That way everyone has some experience, and we only really have to wait for a few people on the different steps with cycling through the tools rather than 13 people.
The grades varied a fair amount between all the students, but supposedly this whole term did much better than the last term in general. They grade pretty tough here, and in some ways I would say it's unrealistic, but my final grade on this guitar was 83% which they'll try to tell you is a great job. Meh. I think they're grading does not reflect the various levels of significance for each area. Not all sins are equal with guitars.
I just kinda took some random pictures of the guitar here and threw them on the blog. The school is not the best place to be taking really great pictures, and I'm not that great at taking pictures, so you'll just have to see it when I get home. You can click on any of the pictures though to see the full size image and they look much sharper that way too.
I think I'm getting sick again here; We've had some short nights, and the other day we were a bit behind so we came in two hours early and had a really long day. They were trying to pack in some repair lectures before the journeymen folks took off. The lectures were pretty interesting, and cleared some things up on guitar repair no-nos. Makes me feel really wrong about what I did to that poor old Harmony I bought.... It's hard to talk about still, but I sorta killed a vintage instrument as far as historical value goes. Actual cost: $50. Opportunity cost which is LONG gone:$500 or better.
This is that custom built baritone case I was mentioning. It really is a pretty nice case, especially compared to what the rest of the students got. I feel a little bad every time I open it... But then I pet that crushed velvet just a bit and all those feelings pass.
I'm finding I'm not real good at using Blogger, or maybe the program just sucks, but sometimes it's hard to get the right words with the right picture. So just bear with me and look around for the next pile of thoughts.


The weather is getting pretty soupy poopy here and so here I sit in my little coffee shop with my baritone rather than letting it sit in the cold car. (Today was the last day of the first term and I just haven't taken Barbara the Baritone back home yet. )Nitro finishes crack very easily if they are subjected to humidity and temperature changes; However, they are also believed to be the best for tone. A guy just saw my guitar here and tried it out, and seemed to really like it. He's playing a jazz show tonight in town so I think I may have to go in the name of entertainment.




Here's my friend Aaron with his completed guitar. He's a pretty cool guy, and he'll potentially be coming back to the school in another term to finish the master program.










So the new bunch of people will come in at the start of this week and will be welcomed with a very very clean shop. We spent a lot of time thoroughly cleaning each room of the shop by blowing dust down from all the high spots, and then of course lots of sweeping, etc.

So here's me filling white space, or black rather, in my blog. I better quit for now. I don't want to bore anyone. I guess just trust me that my guitar is cooler in person. Talk to y'all later.





























Sunday, October 18, 2009

Baritone Assembly


Well once again, I've kinda shorted my blog on pictures for the week. The last few days haven't had a whole lot of exciting steps, or great leaps of progress to show. Over this past week, we have been working on fitting necks, wet sanding, fitting necks again, buffing, bolting and gluing on necks, building bridges (small wooden ones, mind you) and gluing bridges onto our guitars.
After our guitar necks and bodies were wet sanded, we buff the areas around where the neck tongue, and bridge will be glued to the body. This way, we are not struggling to buff around these parts later on. It's important to keep the buffing wheel moving along with the grain wherever possible. The fine scratches it leaves are better hidden this way. We don't bother buffing the whole guitar to the final gloss at this point however since we figure it will take on some scratches throughout the assembly process. In the picture above, you can see the face of my guitar where we buffed around the tongue area, and then we have chiseled off the lacquer where the tongue will be glued on. This same process is done for the bridge as well. The wood glue that is used for this joint will not adhere to the finish. Here, they actually have a vaccum jig for the standard bodies and they rout the finish off in these areas. Chisels do the job just as well though. Sorry, I don't have pictures of the glue-up process, but the neck is glued on now.

Here is the ebony bridge I carved for my guitar this week. The top of the bridge is radiussed to match that of the fretboard, (12") and the bottom of bridge is radiussed to match the top of the guitar, (63' in this case) The nut which the strings are seated on later will parallel the contour of the top of the bridge. This way the strings follow the fingerboard profile closely. This bridge has been sanded from eighty grit, up to 1200 grit, and then was finally buffed on the coarse buffing wheel you saw in an earlier posting. It looks pretty sweet if I don't say so myself! The bridge pins for this guitar will also be ebony, and must be individually fit to their corresponding hole; Otherwise, the whole world would surely implode. Stranger things have happened though. By the end of Friday, we had glued the bridges on, and as I was in a mad rush out the door to a concert, I didn't get a picture of the glue-up for this procedure either. However, I did a little searching to find you a picture of the clamping system we use.


One deep, aluminum clamp is inserted through the sound hole, where the bottom foot of the clamp is pushing on a wooden clamping caul to evenly distribute the pressure. On top, the one clamp pushes in the center of a special clamping caul which has adjustable ends to evenly distribute pressure to the top of the bridge. The aluminum construction of these clamps is a plus as you don't need/want any excess weight pulling down on your nearly complete and moderately fragile instrument. I use this same clamp setup at home. Tomorrow, we will be pulling this clamp off, and begin with installing tuning machines, and fitting bridge pins. I already have my fret dress done, and it looks pretty good, or at least a good leap better than my last one. I imagine I'll have this guitar all setup by the end of Monday, and perhaps still have some polishing to do for Tuesday. One good thing about building this baritone is that the cases are custom made for them, and so I ended up with a much nicer case than all of the other students got for their guitars. It's super plush! They're actually not going to offer the baritone for a student project anymore just because of the added hassle, so I was just in time! I would say my guitar is coming along pretty well, and I'm very excited to play it. I'll get some more pictures tomorrow, and probably have a blog for you by Wednesday evening showing the final look. I wish you all a beautiful day in the neighborhood.
-Brian






Saturday, October 10, 2009

Nature Pics





This is Fred-Spider that I caught in the front lawn this week. He wasn't real full of life though, so after getting a few pics, I tucked him away in the woods where we wouldn't step on him while we were throwing the football around.



I found myself back on Hillside Rd today as I was aiming for squirrels again with my car. But I uh, wasn't actually there, I was here, on my little Hayes Rd which is looking quite lovely these days as all the leaves are breathing their last. I did hit my squirrel, but it wasn't exactly a clean kill; Perhaps the sand road gave under his furry little head and provided some relief? I felt the bump, but he still made it off the road when I saw him in my rear-view.





The squirrels here aren't quite like the filbert eating devils back home, they look a little more like this rascal here, and they're all over right now, running up and down trees, chasing and fighting each other and what not. By now you probably all think I'm a monster for trying to hit one.
Well, it's true.
It was a little foggy this day and raining, so my pictures didn't turn out as bright as I was hoping. This is the Muskegon River that flows through town here not too far from me. I hear it'll freeze about a foot deep this winter so that should be entertaining. Other than dodging the frequent wild turkeys here, and the deer, I don't have to much else to offer from the local nature scene. Hope you enjoy what I have though, hope all is well with...all. Talk to you all later.
Brian

Baritone Finishing

I don't have too many exciting pictures to show you all this week, but I am closing in on the finish of the baritone guitar. Spraying a finish on such a light guitar such as these that are made of maple makes it very difficult to see where you've covered so far. But after a couple of coats, I pretty well got the hang of it. We put an oil based grain filler on the mahogany necks, which is a rather messy job, and consists of smearing a fast drying compound into the wood that resembles a mix between chocolate pudding and red clay. Naptha is actually the base, and it dries very fast, so you must work it in quickly and begin sanding it back before you have clumps dried on the neck. We scuff it back with Scotch Brite and you continue this process all over the neck until you have achieved uniform coverage and are satisfied with the fill. Since we were not spraying any color on these guitars, we did not use the vinyl sealer coat like we did on the first guitars. However I just learned this week that they really only even do that for beginners. On their own guitars, they spray the color coats directly into the wood which makes for a very cool look, but doesn't offer much forgiveness should you mess up your sunburst.


This picture here is my baritone headstock with several coats of finish on it already. It's nothing too exciting yet, but if you enlarge the picture by clicking on it, you can take a better look at my inlay and the scribe work I did on it. Most people find this scribe work to be impossibly frustrating, but I actually really enjoyed it and did a decent job with it.



Here is the back of my head stock with 12 coats of lacquer on it as well, and still it's nothing real exciting to look at.

You can see that the grain is filled completely now, but this didn't happen until about 8 coats in. We'll have one more dry sand back, and then after two additional coats, we'll begin the wet sanding and buffing. The neck set turned out pretty well, but unfortunately, I misunderstood how that was going to happen and it turned out that the instructors did all of the work on it. We'll finish up with a little "paper pulling" where you pull sand paper under the neck heel until it fits the contour of the body perfectly.


I apologize for the angles and general quality of these pictures. The finish was still soft so I was holding the neck by the hanger while trying to take a couple pictures. This is the heel though in it's mostly final form. Well just do a bit more fitting with sandpaper like I said.







This picture shows my guitar body hanging in the spray room. Again, wet finish, so my pictures suck but if you click on the picture to enlarge it, you can see the grain a little better in the sides. Or you can just be patient until my next posting when the guitar is all buffed out. For some reason, blogger.com is taking forever uploading pictures right now, and darnit cause I still had some nature pics to put up. Perhaps it is my computer, so I guess I'll post this, and then restart my computer and try again. See you soon.

Sunday, October 4, 2009

Baritone Progress

We've been moving along on our acoustic guitars pretty well, and I think we are actually ahead of schedule. We worked this Saturday which I wasn't very happy about just because it was unnecessary, and I was already really sick. Today though, I'm feeling better so hopefully I'm looking at the end of it.

This picture here shows my guitar body with all of the bindings and perflings taped and glued in place. The tape we use is a very heavy tape and super sticky so it does a great job of holding the pieces in place. After everything is all taped up though, we also wrap the guitar body in cotton rope which helps pull everything in tight giving us one last chance to get rid of any gaps that may have been between the body and the binding. I'm not sure how necessary it really is though, and it's had to say because with tape on it's really tough to notice any changes. I suppose the only way to be sure would be to compare the average "tape-only" job to the average roped binding job. You must be very careful not to tear out spruce when removing the tape, but the maple is not trouble.

This week the north and south halves of the class were coming closer to being on the same page, and we all were working on both the neck and the body of our guitars. You saw in my other postings that I'd made some progress on the neck already but this week, we picked it back up and began shaping the neck again. We started off by removing excess mahogany from the sides of the neck using this fat bastard you can see in the picture. That'd be the file... below the neck. That's its real name though, and it does a magnificent job, you must be careful though not to hit the edge of the fingerboard because the fingerboard is already at its final shape and size and is practically finish sanded already. This file would really mess it up if you hit it.

After we brought the sides in, we took that same file and began removing the bulk of the excess neck material that would produce the final neck radius. They have figured out here how to dumb down the carving process so that just about anyone can do it, but it is also helpful for speeding things along when you are not really familiar with the neck profile you're after.
To do this, they took a neck that was to their liking and made radius profiles on paper of several different points on the neck with the aid of a radius gauge, and have mapped out points that can be measured onto the neck blank and then have a plane carved between the points. So far, we have only made the initial two cuts on the neck. For this particular profile, we made one line .200" from the bottom edges of the finger board, and a line .300" on either side of the neck center line. then we file a plane into the neck between those lines. We will make new lines later and do the same process with different measurements. This method makes it so that you don't really have to be able to envision the finished product at all. Once this has been done a few more times, we will simply blend the remaining points into each other until the neck is smooth and uniformly tapered.

After the steps above were taken, we carried that angle up into the headstock of the neck and past the volute. Don't know if that's spelled right but, the volute is the ridge that is just behind the headstock on some guitars like this one shows here in the picture. They are much more common on guitars that are cut from a single billet, as it is a strengthening feature added to accommodate the poor grain orientation which is consistent with one piece necks. Some makers add a veneer to the back of the peg head as well as the front which I believe completely restores the integrity of the grain, probably beyond that of a scarf jointed neck.. yada yada. This section of the neck was actually carved with a chisel and my trusty Gerber knife. The bastard file is a little too aggressive for such a delicate job. In fact, the pictures here only show the neck after it was cleaned up so none of the initial file marks are really visible anywhere here.
Here I have my guitar clamped up in a body clamp. At this point I have already brought in the bindings flush to the guitar with a sanding paddle and a file. Unfortunately, the only less than perfect spot on the binding is the part my instructor "tested" while I was away on lunch. He thinned it out just a bit too far. The sanding paddle and file have one wrap of that binding tape on the tip so that they will not tear up the soft spruce, and it also keeps you from removing any more material than necessary by having the tape ride on the final inner surface, while only the high spots behind the tape are removed. Which in theory is just the binding that needs to be brought back to flush. ... In theory that is. You have to be careful. With the guitar in this clamp, we are now cutting the tenon of the neck to fit the body mortise. The neck blanks are cut over sized, so we had almost an inch to cut off before the neck tenon would fit into the body mortise. We simply hold the neck to the body with the fingerboard sitting on the face of the guitar and mark where to cut off the excess. In this case, that point is simply about 1/8" shy of the end of the mortise.

The neck tenon is the rectangular protrusion with the metal inserts and the truss rod end visible in it. In this picture, the tenon has been cut to length, and the corners have been slightly rounded to fit into the round corners of the mortise. In this picture the heel has also been cut to length and cut at an angle that should match that of the angle at which the back meets the sides. One other problem we'll have to get around is a the angle that was sanded into my guitar face by one of the jigs they have here. The jig is supposed to level the soundboard surface where the fingerboard tongue will be glued to, but it was not set up properly, and so it removed excessive material from the top edge of the face, changing the top to side relationship by 1.5 degrees or so. It may not sound like much, but when you are talking neck pitch, that's kinda a big deal. So this angle was taken into consideration when the heal end angle was cut so that in theory it will all work out to "correct" after the neck has been set.

This picture here shows how the neck is currently sitting on the guitar. There should be no such gap between the heal and body, but with the angle that was sanded on the face, this is how it sits when the tongue is sitting flat on the guitar face. So, my work is cut out for me with my neck set that will begin on Monday. I have bad feelings about what this will do to the final product. The neck has a specific orientation that is to be achieved in relation to the bridge height. I think this may cause trouble down the road with that.

By the way, here is a picture of the body mortise that I've been talking about. You can see the three holes that are drilled through the neck block, one of which is a truss rod access hole, and the other two are where the neck bolts will pass through. Here, they route this mortise in after the body is all put together. I've always cut mine in with a table saw ahead of time. I can see benefits to both methods. Not sure if I'll adopt this one or not. It probably is faster, but I think the table saw makes a mortise that is more consistently square to the center line of the guitar. (a definite plus)

There are four end-butt joints in this picture here of the tail wedge, with the most obvious being the one between the maple binding ends. However, they are all virtually invisible, so I'm pretty happy with how those came out. you can click on the image to see the full size version. all of my perfling and bindings look good.
Well, like I said above, we begin the neck set on Monday, which is tomorrow, so this guitar should be ready for finish by the end of the week. Hope you all are doing well. Talk to you later.
Brian