Chloe, the classical, ready for finishing

So, turns out FireFox and Blogger don't get along too well, so again we have a pile of pictures, and a separate pile of thoughts that vaguely seem to correspond with that pile. Good luck!

This week at guitar camp, we have been finishing up all of the final steps leading up to, well... finishing.
I've been ahead of the pack for most of the way building this classical guitar. Every time I start to get too far ahead, they make me wait for the other guys to catch up. So forgive me if it doesn't look like I got much done this week. Last Friday I had prepared all of my frets for the fingerboard, which involves cutting cutting the frets oversize and then trimming the fret tang until it is about .050" narrower than the distance between the fingerboard bindings. This allows the tang to be hidden behind the binding. The fret bead however remains long and after the frets have been glued and hammered in, you must cut back the excess bead of the frets.
The end nippers you can see here are used to cut back the majority of the excess fret bead, I then use a flat mill file to bring the the fret ends flush to the fretboard edge. The file we use here actually has a handle glued to the back of it, and allows you to easily hold it while running the file parallel with the neck and hitting lots of fret ends all at once. This makes for fast work.

This block here is a little something we like to call the 33 degree bevel block, but I never have figured out why we call it that. Anyways, we use it for filing the fret ends to a comfortable angel, right about 33 degrees. It leaves a rather rough edge but after the frets have been leveled, recrowned and polished, we come back with a small sanding block and polish the fret ends to a crisp profile.

As I mentioned before, the frets are installed with super glue on the tang so that the fret is not relying only on the tang barbs to keep its grip in the fret slot. Mastering the feat of applying the perfect amount of glue to the tang so that the fret will hold securely, but not so much as to make a perfect mess is something that takes more than a few attempts. You should have a little glue squeeze out though, if nothing more than to let you know you accomplished the first half of the feat. After all of the frets have been hammered in, you may suddenly find yourself relieved to remember that you did in fact not forget to first WAX the fretboard as I did not mention above. It is now time to chisel the excess dried glue from the edges of each fret, and if you did not find yourself suddenly relieved by this point, this is not going to be a pretty job. The less glue squeeze-out you have, the better, since bigger blobs of glue tend to cling to the fretboard a bit more.
I am getting a lot better at my fret work, making sure that the crown is restored after leveling, and bringing every surface back to a brilliant shine. I don't have any great pictures of that part right now, but maybe after the guitar is finished I'll show some of my fret work shots. Well now I guess that is the biggest bit of "work" I did this week. Now all I have left is pictures of how I'm leaving the guitar for the weekend. My guitar is all sanded and ready for finishing, so in theory, we will start spraying finish on Monday. But the class ahead of me is spraying arch tops right now and we will have to fight for space in the spray room with them.
I have a picture of the headstock here which you may have noticed is a good deal different than the headstock of my baritone. The ridge at the base of it, called the volute is much straighter on this guitar. This is probably the hardest spot to sand on the guitar since you must be so careful not to distort the crisp lines you have created. Any sanding scratches will be highlighted with the grain filler, so it's best to remove them now. Once you have reached 320 grit, the scratches made are no longer deep enough to be an issue.
Here is a picture of how the neck of the guitar will sit on the face of the guitar. Or how it doesn't, rather. This is called a cantilever neck and should not touch the face of the guitar at all. The neck should only be fit to the body from the very peak of the sides on down to the heal cap. This may have a couple benefits, being mainly that the guitar top is left to resonate more freely without a fretboard being glued to it, and also, it makes for much easier neck sets as you are only working with one plane to be fitted, rather than two. Here's a better shot of my neck/body joint. This is the first neck set and fit that I've done here at school, and while it will need a final touch-up after the finish is completed, I'm pretty happy with it so far. It was not too stressful, and turned out looking pretty sharp, while actually achieving the proper neck pitch.

Thanks for checking in.
Brian

Chloe's Neck and Bridge

This week we have been working on making fingerboards, necks and bridges for our classical guitars.

Here is a shot of the ebony fingerboard after the slots have been cut for the frets. In this picture, the fingerboard bindings, which are also ebony are glued on and being held in place with masking tape while the glue dries. You must be sure to clean out any excess glue from the fret slots before it dries. Any remaining glue could prevent the frets from seating properly.

The necks we build here are all made from five pieces of wood. This saves a bit of money on materials as you don't need stock as large, but it can also make for a really nice look with the maple stringers between the mahogany pieces. I didn't take a picture of the gluing process, but it involves drilling through the entire stack of wood at two points and then using dowel rods in those holes to keep the stack from sliding around while clamping it up with glue. Each laminated slab will produce two neck blanks

This is a picture of the drilling jig we use for the tuning machines on the classical guitar. It's really a pretty cool idea; Since there is apparently a standard tuning machine spacing these days for classical guitars, this jig has different bushings to match the hole needed for the tuning peg, which there are a couple different sizes of. Also while the drilling guide holes always stay in a line, the parallel plates on each side will hinge to fit any peghead thickness. A clamp is a good idea while drilling so that your jig doesn't move. Also after the middle hole has been drilled, we put a dowel rod through the jig, into that hole so that there is no chance of the jig moving for the subsequent holes.

On the classical guitars, the tongue of the fingerboard is not glued to the face of the guitar, and therefore must be supported by other means since it has no real strength of its own. So after the neck blank has been made, the easiest way to do this is to add an extension. You can see that the extension starts right where the truss rod slot ends. It is of course a butt joint, and is rather impossible to hide. I have a couple other ideas as to how you could possibly solve the problem with less visible results. For one, don't use super glue like they have us do here because superglue will always make a black line no matter how tight the wood fit together beforehand. One other idea would be to have a stacked heal which is very common, and then the extension could actually just be the same piece of wood that the main neck shaft is made from thus eliminating the butt joint.

This is the router jig we use for cutting the slots in the classical style peghead. I call it the Barney jig since it's a little bit purple, like the dinosaur. It's actually anodized aluminum, and I'm sure quite expensive. I think I'll be making mine. The jig registers off of the tuner holes that have already been drilled through the sides of the peghead, and then has clamps on the backside to hold it in place.

So now the peghead slots have been cut, and also on the back side of the slots, the edges have been pulled back almost 3/4 of an inch to a gentle point. I kinda skipped over it, but you can see the peghead overlays have been glued on. There is one layer of ebony over a layer of maple making up the overlay. Towards the top of the peghead, a decorative "notch" has been cut on each side. You have to really take your time with everything at this stage because the large surfaces will show how square, true, and symmetrical your work really is.

Here's a look at one of my tuning machines in place. They fit, perfect, of course. I'm not a huge fan of the tuners we got, but I guess they do the job. They're not particularly ugly, there's just something about that's screaming 35 dollars, rather than the minimum of 75 I'd say should be spent on good classical tuners. I could always change them out later if I wanted.

Here's a few pictures of the bridge I carved today. There are several styles of classical bridges, as there are with any other guitar. However, almost always, classical guitar strings feed through holes in the back of the bridge and are tied rather than having a ball end that sits on a plate underneath the soundboard as a steel string guitar usually has. You can see the small holes in the back of the bridge here. The slot on the other side of the bridge is where the bone saddle will go eventually.

Like the baritone bridge, this one is also made from ebony. The classical bridge however has much more material to be removed from the blank, and therefore took much longer to make than the other one did. Ebony does not carve particularly fast, or easy. However, it does make a beautiful finished product. I'm not quite finished with this bridge. I still have some finish sanding to do, and some general truing up of some of the contours.

The bevels you can see on the edge of the bridge in this picture are my main concern for finishing up this bridge. They should be uniform all the way across the edge, and ideally, all of the edges should have the same amount of angle exposed. There are also a few sanding scratches I need to go back and remove. I have polished the bridge to this point with 0000 steel wool and lemon oil. That is how the final polish will be done too, but shining it up at this stage helps to see what parts still need attention.

Again, this week went slower than I would have liked. I spend a bit too much time sitting and waiting for the pace of the class to catch up. Soon though we will be carving the necks, installing frets, setting the necks, and getting these guitars into the spray room. Soon...

Have a great weekend, everyone.

Chloe the Classical

As the second week of working on the classical guitars comes to an end, we finished up boxing and binding the bodies. This week doesn't show as much progress as the first week seemed to, but on Monday we should be well into the work on the necks.

Here are the sides of my classical guitar with the kerfing installed and sanded to its final specs. The side braces are also installed now as you can see. these braces are really only there to stop a crack from running far up the side of the instrument. They have no real affect on the tone.

Here is the top with all her lovely braces. Only the three large, parallel braces on either side of the sound hole are tucked under the kerfing. You can see the pockets cut into the kerfing which will accept those brace ends. This helps prevent brace ends from popping lose, a common issue with old instruments. So here's to putting guitar repair men out of business! Which gives me a new product idea... A time-release termite capsule!

You can also see on the top of the end block a bevel has been cut. This reduces the area glued to the top plate and allows the top to move a little more freely while still maintaining a structural backing for the side seam.

In this picture you can see that we have cut the perfling and binding slots with the router. This is only about a five minute job if you have a decent tool setup. Or you can do it with a poor setup and spend three hours truing up the depths. Also a hole has been cut in the shoulder of the guitar which we tell our customers is like a little sound monitor: A secondary sound hole just for the player's benefit. But really it's to provide cross ventilation for the hatching termites that will mysteriously come out of the woodwork, so-to-speak, in exactly three months after their purchase.

This is my instructor, Dave Scotto, who is busy attacking me with a hopelessly dull chisel. I love his name because I have so creatively fit it into the Davey Crocket theme song, which I sing at least five times a day now in his presence. I think he appreciates it.

Here is the guitar getting all ready for the big fiasco of gluing bindings and perflings. It's the only time I wear an apron in the shop; I've found it beneficial to be wearing your glue rag while doing this procedure since it seems to hold still better for gluey finger wiping when it's tied to you. This is where I usually back my argument to God that we could have used three hands. At least that way I'd have pictures of the gluing process. instead, I have just the before, and the after. Actually I don't even really have an after shot. I only have a picture of it after I have also filed and sanded back the excess binding material. After they are glued, the bindings overhang both directions by a good .060" and must be brought back flush through a strategic mix of files, sanding paddles, razorblades, the aforementioned dull chisel, and some good, strong Lipton black tea. The tea just makes the experience more bearable.

Here's kinda an overall picture of how I left the guitar on Friday evening.

The bindings have been brought flush with the sides and faces of the guitar and the body is ready to have a mortise cut to accept the neck at a later point.

If you were of the mind, you could click this image to get a better view of my perfling miter joints. They came out pretty tight. Sorry the picture's not in great focus.

And here is yet another not-so-good picture. I've been playing around with the manual focus option. You can see a knot in the side there that gave me a little trouble with the side contour. Since the sides are book matched, this knot is on both sides. I sanded out most of the issue, but it's something I'll need to practice more at a later date.

That's it then for now. Next week, I should have lots of progress to show you on the neck.

Take care,

Brian