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