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