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.