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I am building the modified plan with a 65 cm scale. The guitar has Indian Rosewood back and sides and a Western Red Cedar soundboard and Spanish Cedar neck.
Preparation: Templates and workboard.
The guitar is to be built Spanish style, using a universal solera or workboard.
The solera design is taken from Courtnall, Making Master Guitars. The finished
solera is shown in the left picture.
The picture on the right shows the body template, made from 1/4" plexi. Brace locations and other
features are scribed on the bass and treble sides and darkened for visibility.
Preparation: Extra jigs.
The most labor intensive, non-essential preparation work that I have added to the process so far is
the construction of a Fox-style side-bending jig.
The neck.
My neck blank preparation seemed almost like a cheat relative to Dave's instructions. First,
the LMI-supplied neck blank was basically flat on one side and thicknessed to a nearly uniform 23.9
mm, so I simply went at it with the Gilbert sanding disk to take it down to a uniform 23 mm +- .05
mm. The prepared neck blank marked for the scarf-joint cut is shown. I have also scribed
centerline marks.
The next step is the construction of the scarf joint which joins the headstock to the neck itself.
I approached this with fear and trepidation and considered building the scarf cutting jig
illustrated on Kathy Matsushita's web page,
but, after practice on the band saw and
constructing 2 practice joints in 1-by-3 finished pine, I went at it with Dave's method on the
bandsaw. Some pictures ...
After gluing up the scarf joint, the next steps are to thickness the head to a uniform 16mm (I
managed to get down to around 16.05 - 16.15mm), and to profile the neck from 15mm at the nut
positio to 20mm at the 12th fret position. This was done using a combination of a block plane and
a #4 smoothing plane. It was the first serious attempt at planing I have ever done, and I was
pleased both by the process and the result. I feel the Neander pull ...
Next comes the glue-up of the headplate veneers. I'm using ebonized maple, plane maple, and Indian
rosewood (left picture). The glue-up is shown in the middle, and the result on the right. Final
head thickness is 20 mm.
The next step is to plane the headstock edges and carve the crest design. I was not happy with the
faithfulness of my crest carving and would love to have a second neck in progress so I could do
this over. This will be a weak point in the overall finished guitar, I think.
Now, we drill for tuners and slot the head. Oops - my placement of tuners has them moved too far
away from the nut. Not far enough to be impractical, but far enough to look wrong.
In the second picture, I am still struggling with doing an absolutely uniform beveling and ramping.
This is my first shot at round rasps, using scrapers for doing something more complicated than
smoothing a flat surface, etc.
Now we make the neck heel. I used a solid heel block for this. I used a friends' Japanese ryoba
saw to do the slotting, and am now completely sold on the Japanese saw tech. The second picture
shows almost finished carving, done with chisel, sandpaper, and scraper blade. Not too bad so far.
Note that there was a pitch pocket inside the solid heel block - one hazard of using this method
over a laminated heel block.
The Plates.
In this section, the top and back plates are jointed and joined, and top, back and side plates are
thicknessed. The first picture shows plate jointing apparati, with the work being done with my
trusty #4 followed by a strip from an 80 grit roll attached to a 4 ft carpenter's level. Resulting
jointed back is next. The top is then joined using what is basically the method in Cumpiano and
Natelson. (I also used this in my previous effort on my Martin OM and on my next effort on a
completely homemade OM in cedar and walnut).
Next row shows joined back, and top and back plates trimmed to size. The center stripe on the back
is a 0.08" Rosewood line with W/B/W veneers sandwiched on either side. Veneers are from LMI and
were left at their original thicknesses (0.025" for the maple, 0.015" for the ebonized maple).
Center stripe is a plate cutoff and was thicknessed with a Gilbert disk.
The rosette for this guitar was obtained from Tom Blackshear and follows a typical Rodriguez design
closely. The following pictures show the rosette ready for inlaying, the final cleaned rosette,
and the top after the soundhole was cut.
Top and Back Braces. Top and back braces for this guitar are cut from sitka spruce, except for the flat soundboard reinforcements, which are cut from soundboard scraps (western red cedar). The cut and squared braces for the top are shown on the left. The top bracing is done using the shaped solera described above, in a go-bar deck, as shown in the second picture.
Some examples of gluing top braces using the solera: fan braces and tone bars
Glued back braces. All brace shaping is done with a finger plane and curved "glue-clearing" chisel,
both designs due to Richard Schneider.
Assembling the guitar soundbox.
First, the neck is glued to the top. This requires that a ledge the depth of the top thickness be
cut, together with two angled channels to allow for the soundboard braces.
Next, we bend the sides, skip the process of fitting sides to the soundboard since the camera was broken, show
an example of attaching solid top linings, and glue the sides to the soundboard. Note that I made a mistake at this point, letting one slide slip a little bit at the heel block, which is going to force me to make an end strip that is a little wider than the back strip.
Now we taper the sides from 104mm at the waist to 100mm at the neck, attach back linings (I used reverse kerfed mahogany), and install side reinforcements (spruce). One thing that happened at this stage was that the heel
was too short to meet the arched back when the height at the heel/side join is 100mm. Others had this problem
too, so it may be an error in the heel dimension as drawn on the plans. This was handled by shimming the heel
with a piece of soundboard cutoff, and then planing the shim down to the required height (back arch of 20' was
checked with a sanding stick arched to the right shape).
The end graft is installed using basically the same technique as the original back strip, and glued by soaking with CA. Cauls are made for the bridge and for gluing the fretboard to the soundboard (bridge shown).
The back linings are notched out to accept the back braces, and then the back is fitted using the method suggested by David Schramm to set the neck angle, using a shim between the foot of the heel and the first back brace. Then, the big moment comes - the back is glued in place. After drying and trimming excess material from
the back plate edges, the resulting top and back views start to look like a guitar (yeah!)
The back was made to overlap the heel. There is still need for final shaping. The second picture shows the
discrepancy in width of the back strip and the end strip. Not too bad - hopefully the binding will hide that
a little.
