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Jul

Adventures in Lutherie

Posted by dante8  Published in Guitar, Lutherie, Relaxation

I am approaching the halfway point of my week-long vacation, so I decided to finally get going on a few guitar-building projects.

The adventures began on Monday, when I ventured down to Denver to a place called Aspenleaf Millworks to get some of the guitar bodies that I had purchased resawn.  For those unfamiliar: the guitar bodies that I purchased were 3 1/8″ thick.  Les Paul bodies are 1 3/4″, so to maximize this expensive old-growth stock I wanted to find a place to cut these 14″ wide slabs along their thickness.  This would yield me the Les Paul body stock that I wanted and an extra piece to use in a future project.

I’m really grateful for Shane at Aspenleaf Millwork… I had called 15 different places to get someone to resaw this wood for me, since I lack a band saw and thickness planer or sander to accomodate this size of a blank.  Everywhere else either didn’t have the capacity to do it, wouldn’t do wood that wasn’t theirs (what?) or wasn’t interested in helping me for such a small project.  Shane not only helped me, but went above and beyond to do the job right at a very reasonable cost.  I know where I’m going if I ever need this type of work done again.  For anyone that needs custom molding or millwork done, give Shane a call and you won’t be sorry.

That project is going to kick off in earnest later on this week.  I spent today getting the first steps of my acoustic project off the ground.  The first step was building a workboard and getting the neck and tailblock glued into position.  It was my first experience working with hide glue (it sets up fast!) but I was able to get the pieces in the right location and clamped up.  We’ll know if I was successful tomorrow when I unclamp things and see if it all stays together.  I also realized why the professionals seem to have a form that they place their bent sides into, then use screwed cauls to apply pressure to the sides and to hold the blocks in place while gluing occurs.  The hardest part of the process was fighting against the tension of the bent sides to position and anchor the tailblock in time to glue it.

I used a combination of spring clamps and cam clamps (three on each block) to apply even pressure while the glue dries.  With any sort of luck everything holds together when the clamps come off and I can move to applying the kerfing strips to the inside of the edges.

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