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Boy our welcome matt sure is getting twisted lately.
Nice work there Dave!
As Mitch said; "Welcome to the obsession".
By the looks of your clamp collection, my guess is this will not be your last build?

Wade

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Wade
Nashua, NH
http://www.wadefx.com

Gee, when someone jumps in here and shows pictures of his first build on his first post, he deserves to be anointed with some of the best stuff we got.  We are, after all, picaholics, and zootaholics, all.

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Waddy

Photobucket Build Album Library

Sound Clips of most of my guitars

[QUOTE=WaddyT]Gee, when someone jumps in here and shows pictures of his first build on his first post, he deserves to be anointed with some of the best stuff we got.  We are, after all, picaholics, and zootaholics, all. [/QUOTE]

Waddy - Just what is a "picaholic?"  Pica means really small.  Oh, I get it now... Pictures!!!!  Yes we LOVE pictures.  Not small pictures, though.   But not as much as ZOOT.

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Steve Walden
Aspiring Builder,
Bartlesville, OK

Dave - Just looked at your website!  Under Construction!  First look is great, though.  San Jose?  Lots of resources around there.....Frank Ford, Rick Turner...... And lots of OLFers, too.  Nice quick bio.

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Steve Walden
Aspiring Builder,
Bartlesville, OK

I always enjoyed visiting the Silicon Valley Mall and found it immediately clear why this place is so appropriately named.....

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Ann Arbor Guitars

[QUOTE=Dave Rickard]

Welcome Dave. You can never have too many Dave's

[/QUOTE]

Yeah, ya can't swing a dead Dave around here without hitting a Dave! (Yet we only have one Lance and one Brock and one Hesh...why is that do ya think...discuss! )

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http://www.presnallguitars.com

Hi Dave,
One word of acvice,
Be very careful when using the term "kerfing" around Howard Klepper.

[QUOTE=Brad Goodman] Hi Dave,
One word of acvice,
Be very careful when using the term "kerfing" around Howard Klepper.[/QUOTE]

Aaaaa! Use it all you but never as a noun

[QUOTE=MichaelP] [QUOTE=Brad Goodman] Hi Dave,

One word of acvice,

Be very careful when using the term "kerfing" around Howard Klepper.[/QUOTE]



Aaaaa! Use it all you but never as a noun [/QUOTE]  That would be "Use it all you want, but never as a noun.

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Waddy

Photobucket Build Album Library

Sound Clips of most of my guitars

[QUOTE=TommyC]If Grumpy tells you that you are

dumb for not cutting your kerfed lining with a salvaged tire rim take it in
stride because he is wealth of info and willing to share it!    [/QUOTE]



I don't know about Grumpy, but I've actually cut down the tallest tree in the forest with a herring!



Welcome!! 

Thanks for the warm welcome and all the warnings (duly noted!)

You guys crack me up ! I can see I'm going to have to watch every word I write very carefully around here!!

Uh, Cambrian Explosion....yah, that's it.....well, not quite. I live in an area of San Jose called Cambrian Park and since no one can spell or pronounce my surname properly, I went for the Cambrian name. I like the ancient-ness of the Cambrian era connection though....like I've been making guitars forever (good for marketing!).

It seems like I have been doing woodwork forever. I have a fairly decent workshop full of nice tools (and hundreds of clamps ), and a very nice Epilog EXT laser engraver indoors. I can mill pretty large billets of wood into sets for guitars. I'm into marquetry and inlay in a big way (see www.daveswoodenwonders.com), plus am a bit of an amateur musician (with a nice studio - see www.jardini.com), so making guitars seemed like a natural next thing to do.

Here's some more photos (and some repeats of the ones above, sorry!) of my build. I'm calling this guitar my "Omega" model (OMega - geddit?). All the photos are in chronological order of the work done. I tackled the soundboard first. I jointed some bookmatched AAA grade sitka spruce on my Jet 6" jointer, then glued it up on a flat workboard. Then I sanded it to near-final thickness on my Performax drum sander before tackling the "rossette". I went for a tried-and-tested pattern with b-w-b pfurling and some rather nice select paua inlay around the soundhole. After leaving it overnight for the super-glue to dry thoroughly, I finished off the surfacing with some 220 grit paper and finally a cabinet scraper.







I wasn't real impressed by the structural qualities of the endgrain around the soundhole, even with the pfurling/inlay in place, so I decided to go with some crossgrain oriented wenge veneer on the back of the soundhole. I think I've seen this done on a classical guitar before. Wenge has a very tough straight grain structure and is reasonably light weight, so I think it'll do a good job here. I cut out the circle of wenge veneer using my Epilog EXT laser engraver.





Next job was the soundboard bracing. Nothing innovative here. I cut the wenge veneer back a bit to make space for the X bracing.

See, I do have a go-bar deck. I just didn't think about using it to clamp the soundboard to the sides (later in the build).



After rough-shaping the X braces, I added the tonebars....



...and the top bracing, and some extra support around the wenge veneer.





Then, after adding the rosewood bridge plate and some final shaping and sanding, the soundboard is ready.





Now for the back board. I came across some fairly nice (AAA quality?) koa wood on eBay recently. Not so expensive that it would break the bank if I ruined it, but nice enough for a first guitar. Jointed and glued up the same way as the soundboard.

 


Next was the bit I'd been dreading....the sides! I did several practice pieces on my StewMac electric bending iron. They seemed to go quite well. Then I summoned up the courage to tackle the actual sides. I started at the waist, and thought I was doing quite well on the first side, but when I got to the bottom of the lower bout, I found I was a half-inch short of making it to the center line! Oops! I had to re-bend the side to move the waist up a bit. It wasn't too difficult, but was very time consuming (about an hour!). The second side bend went like a dream (about 15 mins). After I cleaned up, I noticed that my fingers were covered in wood resin, and still are today! Gloves next time, methinks!

Next, I set about milling and cutting to size some nice Honduras Mahogony for the end blocks.







I decided I like a much more rounded look for the blocks. I can't see that it would weaken the structure of the guitar any, so that's what I did.



I then glued the end blocks in place with the sides out of the mold. Some people glue the blocks in with the sides in the mold. Is there any advantage either way?







I found some nice rose wood to use for the tail inlay.



With a small dovetail saw, I very carefully cut the slot to size, then chiseled out the waste material before super-gluing in two strips of b-w-b pfurling with the wedge of rosewood.







Then I carefully trimmed off the excess material and sanded and scraped the inlay until it was level enough to leave for final finishing later.









With the sides back in the mold, I got busy with the kerfed linings. I did the top edge first, setting the lining about 1mm higher than the sides, so that when it was sanded in the 28' radius dish later, there would be enough material to provide a good surface for glueing the curved soundboard.





Before glueing the kerfed linings to the bottom, I had to first plane the desired curve on the bottom of the sides. I deliberately left this high, then finished off setting the curve by sanding the bottom edge of the sides in a 20' radius dish.





With the bottom edge nicely curved to size, I glued on the lining, again leaving it about 1mm higher than the sides to allow for the curve of the back.







With all the linings done, it was time to sand the top and the bottom in their respective dishes. It took quite a long while and lots of sweat to do this!

 

Next I prepared the soundboard braces ready for glueing to the sides. I marked the long braces and cut them off with a dovetail saw and trimmed them up with a sharp chisel.



At this point, I realized that I had forgotten to glue on the "lollipop stick" side braces, so I turned my attention to doing that before continuing with preparing the back for gluing.



With the side braces in place, I did the final trimming of the back braces, carefully marked the linings (top and bottom) for routing the small pockets, then used my Dremel tool in a StewMac precision router base to do the routing. I fitted the back first.





Then I fitted the soundboard.





All went well until the very last brace pocket.....I guess I must have rushed it and forgot to route anti-clockwise for a split second.....before I knew it, the router bit was through the side of the guitar!  For a moment, my heart sank and I thought I'd ruined the guitar completely, but then I realized that everything was okay, since I would be routing out that part of the side anyway to fit the binding.....PHEW!!! What a relief!!  Here's the "damage":



With everything now ready (including signing the underside of the soundboard), I glued the soundboard to the sides, very carefully clamped it all the way around, and shut up shop for the night.



All in all, I am very happy with my progress so far. It's taken me about 3 weeks of evenings and weekends to get to this point.

I just took delivery of a Peterson Strobe Tuner (490) last evening, so this weekend I'll tune the soundboard braces and tone bars and back braces (to even tempered scale notes) before roughing out the neck and neck joint and gluing on the back.

More pics to come. Jump in if you think I'm doing something the hard way or just plain wrong!

Hey, maybe the soundboard would look good painted black?......

Cheers,

Dave F.

www.cambrianguitars.com

Hi Dave! Welcome to the OLF!
Great looking work! One question,

wheredidyagetthatslick scraper holder!

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Support the OLF! Bookmark our STEWMAC link Today!
Lance@LuthiersForum.com

Hi Lance. It's a Veritas job. Got it at my local Woodcraft store but it might be cheaper from other places (e.g. http://www.highlandwoodworking.com/index.asp?PageAction=VIEW PROD&ProdID=832 or even http://www.leevalley.com/wood/page.aspx?c=2&cat=1,310&am p;p=32669). Saves a lot of stress/strain on your thumbs!

Cheers,

Dave F.

www.cambrianguitars.com

 

I like the fancy black kerfing clamps myself...Didn't know Staples had a clamp section in the store! 

Mitch

Great shots of your work.  Thanks for posting them.  3 Weeks, Hmmmm!  I think I better readdress my process! 

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Waddy

Photobucket Build Album Library

Sound Clips of most of my guitars

Welcome to the OLF, Dave. Nice instrument, workmanship and documentation.

A word of caution regarding the use of "Omega" for your guitar: Kevin Gallagher (a noted builder and member here at the OLF) operates as "Omega Instruments" and I am sure you don't want to create any confusion.

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"Building guitars looks hard, but it's actually much harder than it looks." Tom Buck

Ummmm............Mister Klepper... Mitch used a diributive of.... ah.... kerf as a noun

Real nice Dave,

Your post caught my eye because my daughters name is Cambria.

I don't think anybody noticed yet, but those black rubber mat things are known to sometimes have silicone residue on them. A mold release agent. Real bad stuff for finishes.

Keep up the good work. And welcome to the forum.

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Horton, MI

Great looking work Dave!

I dont know if you have read about it in the forum archives, but super glue is not the first choice for adhesives. It seeps deep into the wood fiber and you really wont notice it until you put the finish on. No matter how much sanding you do, any portion of wood that has come into contact witht he super glue will remain at the color it is now. This color may be drastically different than the final color of the wood and will stand out like a sore thumb with final finishing.

One way to avoid this affect is to spray accellerator ont he wood prior to gluing. This keeps the CA from penetrating the depth of the wood fiber but still allows for a strong bond.

Otherwise, looks like you are right on track for a great first guitar!

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Reguards,

Ken H

I used CA to glue the rosette on my first acoustic, but first I laid
down a coat of rattle-can shellac (Zinssers) on the rosette channel and
surrounding spruce, and I had no problems.



Same for the binding.

Geez o pete Dave, first build and a tutorial, I'll be dead before I'm building guitars that nice.

Seriously, she's a beauty, I really enjoy the pictures, keep 'em coming!

I just finished.....completed my first and am having it finished for me, after a little liquid courage maybe I'll post some pictures of it. Course I have to wait for the black paint on the top to dry before handling it

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Kurt Thomas

"There's a first time for everything even if you do it by mistake."

Michael! YOU are a tattler...

Pay him no mind Howard...

Mitch

Steve - I am going to use the Greek symbols for my various guitars (Omega, Alpha, Lambda, etc.) rather than the English words, so I don't think I'll tread on Kevin's turf. However, if Kevin is reading this, then please let me know if you're happy with this....I'll be more than willing to change it.

Thanks for the heads up about superglue. Yeh, I read about the seepage issue somewhere else AFTER I had done the rosette. I guess I'll just have to wait and see how it comes out. Next time, I'll pre-treat the wood for sure. I read somewhere else that I should use a vinyl sealer (anyone know a brand name for this?) prior to using superglue.

Oh, my soundboard is nearly dry:

Cheers,

Dave F.

www.cambrianguitars.com

I think you're gonna fit in just fine around here.  Nice black soundboard.  I'm impressed at how you were able to paint it while it was clamped to the ribs.  Isn't Krylon wonderful!   

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Waddy

Photobucket Build Album Library

Sound Clips of most of my guitars