Here are a couple of pix taken by my student Rick Cowan (a member here, whose son did the documentary on me making guitars) of the new mod I made to my florentine cutaway mold. Rick has christened it The Hulk.
I used the same springs that I had on the upper bout of my Fox, and will soon mod all my molds to take the spring loaded arm on the upper bout bend as well. I figure I have about 60-70 lbs of tension on the slat. In the first pic, you can see in the background the test pieces taped together, some EI rw, one quartered - .105, the other flatsawn mostly, about .095 thick. I bent them without any supersoft (although another bud just brought me back a gallon from Detroit) and in about 3 minutes they were done. I used a 6x12-2.5 watt blanket, plugged straight in, no dimmer. Once the bend was done, pulled the plug. The real test was Ricks cutaway piece in madagascar rw, which I supersofted Sunday, and we bent last night - .075, and it came out like a charm - almost no springback, although during the day yesterday I reshaped the mold to overbend about a 1/4 inch. We used the blanket full blast at first, but then used a variac to trim it back to about 100v. Once the arm is fully down, you can see I added a chain to lock it to the bottom of the bench to cool in place. No welding was required to make the arm, its just 1 inch thick wall tube, some baltic birch ply, and some bolts, screws, and eye bolts.
Thank you John How for the wonderful mod !!!!
![[clap]](./images/smilies/smiley32.gif "adulations")
