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Howdy!

So here's what I've been working on. I was hoping to be done a while ago, but I got married a few weeks back and it turns out planning and having a wedding takes a lot of work.

A little background - I've built enough guitars now that I have a pretty good grasp on the process. I know that to really get good, I should just keep making the same guitar until I figure out a lot of stuff. But I don't need a bunch of the same guitars around the house. So on this one I'm trying a variety of things. This is is going to be a multi-scale, wedged-body acoustic baritone. I was originally also doing an arm bevel and a cutaway, but those got nixed.

And to be clear, I'm making this up as I go along. I'm happy to share my reasoning, but please feel free to offer advice.

So since there aren't plans for this that I am aware of, I figured I needed to work out from the bridge plate, and to locate the bridge plate, I needed to figure out the fretboard.

I picked two scales, 29" and 27." I drew a fretboard and slid them around a bit to find what looked like it might work. Then a buddy of mine drew it up in autocad and printed a full size copy for me. I glued it to the fretboard and cut it by hand with a Japanese pull saw. I tapered it, glued on some ebony binding and radiused it with Tracy's jig using my drum sander. Ended up with this. Oh yeah, somewhere in there, I used the OLF fret template to put some indexing holes in it too.

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Mike Lindstrom

Next, I had to figure out how to match that angle at the nut. Thanks to Matt Mustapick for his help. It turned out to be really easy with just a few test cuts. I just angled my table saw blade when cutting the scarf joint. It took two separate cuts to get pieces that lined up right instead of just the one.

Here's the headstock and neck. I also routed slots for the carbon rods, epoxied them in, routed the truss rod slot, and routed in slots for cross grain splines in the heel. The tenon is only rough cut by hand to help me picture things.

I also tapered the neck to match the fretboard. My thinking was that I wanted the cutaway to match up smoothly, so I needed to know where the neck would end up. As I ended up not doing a cutaway, I'm not sure that was the best plan. Plus, now I've got John Maye's cutaway video, so I should know the right way to do it now.

Mike

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Mike Lindstrom

The back -- In the past, I've always rough thicknessed with a safe-t-planer and been happy with it, but with the crazy wood, I worried it would just explode, so I tried doing everything on the drum sander. Mostly it was great, but the 36 grit paper I got apparently had a solitary huge rock in one spot, so I ended up with a few huge gouges on both sides of my back by the time I got those sanded out, it was pretty thin.

To help the thin back hold the spherical section (is that the right term?) I decided to try the this bracing on the back. I think it's still way too burly. It rang pretty well as a free plate, but is dead glued to the sides. Maybe this will be my test to see what I think about a responsive back v. a rigid back.

I notice I still need to put in a back strip.

Nothing much to say about the sides. SSII worked great, but was cooked out when I tried to do the cutaway by hand. I heard scary noises and decided my first cutaway would be later.

I was trying to figure out the bracing today, but there's a ton of lightning right now, so I think I'll shut down for the evening.

Thanks for looking.
Mike

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Mike Lindstrom

So here is kind of what I'm thinking about for the bracing. In my original sketching for this, it looked like I would end up with an X that was rotated and offset to one side in order to support both ends of the bridge. When I started laying it out on the bridge, I did not like the way the x-brace on one side would have either replaced a long section of the lining in the upper bout, or would have had to pierce the UTB. But as I write this, I'm thinking about going back. I'm also wondering if a longer bridge would let me spread the braces and loosen things up a bit.

So now, I'm thinking about a symmetrical X that hits one end of the bridge and pick up the other end with a tone bar.

Either way, does anyone have opinion on grain orientation for the bridge plate? Any reason to not have it parallel to the bridge angle?

The body is an OLF MJ, the biggest thing I already had forms for and I put the sound hole in based on those plans. Looking at the braces and the extra frets slots I've got, I may move it down a bit.

It's been raining hard here every day, and as we usually get 15 inches of precip a year, it's way more humid than we are used to. I'll have to wait a while before I can glue on braces or I'll have a flat top with a crack in it for sure.

As I look at the preview, I notice the bridge appears to be backwards. That's because the top is flipped. Also FWIW, the bridge location is pre-compensation, and the body joins the neck at the 12 fret on the bass side. I wanted to keep it in close so it wasn't too far to reach, but looking at the bridge placement, I wonder if that was the right choice.

Mike

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Mike Lindstrom

Outside of my giving up on the cutaway, there was nothing special about bending the sides. SSII worked its wonder. When looking at trying to fit all of those braces into nice neat pockets in the linings, I struggled. But I came up with this tool that works great! It's just a scrap of aluminum bar 36" x 3/16" x 1" that I found in the corner when cleaning up and I glued some sandpaper to it. On one end, the sand paper is glued to the wide side. On the other, it is glued to the narrow edge. After rough cutting undersized notches in the lining and sides, I used this tool to make the pockets perfectly sized. The far end of the tool rides in the opposite notch to keep the holes in line with each other and therefore the braces. The sandpaper on the wide side lets me widen the pockets. The sandpaper on the skinny edge lets me deepen them. I was very pleased with how well it worked. It did tend to round out the bottom of the pockets, so they needed squaring up with a chisel, but that was easy.
Mike

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Mike Lindstrom

And the last picture I've got today is my end wedge. I'm going to bind this with ebony with basswood pre glued to it, so I took two scraps left from binding the fretboard and glued them together with a wedge of bloodwood between them. My intent was to have the bloodwood a much longer pointier wedge. You can't tell from the picture, but the centerline of the wedge is square to the front of the guitar. In my head the wedged body is a normal guitar, with the back shifted. There is a small tear-out in the bubinga that I'll have to patch, but I like the way it turned out. I was just going to do a simple wooden rosette, but I think I may try to tile something using more bloodwood and black. (another first for me!) Maybe with some endgrain black palm. Well, at least I've got something to do while I wait for top to dry out.

Oh and I wanted to say thanks to everyone who does such a good job taking pictures of their work in process. All I'm able to get is pictures of completed steps. I've also learned it's easy to lose a camera in a messy shop.

Thanks for looking!

Mike

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Mike Lindstrom

Mike,
That is looking good! Can't wait to see the finished product. One of these days I'm going to build a baritone, but just too busy with life right now. Haven't had time to build at all this year. But you are doing a great job there! Keep it up!

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Tracy
http://www.luthiersuppliers.com

Thanks, Tracy. And BTW, your fretboard radius jig is working great.

Here's what I'm trying for a rosette. The plan will be to cut a circle out of these when I get them the right size and like the look.

Pretty good hail last night. Need to go check the roof.

Mike

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Mike Lindstrom

Sorry everyone. I just remembered the OLF Docu-build sub forum. If someone can relocate this there, great. If not, I'll just continue a new thread over there.

Mike

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Mike Lindstrom