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One of the things that continues to interest me is how people use indexing in their work to quickly and accurately get things aligned. It seems like a great move towards efficiency. I've seen people use pins set in radius dishes to index brace positions, but I wonder how else they can be used. How could the top and back be indexed to the rim assembly? What else can be indexed? I'm interested in brainstorming possibilities.

These are a few pictures I've grabbed over time. The first is one of Brocks, the second is just a Somogyi top in a mold. Somogyi has similar ones in his books with indexing pins in place for the X-brace. A top I have from Martin indexes at the waist rather than the head and tail.

Jim Olson uses a lot of indexing on his molds. Lots of possibilities there.

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-Marcus
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Marcus, do you have pictures or links that would make it easy for people to reference?

Had a simple idea while driving. To index the rims to the top and back, you could just use removable pins in the mold located in the same place as the positioning pins on the dish. So if you indexed at the head and tail on the dish, have pins in the same location on the mold.

James, pop through these pages on Jim Olson's website http://www.olsonguitars.com/shop.html for a bunch of pictures. I've gleened a few ideas over the years from looking on Jim's site.

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Taylor Guitars has a "Factory Fridays" section in the videos on their web site. One of the videos shows a nifty template system for quickly, accurately, and repeatably locating the top braces for gluing. Their particular system uses vacuum clamping, but I see no reason this same approach wouldn't work on a go-bar deck or other clamping set-up. Check it out.

Yes, I've seen that and it seems like a good idea if you have resolved desings you just want to copy. The location for the braces seem to be slightly sprung so they hold the brace. Making them accurately by hand would be a challenge but not impossible if you take the time.

For gluing tops and backs, I been through lots of ideas in my head and have decided to try small blocks of wood glued to the head and tail and perhaps the waist on the waste side of the outline to help keep it lined up when clamping. Makes it more flexible than having pins in the mold.

Cheers
Dom