Official Luthiers Forum!

Man, do I wish I were where you are on my OLF MJ build. I see we had similar ideas in mind with regards to doing a semi-solid mold:



Bear with me since I'm still very new at this. I feel like I'm learning a lot but the going's slow as I don't have access to many tools or time to devote on a consistent basis. I'm still working on the bending form. I'm just using a hand drill with a spindle and a square, which is also doubling as a scraper. I think it's close though:



...just a couple of uneven spots in the cross-section.


...but I figure that if it fits within the curve of the outside mold then I'm getting there:


I'm mostly worried about the fit at the waist:




Not much actual work being done on the guitar itself. Most of my tone woods are over at YJ John's place where he has all the proper tools. My top and back are joined and sanded to thickness but I still have to run them through the drum sander just a couple more times with a lower grit roll to smooth out the marks from the 80 grit roll. The sides are waiting to be trimmed to the outline on the plans.

Last week he and I dremeled out a 5" radius x .1" thick rosewood ring from some scrap to be used as the central ring of my rosette. It took 6 tries but now I have a full set of 6 rosewood coasters!

In the meantime, I'm mostly just doing prep work. You know - lurking here and bending peoples' ears about what the best way to do the next step and all. All I can really do here at home is think about what I want to do and try and come up with a plan. Being a graphic artist does have its benefits. While it's not truly a CAD program, Adobe Illustrator does have its uses:



The numbers are simplistic and likely to be off, but essentially I intend to route out the trenches for the two outer purfling strips at equal distances from the central ring which will also be bound by purfling. The central trench will be a bout .22" and I'm going to try to glue the purfling in the central ring before dropping in the rosewood. I'm still trying to figure out the best way to do that though. Speaking of which, the rosewood ring is cut at .1" thick give or take. I have a little tear-out that needs to be smoothed out but it's usable.

It doesn't look I'll get much more done this week but I'm going to finish up sanding the acrylic template for the sides. I still have some extra material that needs to be carefully removed with the hand drill spindle:


I'm hoping once this is all done I can get the inlay done and move on to splitting billets and using my band saw here to cut them to rough shape. I'm really looking forward to voicing the top and bending sides for the first time though. Those look to be a few weeks off though.

Bent my first set of sides. Yellow cedar on a homemade iron.

-Jake.

Thanks Todd. 1.25 oz. is a fairly substantial weight savings... I have an OM that justs feels a little heavy at the headstock,, might be a good way to bring it in better balance. Now how that willl affect the tone....

Thanks, Chuck

_________________
_________________

No picture, but I picked up a Grizzly 18" Drum sander off of craigslist yesterday for $600. I have been watching cragslist/classifieds for 8 months trying to find a good deal on any decent drum sander. Finally paid off. It is only 6 months old and the guy I bought it from built an enclosed shelf on the stand, and a frame with casters for the stand to sit on. I'm pretty stoked!

_________________
John Thiessen
http://www.iszacguitars.com

Well, up here in Canada it was Thanksgiving weekend, so we had a 3 day weekend. Spent some time with family and friends but managed also to get some work done.

I got a Monkey Pod all sanded up and ready to finish.

And also got one put together.
Black Walnut/Spalted Maple with Engleman top.
It's a 12 fret small body. Sounds pretty good already.

Here's some pictures...

Neil

That is a beeeeautiful guitar Neil. Love the wood combination of the three piece back. Very nice.

Darrin

Finally got this beast done. It's the third I've built for Dan Mahar. (http://www.youtube.com/user/danmaharoff ... i-HeV20TMA) He's taking it to a tour of Ireland and Norway in a couple weeks. It's basically Dan's concept that I tried to make happen and has a Fishman Nashville pizeo on the spider and a fretboard end humbucker with dual outputs.
In the hands of a good slide player it sounds awesome.

_________________
It's not what you don't know that hurts you, it's what you do know that's wrong.

This is really sweet. So many details working together like the sister curves on the top of the heatstock and the end of the fretboard and the spalted line that matches the back and end graft.

Nice work.

_________________
rono

Processing some sproose.