Steel Guitar Builder

Ok, so here goes my first project!

It started with a tuning of a Stanley/Bailey #8. I'm soo lucky to have a GREAT hardware store a few doors down from my day gig. Bill. one of the part time guys there has been coaching me along with Japanese and antique Baily/Stanley planes. This weekend, spent a few hours and tuned the old #8 and I have to say I was AMAZED at what you can do with one of those! I was convinced that I'd be investing in some kind of powered jointer/planer ( and had been lusting for a week or two over the seemingly reasonably priced Porter-Cable Jointer at Lowes). Definitely a lesson learned for me----DON'T rule out the hand tools!!



More tomorrow....

-L

Larry, It'll be interesting to follow this one from the word go. I have always loved to see a thing of beauty being transformed from a raw piece of wood.
Good luck with your project!

Looks mighty fine Larry, tool toys are nice, in my former career in the bush you sometimes had to make things work with what you had on hand. A bit of elbowgrease and ingenuity goes a long way. Like you say, don't discount hand tools. I'm sure Bent and others would atest to this.

Eldon wrote:Looks mighty fine Larry, tool toys are nice, in my former career in the bush you sometimes had to make things work with what you had on hand. A bit of elbowgrease and ingenuity goes a long way. Like you say, don't discount hand tools. I'm sure Bent and others would atest to this.

Eldon, you're right I would.
There is nothing like hand tools. Say you run a 6 inch board of birdseye through your planer. It tears out every 5th birdseye and the board is firewood.
With a smoothing plane you have more chances and also more chance at initial success. So what if it takes a half hour rather than 5 minutes?
Here's a very sweet unit from Lee Valley Tools. Notice the VERY shallow angle, so less of a chance for tear-out.
http://www.leevalley.com/wood/page.aspx ... 1182,41186

For everyone's info, Lee Valley is a Canadian store, but I see they also have stores in the US.

Man, that Veritas is a sweet looking plane!

I got a low angle Kanna from my local hardware guy and I'm liking that a lot. Different animal though when it comes to tuning it up. I finally have it nicely squared and I'm starting to get happier with the results.

Got the body glued tonight, but I started thinking that I should have used a couple of dowels instead of using just glue. What do you guys usually do? Dowels, or just glue?

Well, I'll be keeping my fingers crossed till tomorrow night when the clamps come off!

Larry, I can't see clearly enough, but is this a three-level steel? I mean, is it one with 3 necks?
In my guitars I used biscuits - about 6 of them and glue. This is a bit tricky where you offset the planks by as much as 1/4" to the other. You get very little wood left over on one side after cutting out the slot for the biscuit. The expansion properties of the biscuit might actually show up as a bump. But if you glue up the boards level(full edge to edge), biscuits are best because they are used for lining up the wood edges as well as reinforcing the joint. Dowels can be used as well, they are good and strong but a bit more problematic when trying to line up. With dowels it is best to glue the boards together slightly oversized and then plane them down to finished thickness when the glue dries. Another way is to rout or dado out a 1" mortise on the edge of both boards, half the thickness of the wood.
That way you get a much larger gluing surface. When you have clamped this together(not too tightly) you use wood screws in pre-drilled holes on the underside of the body. I think this would be the strongest way of doing it.

Bent, are you talking about pocket screws in that last post there?

Allan.....

Allan, no I am talking about screws straight through the routed-out mortise and into the mating surface. The screw is counter-sunk.

Got ya, thanks...

Finally got a little break today and was able to get back to the Black Limba project.

I decided to take a bit of a different approach with the design. I wanted to do something along the design lines of Bill Asher's guitars. Since I have a couple of Duncan 59s and all the quality parts for a nice Gibson style wiring, I figured this would be a good way to go. I've become a serious admirer of Bill's guitars and I love the sound that guys like Steinar and Ben Harper get!

So, it was back to the 3d program to come up with another design. Luxology Modo is my 3d app of choice, and while it's not a CAD program, I can easily render out full scale isometric views. Using a pic of the Ben Harper model as a reference, I free-handed some splines, rendered out a wire view and printed out the tiles from a PDF file. I'm sure there's an easier way to do this with the CAD stuff, but I guess I'm so used to working in apps like Lightwave, Maya, Modo, etc, that for me it's the fastest way to get a workable template. About an hour later, I had the body cut out and was on to a first rough sanding and smoothing. Fortunately, there's was just enough wood left over for the cuts to work into my next project.

One point I'd like to make for those like me just starting out:
My buddy Bill over at Asheville Hardware gave me a terrific piece of advice-- Don't buy an el-cheapo bandsaw, instead get a top of the line jig saw, use Festool blades, and save up for a quality bandsaw later on. Sage advice indeed! The Bosch 1590 has changed my mind about jigsaws. With a Festool blade, it cut the Black Limba like butter and the cuts were perfectly straight up and down. That's more than I could ever say for the cheapo Ryobi bandsaw I had (briefly).