Day 4 - My fingers smell really great!

Day 4: Yesterday we joined two pieces of bookmatched wood into a single piece for the back of the guitar, letting it dry over night. This morning we continued working with the back, cleaning it, removing excess glue that had squeezed out, and working the thickness down to 110/1000" with our friend the metal scraper. In the second most scary operation of the day, we used the band saw to rough cut the back to the shape of the guitar (leaving about 1/4 - 1/2" all around the outline of the body).

We also continued working with the headstock, cutting it down to its final shape (except down near the transition area to the neck). The most anxiety-provoking operation to date was when we drilled the tuner holes. This is a pretty bold task, and there aren’t any easy (or at least unsightly) “undos” if you mess it up. With a bit of luck, mine seemed to go okay.

My headstock

The headstock for my dad's classical guitar

After lunch we chose wood for the sides, to match the back. I got a nice set of straight-grained rosewood that has a similar coloration to the back. Since the sides (as opposed to the back) fit through the thickness sander we didn’t have to manually scrape/plane them down to the proper thickness. We did have to clean them up a bit, but mine looked pretty good to start with. By the way, rosewood smells great! My hands are currently stained purple, but at least they are really sweet smelling. You’re probably wondering “who goes around sniffing their fingertips?” Well, if you haven’t spent two days working with rosewood, don’t laugh.

The design for the neck that George employs is really clever; from what I can tell, it’s similar to the Taylor “NT” design. I’m sure I’ll talk more about it later when when connect the neck and body, but today we worked on the heel area, which will include the hardware for the bolt-on hardware. It’s a three piece neck: headstock, neck shaft (for lack of a better term), and a stacked heel. Today we drilled the heel for a brass shaft that receives the bolts to attach the neck. Somehow I messed this up and drilled my hole slight off vertical by about 1/16”. That might not sound like a lot, but it could have been a serious problem if we hadn’t caught and corrected it. It was my first screw up, and hopefully (but probably not) the last! Finally, we glued the heel to the neck, and left it to dry overnight. 

Started working at 8:00am, left the workshop at 6:45pm.

My commute to and from "work" each day