Guitar-b-que

WAY behind on updates here. I've been lagging partially because there hasn't been a ton to show. Sealer and grain filling has been on the Firebird's but they are waiting for paint. Joes Thunderbird is cut out, I'll update that in a separate post.

In the mean time, we are having a BIG BBQ at the shop for guitar building hobbyists like ourselves. We stocked up on material and we'll be running bodies all day. Steve and I went out and picked up a truck load (literally) of Mahogany and Alder. Today, Steve, Dave and I started cleaning up the material and gluing them into billets.

ROUGH Mahogany. This is one of my favorite parts of woodworking... running nasty looking wood through the planner.

Steve and I are doing a light cleanup, getting the material down to about 1.85" thick.

Rough Mahogany in, clean Mahogany out :D

This is how we straight line. The jig at the front basically pinches the the board in, works really well. Nice thing is I can straight-line 10' boards here with out hassle.

I did have a couple 12 footers though, I chopped 2 feet out of them to straight-line separately.

Doug: "What does that mean?"
Dave: "Kauer Custom Instruments, duh!"

Once everything has been straight lined I run them back through the planer on edge to true the edges.

After the edges are trued, we started cutting them to length.

FILLED the rack with materials!

We only have so many clamps in the shop so we'd glue 2 billets at a time.

Steve digging through all the blanks to match them up into nice two piece bodies.

And there we go... All of the Mahogany ones are glued, a few of the alder ones started. Tomorrow we'll get another 10-12 alder ones glued up. After this everything goes through the widebelt till they are perfectly flat.

-d

fabulous beard brothers guitar builders...

Well I promised an update... Im late but here it is. So the "fabulous beard brothers" got together again to do some more fret work.

Here I am putting the edge bevel on frets.
...then leveling the frets.
The start of crowning
Crowning REALLY wears your pointer finger out!
Poor Dave, we had to pull a couple frets and one chipped.
So we just mixed up some dust with some CA glue.
...and filled it up. Forgot to take a finished picture but it came out nice.
Started on the "JR"
and finished the P90GLT
Dave working on his... working the corners of the frets.
So that was it. Brought a few home to start grain filling. The grain filler does make them look nice!

Third time's a charm...

I think I should start this post... third time's a charm.

So yes, its been quite a while since I've posted an update. There is a reason for this. Just as we were getting ready to try machining I notice a problem. Because the I left the walnut strips wider than how I originally intended I found a problem down the road. I started laying drawing a fullsized mockup and realized that I spaced the walnut strips out to far... they'd run right out the sides of the neck about half way down.

DOH

So I debated and decided to just cut the outter strips out and reglue. So I cut it apart and realized that the strips were slightly skewed anyways (though its possible I skewed it when I ran them across the table saw).

When I realized that I just threw them in the firewood pile and started gluing up a new neck section. I just used 2, 1/4" wide walnut strips this time and made SURE they would be INSIDE the neck width. Joe and I had talked and we both agreed that we would rather have less pieces of Walnut if they were wide enough to actually DO something.

So off I went, glued up another nice laminated neck. Nice and long to give me plenty of material to chop the headstock section out to scarf joint ect ect.

Awesome right? Nope here's where murphy strikes again. Pulled it from the clamps, let it sit for while I worked on other stuff. Came back a few days later to put the wings on and I do a double take... the last foot and half had decided to twist nearly an inch to the right!

UGHHHHH. Cut that one back apart and threw the entire thing into the firewood pile.

SO this week I just started from scratch. Went and picked up more mahogany and started completely over. This time I took a bit different approach and relaminated the neck section nearly an inch wider than I needed. Formed a jig on the bench to make sure when I clamped that this thing would stay true. Now I should mention that I've always made my laminations with alternating grain directions and spend A LOT of time doing this. Every one of them has been as stable as a rock... just had a lot of visits from Murphy on this poor bass.

Then I worked it through planer and then widebelt till it was the width I needed. THIS FINALLY worked! Straight as could be, the walnut strips are with in a 1/64 true all the way down 80* of laminations... finally.

On better news though, I did get to run the mockup and it came out PERFECT! Should be seeing the real deal roll off the CNC by end of the weekend.

I sacked up and put the actual blank on the CNC and this is the result.

Came out great!