Acornhouseworkshop

The table top panels are in the finishing room. It was an ordeal to get down to the final, finish surface. Because of the size (and weight!) of the panels, it was going to be impossible to use any stationary tools; definitely had to bring the tools to the work, rather than the other way around. Since I abhor the handheld belt sander, that meant hand tools the whole way. Veritas to the rescue! I sharpened up my No. 80 cabinet scraper to do the bulk of the smoothing at the glue lines, then turned to the bevel-up smoother with a high angle blade to deal with the final pass on the figured QSWO. It sure works as advertised.

I used a simple 15° bevel on the bottom edge with a slight roundover on the top for my edge treatment. Then a final sanding to 120, and over to the finishing room. Now all that is left is to fabricate the extension slide mechanisms.

Now that that is (mostly) finished, I am turning to the next project. Definitely on a smaller scale, I’m starting on a second parlor guitar. I want to take my experience from building the first one, and perfect my build techniques. I am using a nice board of curly moabi for the back and sides, and some bearclaw sitka spruce for the top.

I started out working on the neck, glueing up some mahogany. Instead of trying to find a thick, straight grained, quartersawn plank, and wasting a lot of wood sawing it out, I use smaller pieces, and laminate them. This results in a stronger, more stable, neck; particularly at the angled headstock. By using a scarf joint to join the headstock at a 15° angle, I end up with all long grain, instead of short grain along the angle. I bandsaw the angles, then fine tune them by stacking them and using my block plane and a small square to keep everything running true. I will add an overlay on the headstock which will further reinforce the joint. The beautiful thing about mahogany, is that you will never notice the joints.

Stay tuned (as the guitar will!)

This entry was posted on July 10, 2009 at 5:52 pm and is filed under Acorn House. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.