What kine wood? Da Koa kine wood bruddah!

So I got my package from Certainly Wood today, and I am excited to say I got a couple of fine pieces of Koa wood. This delivery seems like its the tipping point of the project now, up until now, everything I have been dealing with has been with jigs and preparation. But now, I got the wood that will make up the backs and sides of this guitar. It settled in as "Wow, I am really going to do this!" this is "Actually happening" I have to say I am pretty stoked about it. I don't think I have had a project like this in a long time that i was this enthralled by.

Now that I have the veneers, I'll have to start focusing on building my vacuum bagging system. I currently have a portable automobile air compressor that I am converting to a vacuum pump. I'll have more information on that in my next post as well as the construction of my vac system via http://www.joewoodworker.com this site has a tremendous wealth of information on a DIY vac system which I'll be following.

But for now Koa!!!

Sneak peak while at the office, ooohh ahh! However florescent light really doesn't do it justice.

This is a little bit more like it! Under incadecent light the vibrance is noticeable.

Another shot of the koa unrolled. You can see the koa has really nice figure. Will look really nice when it has a finish!

Here's the end piece of the two pieces. Not to wild about texture of that end piece. Fortunately enough I got about 11 feet worth of koa to work with!

Had to cut off some of it which will make up the sides of the guitar. At this angle, the colors are ultra rich, but could be just my iPhone's camera! Very perty wood!

Needless to say these pics really don't do the wood much justice, the camera on the iPhone leaves a lot to be desired and has a lot of problems with grain and boosting the greens too much. Almost every picture not shot outside pretty much has to have some color correction to get back to proper color. Even then there is only so much you can do. So at some point, I'll have to get a semi decent point and shoot digital cam to log the progress of my build. I'd like to get a Digital SLR like a Nikon D90, but at this point it wouldn't be fiscally responsible to make such a purchase, when there are other more important things to spend my money on. So for now something simple will have to suffice. Guess I'll have to do my homework on point and shoots.

Till next time,

Grego!

The guitar form

So its been a few days, works been a little busy, and i have been spending more time building than updating. But, nonetheless there are a few things that are new and exciting to talk about. The big one is the guitar form or mold, I has finished it! :-p

The guitar form is used in the assembly process of the box or body of the guitar. It maintains the shape of the body during the assembly of the guitar, when gluing the sides, top and back together. Using the templates I had, I traced out both the sides on Birch Plywood, I was trying to figure out how I was going to create a 2 inch offset line from the template. I remember watching a video on the Luthiers forum where someone used a 2 inch radius disk with a hole in the middle for the pencil to scribe out the width of the form. Unfortunately I didn't have this, and I wasn't exactly jonesin' to cut out a circle out of masonite either. But then the solution was staring me right in the face. I noticed that a CD looked like it was close to two inches between the inner diameter and the outer diameter. I pulled out my ruler, and sure enough, just a hair over two inches, that will work!! so using a old beat up CD I was able to trace a uniform thickness around my templates.

I managed to cut out the two masters where I took my time and patiently cut as accurate as I could on the scroll saw. Once completed, sanded, and matched to fit my templates, I could then trace out two other parts will make up the three part laminate for each side of the mold. The other two pieces were rougly cut, then glued to the master. The idea is, using a flush trim bit on my palm router, I could hog out the excess material up to the shape of the master leaving the exact same shape as the master. That way I don't have to cut the pre-glued billets of plywood to get my mold. I tried that already with six layers of MDF laminated together, and even though I was able to create the molds, they ended up not matching the template so they can't be used (lame). It ended up working really well, there was a slight learning curve with the palm router. That thing can kick if I'm not paying close attention to what i am doing. plus there was a few spots where I pulled it up at an odd angle and it cut a little nick in the final shape. Bugger! Least its nothing that will cause any problems with the shape of the guitar so I am not worried.

I didn't have to do too much sanding to clean up the final shape any. There still a few spots where I need to spot sand due to glue build up, but over all it turned out pretty well. I finished it up earlier this evening by adding the bolts to hold it all together. I picked up a 18-volt Ryobi Portable drill that I had my eye on for a while. Normally it went for 99.99 at Home D'Poe but they had it on sale for 49.99 so I couldn't pass that up. Bought the 5/16 x 3.5" bolts with a few fender washers, couple of lock washers, and wing nuts to finish up the mold.

Gluing up the laminated cutouts

Laminated side, ready for trimming

The triming process with my handy colt

Half way there, trimmed flush with the center

Other News, while I was working on this form, I also recieved my portable DC air compressor which I will be converting over to a vacuum pump to vac bag my back and sides. I found a really good site on vacuum bagging veneers and a lot of DIY write ups on bagging systems. very informative and a lot of good ideas for how I am going to approach the vacuum process. I'll probably have a post on the pump in the next couple of days or so.

Also, I finally ordered my veneers from I should be recieving my shipment on Monday. I settled on Koa for the backs and sides using Quarter Sawn Mahogany as the interior veneers. As far as the top goes I am still looking to use Redwood. While this is my very first guitar and I should stick to the traditional materials, I still like to experiment. From what I have read, redwood gives you all the good qualities for both Cedar and Spruce. Plus I like the look. I think my final decision whether I go with redwood, or spruce will fall upon when I get my veneers and see what the koa looks like. So far, thats pretty much been holding me up from buying the top wood as well as bindings and purflings, I want to make sure what ever materials I end up using will at least be aesthetically pleasing. But I did think that maybe I can use the excess peruvian walnut from my neck wood to resaw bindings. It has a real nice chocolaty color to it and I think it would look nice agianst the Koa and redwood. Plus it will tie in the neck better to the guitar. We'll see.

Anyways thats it for now, till next time.

Greg

The Dish!

Over the weekend, I managed to bang out the compound radius dish that I mentioned in my last post. I figure I'd share the fruits of my labor, with ya in the form of a few pics. Originally I had planned to put up more, but the pics I had taken, didn't seem all that great. Plus I am a little lazy right now and its a bit late. For that reason, I'll keep it simple for now and when I have the gumption to add more elaborate images. I'll do so.

So Finally I get to put to use the go bar deck I made (aside from being a table stand for my scroll saw). The construction of this dish is pretty straight forward. Its an oppostie form of what the sound board and back shapes are. That in consideration, instead of convex braces, concave radius braces that share the same radius as the braces that will be used in the guitar are used to form the shape of the dish. I used standard 23/32" sanded plywood as the brace material, and two 1/8" hardboard(masonite)cutouts to form the dish. I used my 3d skills to figure out a more accurate sloping transition from brace to brace using mesurments that I had made off the plans. So instead of using the standard 7' and 12' radiused braces as what was called for in the Selmer book, I figured out my radiuses by find a radius where points at the edge of the sound board where brace ends are located and a center point of the brace all reside on the radiuses circle. May sound confusing, and maybe I am a little exhausted to coherently explain it properly, but in math if your given 3 points in space, you can typically find a circle that will fit them, giing you your radius. Once I had those all figured out, I printed out cut-out guides and placed them on the plywood using contact cement. I also created a brace that runs down the center of the the dish, which also helps form the "pliage" of the soundboard. All the other braces would cross this brace to give the deck its compound curves. This is where the go-bars came into play. I used them to conform the hardboard to the curves of the braces. In the picture shown, is the final step of the gluing process where I am adding the second cutout of hardboard to reinforce the board that was glued to the braces. Also notice I came up with a nifty trick of using some of the left over plywood stock and created some cantilever style go bar that are pressing in the radiused cauls near the apex of the pliage. Its actually a pretty nifty clamping system and i might actually make some proper cantilever bars for other clamping jobs.

So here is the end result, its kinda hard to see the actual radius of the dish from this pic, so I'll take a few with a ruler so that you can see the arch that is created and how that arch changes over the length of the body of the guitar. Also I have my centerline and pliage line marked out on the face of the dish, so that when I go to use the dish for shaping braces or what not, I have a good idea where everything is placed withing the contours of the dish using the templates I made a while ago. I also made sure there was a bit of a lip on the dish so that there is a ledge for the guitar mould to rest on when doing jobs that require both.


Lastly here is a pic of the backside of the dish, here you can see what I mean't as far as the cross bracing to create the complex radius of this dish. If you notice the spacing of the cross braces, they aren't even. What I did was placed each brace where each brace on the sound board would be placed. that way I have extra support in that area when it comes time to glue the braces to the soundboard. I thought about adding additional braces to cover the back braces when I was designing this dish on the computer, but figured it would be overkill and with the braces that it already has should supply ample support. Anyhow thats it for now, gotta get me some sleep!