#1-FoRealzies
FoRealizies | All this warm weather - in February, in Memphis - is affording a lot of good work time. This weekend I got out to do a few odds and ends and start working on the guitar fo real.
I planed down my neck blank - a solid piece of mahogany, 35 x 3 x 7/8 "- to get it flat and square. Then I decided to go ahead and thickness my sides and if I had enough time, bend them and set them in the form.
To do the rough thickness, I decided to use a safety planer I got from Stewart MacDonald.
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This cutter/planer attaches to a drill press and then you can raise or lower the deck to plane down to the thickness you need. This is a nerve-racking operation because the sides of the guitar are the thinnest part of the body at just 1.9-2.1 mm (about .o79 inches!) The side pieces came from the supplier at 4mm so about half their thickness had to be taken off. I was so nervous about this whole operation, I forgot to take pictures of it. I will use the same process for the back so I will show it there.
The safety planer saves a ton of work and elbow grease but it makes an enormous mess. I thicknessed the sides down to about 2.5mm then finished to the final dimensions with my hand planes and scraper.
I then bent the sides with my redneck heating iron (as my daughter Hannah called it) then attached them in the form.
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No more practice on that part, finally making a guitar fo real. After I attached the guitar to the form, I sprayed it lightly with water, then used my heating gun to warm the damp sides up to see if they would set and retain their shape better in the form. This morning I checked and it looks like the sides are holding their shape very well.
* First big mess up: While I was bending the sides I didn't notice that the control to my heating element (I reworked my heating iron to use a cheap electric charcoal starter and a variable speed router control) accidentally got bumped to the highest setting and I burned the bling-blang out of the inside bottom of my upper bout. I think most of it will sand out. But this is a first time and I am not too worried about it. I am not expecting perfection on this one and know that I will have more mishaps. I think this is all a practical application of C. S. Lewis' quote: