Acoustic Guitar Construction

It has been 2 years since I finshed my last guitar. That was #14. I thought my next project would be the archtop jazz guitar for which I have all the materials to build, but that got put on the back burner as I've been making duck calls....up to 163 of those.
It is now time to get back to guitars. This one will be for my son in law who lives in India. He has my #3 guitar finished in 2010, which he still plays daily. It is time for him to get another one.

It was fun getting down the stock form my shelves and putting the parts together.

This one will be a dred. Birdseye maple with a redwood top. Ebony headplate, fretboard and bridge. Indian rosewood binding. I am planning at this stage to do abalone purfling, at least the top, maybe the back too. There will be some type of abalone rosette and fret markers. Gold frets and gold tuners. The headstock inlay will be my first inlay of my last name, with MOP cut by De'Paule. I had 24 of these made a couple of years ago and so from this guitar forward, my headstocks will be adorned this way instead of the large wooded brush script "S" that I have been using.
I have this Fishman under saddle pickup that I MAY use but not sure yet. I will have some type of pickup in it though for sure.

Most the materials are in the pictures except the bracing stock which I have but forgot to get down off the racks, pickguard, don't know what that will be yet, and that abalone purfling which is packed up in bubble wrap.

It will be fun to be building again. This one needs to be completed by next spring as my family will be visiting us then and he can take it home with him. This will be the 5th guitar to spend its life in India.

I will try and post pics as I move along.....it won't be anything new but you all may still enjoy the process. I know I will!

Kevin

I was able to get going on this guitar yesterday. I had to clear off my bench before I could get started and get organized, but it sure felt good to start this one.
It has been 2 years since I finished my last one.

So I was able to thickness the maple sides on my drum sander. This takes awhile because they started out at 3/16" thick and I took them down to .080", but it still works well.
I have a safety planer for the drill press for thinning them down, but maple can be kind of chippy so I didn't want to risk messing them up.

I have a template I made for the sides so I pre-shape them on the bandsaw before I bend, this gets the approximate profile for the back in the sides once they are in the mold. This saves much time later.

The side bending went perfectly. My bender has 3 x 150 watt lightbulbs in it that will heat up to over 300 degrees, but the blanket and controller I started using about 5 years ago work so well. The whole bending process once the sides are setting in the bender takes about 5 minutes from start to finish of the bend. I start bending the waist at about 220 and by the time the temp is up to 250 the waist is almost done. I leave a little bit to bend after I've done the lower bout so the side pulls down a bit tighter around that curve. By the time the heat is up to 270, both bouts are done. I let the side cook for only about 5 minutes, then cool it down. At 100 I took the sides out and clamped them in the mold.
No cracks, no scorching, near perfect bends. That is how its supposed to be right!

I got the redwood top plates jointed, but not glued up. The maple backs will be next after I hone up an iron on my 1910 Stanley #5. The iron just wasn't sharp enough to do the job on the maple.

That is probably all until this Saturday. Daytime temps here this week are going to be from 104 to 109 and my shop is not air conditioned. Yikes!!

So more later this week.

Kevin

Good to see you building a guitar again. With the purfling it sounds like it will be a fancy looking guitar. I will look forward to seeing it in progress.

Heey Kevin,
Nice to hear from you. Hot California brings back memories. Keep us informed.
Herman

Made a little progress this past Saturday. I got the sides trimmed to length, made the end and neck blocks and glued them in. The neck block was cut from the extra large mahogany neck heel block that will be used for the neck.
I radiused both sides in my double sided radius dish. 15' radius for the back, 30' for the top. You can see the saw dust on the radius dish which indicates when you have all surfaces sanded, this along with some chalk marking the edges insures a uniform edge

Then I glued in some reversed kerfing on the back of the sides.

This was the first time I've used reversed kerfing, and I was not impressed. The webbing was so thin the strips broke in multiple places no matter how carefully I handled it. I will probably not use this stuff again. Anyway, for the last few guitars I've used my own made kerfing so I think I'll go back to doing that on my future guitars

Next step will be to glue the kerfing on the top edge, and re-radius the top and back in the dish. This goes quickly as the mahogany sands very easliy.

Kevin, I've used reversed kerfing on four guitars (in other words, all of them so far) and I found that the stuff I got from Grizzly broke up in transit even before it got to me. Busted out of the box. Stuff I bought from RC Tonewoods had a thicker web and I've had no problems. I did use some of the Grizzly stuff, I laminated a reinforcement strip on top of the entire kerfing, reminiscent of binding, but inside. That worked for me. I enjoyed making rims with a lot of inherent stiffness.

Peter this kerfing came from LMI. Not knocking them, I love their stuff, but these strips are not very good. I will go back to the standard style.