Following its final visit to the robo sander, the guitar body looked like this:
The next step is to prepare and attach the maple cap to the body. I jointed the edges, and glued and clamped the maple:
You can see here that the maple had warped along it's length - whilst the two ends of the joint were flat across the surface, the middle had a protruding edge. This needs to be dealt with before it can be attached to the rest of the body:
I only needed to get one side of the wood flat - the side that will attach to the mahogany. The other side will be subjected to the top carve, so there's no point in making sure it's absolutely flat / parallel to the bottom. I attacked the surface with planes, scrapers and a sanding beam. In the end, the surface was quite significantly uneven, and the quickest way to flatten it was using the router:
This was done with great care. It would have been safer to have done it by hand which was a major consideration giving the haunting cost of this piece of maple :) However, the uneven grain of the maple made for frequent tear outs, and the lack of space in my workshop made this particular operation annoyingly cramped.
Once done, the surface was fairly flat, I finished it off with a sanding beam. Covering the surface in pencil lines before sanding allows one to see where the low spots are:
Where the pencil remains is a low spot, so more sanding is required:
Eventually, I got it flat. Maple is much harder to work with than mahogany :(
I can now locate the cap into its place on the mahogany. Given that both the mahogany and the maple have a centre line where they were joined, it's easy to line them up using that. It's also useful to get some screws into the pickup routs for gluing, as they'll be able to provide clamping pressure in the middle of the body. The screws holes don't matter in this part of the guitar, as that area will be excavated for the pickups.
I already had a pair of screw holes in the mahogany which I'd used for the router template; to locate these into the maple, I put a couple of small pins in the holes:
Then put the maple cap in place before pushing it down. The pins left little divots:
Which I could use to drill out the maple. These screws will be used shortly, when we glue the body.
Before gluing the top to the mahogany, there's one job left, which is to shield the channel between the pickup switch and the control cavity. There's no way to get at this once the top is glued in, so it has to be done now.
I like to use copper tape rather than conductive paint, just for the colour and effect in the cavities - I like to think of it as a little surprise for anyone working on the guitar in the future :). I lined the back of the maple:
Using the position of the mahogany cavities to check it was lined up correctly:
And also lined the cavity in the mahogany:
Close up. It took more than one piece of tape to cover the width of the channel:
So I had to drop little solder blobs on the tape to keep the Faraday effect working. These look really messy, but no-one will ever see them :) :
One last look at the separate pieces before they're glued:
And a note of the date and serial number in the guitar:
And the blank is glued:
I made sure to check that there were no glue runs in the internal cavities. Were any glue to harden, then drop off or get dislodged somehow, it would rattle around in there with no way of ever removing it.
In addition to the screws in the pickup routs, I also used a couple of clamps...
A few hours later...
I weighed it out of interest. Somewhat surprised to see that the maple cap has doubled the weight. Fortunately there's a lot of that that will be removed in the upcoming carving process.
Next step, will be to rough out the top carve...
No comments:
Post a Comment