Mark Riess's Blog (30)

Once I scribed the abalone diamonds, I removed them and, with bits donated by my dentist (!), chucked in my dremel, I hollowed out the cavities for them. Then I dropped a bit of superglue into the cavity and tapped the diamonds home using a wood tapping block. After the superglue dried, I sanded the fboard down flush.

I did the same with the plastic position markers for the side of the fingerboard.…

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Gluing the back to the sides/top assembly.

I made abalone shell diamonds to inlay on the fingerboard. Here they are laid out and temp cemented to scribe around prior to routing out the cavities for them.…

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Playing around with this demonstrated to me how a little change in one dimension effects a larger change in other dimensions. Newenglandluthiers.org has a webpage which helped me quantify the necessary adjustments. The previous post concludes with a photo showing the clearance at the bridge location of a straightedge placed on the centerline of the fingerboard. After adjusting the neck heel, this was the condition:

From 16/64 up to 29/64. Too… Continue

Okay, the neck: I started with a neck partially shaped I "inherited" from a friend who passed away. I think it was from a kit, because it has the cute bump under the headstock, the shaft pretty much shaved to shape, a groove for a truss rod and a tenon at the unshaped heel.

I glued on the headstock veneer, trimmed it down and laid out and bored the holes for the machine heads,

I decided after some reading and thinking, to saw off the tenon and pursue a bolt-on neck ala the older… Continue

I traced the outline of the top/sides assembly onto the dreadnought-shaped back I started with, and braced it with spruce strips. I'm using the Cumpiano book as a general guide, but also using wood from inventory, so inventory trumps book for this project when there is a conflict on size, species or other parameter.

I used a wet saw to mill the abalone, wearing a respirator and a fan while working outdoors when final-grinding it down on the… Continue

My side-bending set up is decidedly low-tech. I figured, the old guys managed to do it this way, it CAN be done, I'm gonna do it! Got a 2.5" pipe and a flange at Home Depot, threaded the pipe into the flange, sledge-hammered the open end ovally, slipped an old tin cup over the open end, clamped the flange edge in the vise, wired up the torch and flame on! Like I said earlier, the sides I'd come by had already been bent to a dreadnought pattern, so I had to unbend and rebend 'em to fit my mold… Continue

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So the rosette came out well, and I turned my attention to cutting out the circular trough for it to sit in. I don't have a decent drill press or a 'fly-cutter' whatever....What I do have is a drywall circle cutter that I modified and used to successfully cut the channel. There's room for improvement, but it sufficiently filled the gap for now. The mistake I made, however, was using epoxy to glue the rosette into the channel. I should've used AR. The… Continue

I've started my first guitar. Actually, I started it over thirty odd years ago, but for one reason or another, I set it aside for a moment to accomplish some other things. Now, the time and opportunity have coalesced to bring this project farther along. I long ago and at various times have collected an assortment of woods, tools and know-how. The spruce top I joined first, back in the seventies. Some other parts came from a second-hand kit I picked up along the way, abandoned by it's first… Continue