Octatonic's guitar buildery thread

octatonic

The rest of the week was sorting out the body & getting it ready for the kerfed lining.
It turned out all right.

Also running an experiment to verify or disprove a bit of internet law.
I've read a bunch of reports about how baking various woods 'increases their stability'.
Wanted to try it with maple but I didn't have any to hand.
Tried it with beech and tulipwood.

I took two pieces (dowels are 30mm x 30mm x 30mm) of each, one straight off the bandsaw and two that had been baked in a special oven over the summer.

All 4 pieces are measured quite precisely using a micrometer and then put into a very humid environment (a glass case in the wood science lab that has 95% relative humidity) for a week.

I'm fairly suspect about the conventional wisdom of how baked woods are 'more stable' and what I expect to happen is that the dowel pieces will all expand by a similar amount.
If the baked wood expands by less than the unbaked wood then it would support the conventional wisdom.

Wood expands tangentially more than radially, and hardly at all longitudinally, so I expect the most expansion to be along that axis.

Drew_TNBD

I'll glue your end block in!! (penis)

octatonic

Drew_fx said:

I'll glue your end block in!! (penis)

Brilliant.

Thanks for the clarification.

octatonic

Today was spent glueing in the kerfed lining which I obtained from a UK luthier supplies place.

Don't like what I received but I need to crack on with the build so in it goes.

Next time I'll go with LMI I think.

I was able to bend it in place without needing to wet or heat the wood.

A couple of pieces broke, but I ended up with two pieces that didn't.

I had a problem with one piece not conforming to the side, so I had to cut it and then use clamps to hold it in place.

https://scontent-b-lhr.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-prn1/548446_418905514905902_1593726619_n.jpg

ThePrettyDamned

This is, just so you know, my favourite thread.

octatonic

ThePrettyDamned said:

This is, just so you know, my favourite thread.

Thanks mate.

octatonic

A couple of thoughts and a question for you all.

We have 17 students on this year of the degree (Year 2).

Today we had 9 students in the workshop.

2 were sick but the others were just not in.

This is reasonably typical of attendance.

I don't really get it.

We are all spending a lot of money to be on this degree- it is £7k a year plus tools etc.

I can't afford to spend that sort of money and not turn up.

We have 16 hours of scheduled classes and one full day and 3 half days of 'free time' where we can get access to the workshop to work on stuff. 

We are expected to do it to finish the guitar.

A few people (including myself) go in as often as possible- pretty much all the free classes and all the scheduled classes.

If people were in my position- spending that sort of coin on a degree, how often would you be in?

WezV

every single minute... not sure i will ever have that much time to designate to guitars though

randomhandclaps

I have never understood that and like you I would use every opportunity.  I can only assume that to the others £7K isn't that big a deal.  Either that or it's being paid for by some JSA type scheme.

octatonic

I think most people have loans- so the idea of lying it back hasn't hit home just yet.

ThePrettyDamned

Every minute I could.

When I studied chemistry, at 3k a year, I worked out how much each lecture cost and they ain't cheap! Chemistry is VERY intense, lectures every day for most of the day and lab when there were none, but it was daft to miss any, even though this offered better value.  So, lectures were attended, even when hanging like a twat. 

My house mate studied English Lit, and he worked out that, with just 4 hours of contact time per week in the third year, he was paying hundreds per hour! Weird thing was, he'd still miss the odd lecture... Seriously! 

Get the best value you can mate.

ToneControl

octatonic said:

I think most people have loans- so the idea of lying it back hasn't hit home just yet.

Many people don't ever pay them back, especially those who lose interest once they get to uni anyway, and drop out, in any case you need to earn quite a bit to start paying them back, and when you're 18, it probably sounds like a debt to be paid in 100 years time. Mind you, possibly even more students lost interest when the fees were "free"

I'm guessing that the percentage of very serious students who are all about careers (and find concentrating on studies easy) will be higher in accountancy or computer science, etc. rather than in a more interesting (to us) niche subject. My guess is - it will be the party animals who are not always turning up (as I did myself, but it was a maths degree, so no worries about missing lab work, so I still succeeded)

When I worked in unis the mature students were most often the ones deadly serious about getting the most out of it. I always observed and realised that once you'd had a real job for a few years, and then went to uni, you wanted to do everything "100% properly", not "70% properly" like schools train people to do.

octatonic

So this week was gluing in the kerfed lining and then fixing the problems with that.

The linings I got were not great and needed to be significant worked on to get glued in.

Even then they weren't flexy enough.

I had to do a couple of dodgy things to fix it- cedar dust and titebond in one area and a veneer and animal glue in another.

https://fbcdn-sphotos-b-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash3/1415266_421661691296951_504474875_o.jpg

https://fbcdn-sphotos-c-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-frc1/902305_421661727963614_1386164454_o.jpg

It hasn't turned out TOO bad in the end.

Learned a lot though.

octatonic

Today was spent making the end block veneer.

Going for a simple art-deco inspired design of a wedge of ebony with B/W/B/W knife cut veneer.

Took ages to thickness the ebony but it should be good when done.

I cut with a marking knife, then sawed, then chiselled the channel.

Will trim it tomorrow.

https://fbcdn-sphotos-e-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-prn2/q86/s720x720/1457586_422071111256009_960652521_n.jpg

https://fbcdn-sphotos-a-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-prn1/q72/s720x720/1012774_422071361255984_1130429073_n.jpg

octatonic

It didn't work.

I have to rip it out and do it again.

Whilst doing that I slipped with the chisel and cut my hand, right across the knuckle of my left hand middle finger.

Quite deep and a difficult place to heal so I had to glue it and bandage it.

No workshop for me for a couple of days.

Bollocks.

ThePrettyDamned

I'm still loving this thread, keep it up man. I'd seriously consider a luthiery course purely because of this. It's great.

octatonic

Thanks mate- yesterday was a difficult, frustrating day. Still, better than any day I had in an office job.

Kebabkid

Looking good J and sorry about the hand (ouch)!

Thanks for the updates and as ThePrettyDamned said, it's inspiring.

octatonic

Been a bit quiet with the updates but I was healing and then working on fixing the problem I created with my end graft.

First I chiselled out the ruined ebony graft and then used my teeny tiny Veritas plane to get it flat.

https://scontent-b-ams.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash4/524729_425867574209696_254668851_n.jpg

I then painstakingly chiselled out a new line for the graft and made a new ebony veneer with a single black and white veneer.

It took me the entire week and I was extremely frustrated at times but it turned out pretty damn good.

I learned a whole lot- and mostly what I took away was do not rush anything and when you think 'that'll do' you are making a mistake.

It will never do- you have to be exacting and rigorous in your attention to detail or you will hate the results.

Anyway, here are the results- it isn't perfect but I absolutely know it is as good as I possibly can make it at this point in my guitar building career.

https://scontent-b-ams.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-frc1/580827_425867660876354_474560198_n.jpg

In terms of workshop time, including all the errors etc this was about 30 hours worth of work.

Removing all of the mistakes and fixing those mistakes we are looking at about 8 hours.

Them's the breaks.

randomhandclaps

Really liking the ebony in there.