Tailpiece

An archtop features a tailpiece where the strings will be attached to. The guitars which stand model for my guitar have a rather unusual design and are not of the shelf available. I will try to build one of my own (with a lot of help of my father who is quite good in small metal work since he builds miniature steam machines as a hobby). I made a drawing of the tailpiece which you see below next to its example:


























I will fabricate it most likely out of brass or copper. I like copper the most because of its color but I am afraid that it is not hard enough. So it will probably be brass.

Shaping

I did some more shaping. It's all in the details. The sides of the body needed some more fine-tuning. With a little hand plane I removed small layers until I got to the right height of the body. Next up was the top. In order to get the outline on the top I clamped the body on to the top on a table. The symmetry was brought in by forcing the waist inwards with a glue clamp:

Now the outline of the body can be transffered to the body with a pencil. With an electric fretsaw the top was cut to its rough shape (with about a centimeter tolerance). The top is about 5 mm thick. It should be brought back to somewhere between 2 and 3 mm. With a hand plane I planed off a good 2 mm. Hence the pile of wood shavings:

And last but not least all the kerflings are glued in and as you can see I also drawn out where the sound port should come:

Kerflings

Yesterday evening and today I concentrated on the kerflings. They have to be glued in for extra support and give the top and back a larger surface to be glued on. There are lots of tools that guitar builder use as glue clamp. From clothespins (reinforced with rubber bands) to normal glue clamps. From a blog of another guitar builder I got the idea of paper clamps:

One side finished:

And to finish. I placed the body on a dresser, away from little hands. After that, my wife lighted the candles and we had diner. During diner my son pointed me to the follwing scene:

Mending

Mending was the keyword this weekend. And since it was a bit cold in our shed I used our dining table as workbench. As mentioned before I had some cracks in the sides of the body. Before I can start with gluing the kerflings in I first have to mend these cracks. The first step is filling the cracks with glue:

With a small iron thread I tried to get the glue as deep as possible in the crack. Then press the crack down firmly with some left over wood and glue clamps. Baking paper prevents the wood and clamps from sticking to the body:

There are still ridges that need to be sanded but the result is pretty good:

Loosing height

The first snow of this winter has fallen which gave me problems to get to Bemmel (from Woerden) last Monday. So with only 1,5 hours left I could not do as much as I wanted. I hoped to cut the body to its correct height and get the kerflings in place. But I did not have the time for the kerlings.

I had to draw out a line on the body where to cut off the sides. I used a mold which I brought to height with metal blocks:

 

Because it is hard to keep track of a thin pencil line when you are sawing, I used tape to accentuate it:

With a backsaw I removed the excess material away. To get better hold of the body I used a piece of wood to hang the body to. This gives you a surface to be able to apply enough pressure to the saw:

 

The end result:

 

The next steps will be: Glue down the cracks which are still there. After that I can glue in the kerflings.