Phew it's been a hot one today! Not happy I have a blister on my thumb! How you ask? I'll tell you how :roflmao:
Started off routing a shoulder at the level of the top of the binding to give myself a clean edge to work to while shaping the tops, yes shaping at last WOOHOO!! After that I drew a rough contour map of the general curves I expected to get, after that well it was shaping time. I used a thing called an Arbourtech, a rather nasty carving attachment that fits onto a grinder, this is a method I do not recommend, it can reduce your guitar body to firewood in less time than it takes to blink. So why am I using one, I've had a lot of practice with it but even then it's a worrying procedure.
After rough carving I used some small thumb planes (blister!!
) to just get it somewhere like a shape at the back, the front couldn't be done until the angle for the neck/fretboard had been cut. For that I just made a jig, basically a sloping bit of MDF at 4.5 degrees with a hole in it to access the top of the body. There was some spare wood the jig didn't reach so I whipped those off with a drawknife, a bit like a massive spokeshave then took a bench plane to flatten it. Finally I took the thumb planes and some tiny spokeshaves and tuned the shape to something that looked right, it's sort of an intuitive process, try it you'll see. After that I was tired so I still need to tune the shape on the second body but I'm happy with the first, that just needs the neck fitting and sorting any snags before sanding etc.
Oh and I also checked the neck blanks for any movement, admittedly they are still blanks and any movement would be unlikely but if there is any movement at this stage then the blank is firewood. There was none but some of you may be interested to know how I checked. To see if there is any twist on a narrow board you used a gadget called a pair of winding sticks, these are basically two parallel wooden straight edges with two inlays on each one with a pair of black (Ebony) and one with a pair of white (in my case Ivory veneers from a piano), as luck would have it I couldn't find them so I used a pair of 12" rules one balanced at either end from which you can sight down to see any twist (wind) exaggerated by the length of the winding sticks. Handy thing to know
