Last Day

Today I spent the day helping Tom sell wood to a guy from australia who is visiting the states. He is a tonewood dealer and luthier and is interested in red spruce. We sold him a thousand dollars in goods, and he wants more in the future. This was a really successful day! Here, as promised are pictures of chladni (free-plate tuning) patterns.

Day 12

Today was mostly spent cleaning up the shop from its use all week, and getting it ready for tomorrow. Tomorrow an Australian tonewood dealer is coming to the shop to check out some spruce to potentially buy and re-sell in Australia. It is kinda a big deal, and the shop was in pretty rough shape. We got everything looking pretty good and then we moved on the Brazilian Rosewood. We have had a pile of Brazilian Rosewood to match, grade, and store all project, and we finally put it all on shelves in "books" which is our new inventory system.

Weekly Reflection #2

This week has been very packed. We worked for 56 hours over 6 days (from sunday to friday). Last week was mostly design and inventory, but this week was very different. We did do a lot of design, but it was finalizing, and setting up to build the tops. We spent a lot of time building things, too. We built a go- bar deck, a set of shelves, and two guitar tops. We visited Al Carruth and tuned our tops using his lab set up, visited a luthier's guild meeting, and looked at a violin maker's shop. I am amazed at the amount we got done. As I said before, a project like this really should be over a couple of months instead of weeks. This week has been packed with science and math as well. I have always liked science, but hated math. It is really helpful to see all the applications for the math we have to learn. This week has had so much science, my head hurts, but it is all really interesting. Over the last two days we will focus on tonewood. More inventory and processing.

Saturday

What a long, productive week! I am amazed at how much we got done! (in a mere 56 hours) So I didn't work today, but I did skateboard a lot, hang out at the local coffee shop, and talk guitars and tonewood to a lot of people. In the evening, we went to the school musical;Bye Bye Birdie. It was amazing. Matt, you are very talented, and did a wonderful job, as did Zada, Canon, Will, Caleigh, Jessy, and EVERYONE else. I was very, very impressed. What a solid, well done production. Great job, guys!

PS. I will finish posting the story of the trip as soon as i get the pictures.

Day 11

Wow! What a day! We went down to Al Caruth's in Newport, New Hampshire (not New Market). Is is a mad scientist of luthiery, and we learned how to tune plates. Tuning plates is a way to see waves in a top that was developed by violin makers, specifically Carleen Hutchins who lived in Wolfeboro, NH until she died last year. HERE is a link to her wikipedia page. Al worked for her tuning plates and building violins, and has applied this to guitars. He shared his knowledge with us. I have to get the pictures from the day, and then I will make a complete blog post. After we left his shop, around 7:30 or 8, we went to a luthier's shop in Etna. It was an old gentleman who was selling his shop. We took a complete tour of his shop, and looked at all of his tools and specified which would be useful to build guitars (he was a violin builder). After that we went back to the shop briefly to put everything back and sign my time sheet so i can fax it today. So there you have it- I got to the shop at 7:30 and left the shop at 11:30. Yeah, 16 hours! And I thought yesterday was long. Be expecting a more complete post soon.

Day 10

Today was a looong day! We spent 12 hours bracing up the soundboards. First we started off by cleaning up the glue joints, which although usually a simple task, one of the joints had failed, so we had to re-glue the top. Next, we cut the braces out of brace stock. Brace stock has to be cut very quartersawn for strength and sound. Next, each brace had to be sanded, planed, and shaped in general to fit the contours of the workboard. This was a very tedious process, and I sanded through the skin on both thumbs and had to repair them with superglue (which was the reason superglue was developed apparently). I shaped all the braces while Tom was working on the tops and other things. Then using the go-bar setup, we glued in all the braces. Then we shaped the braces with planes, chisels, and spokeshaves. By that time It was 8:00. Here are some pictures

Heres the glue pot. It is a jar of hide glue in water that is kept at around 140 degrees. It can be a pain because it comes in flakes and you have to mix it with water, then heat it up, and it will go bad after a day or so.

Here are the tops after they were glued. We braced the bottom two. The three in this picture (from top left to right) are white spruce, white pine, and red spruce. This pine is not your normal white pine. It is old growth from michigan. It has beautiful, tight growth rings, and sounds very similar to spruce to the ear. I'll be interested to see how it stacks up in the experiments tomorrow.

Here are the braces I sanded and planed to fit to the workboard. The result was holes in both my thumbs.

Here are the braces laid on the top in the pattern we designed

Here are the go-bars in action. I am cutting the angle in one of the braces to fit it on the top. As you can tell by the previous picture, you can't just throw the braces on the top. They have to be angles, and notched so they can cross and fit together.

After glueing, we shaped the braces. Using chisels, planes, etc. we tapered the ends of the braces, and shaved down the corners. This is just a rough shaping, there is quite a bit left as part of the experiment tomorrow at Al Caruth's.

We ended up with two of these. Pretty good for a day's work. The tops are really thin to make up for the amount of bracing. We decided to really go nuts with bracing, so we will shave them way down.

our top is really thin. The hole in the middle is where the soundhole will be.

voila!

Day 9

Today was a strange day. It started off assuming my baseball game would be cancelled and that we would have plenty of time. We were glueing up tops when I figured out my game wasn't going to be cancelled after all. Tom finished glueing up the tops and we will brace tomorrow. At a grand total of 3 hours today it is good i worked 11 hours yesterday so that averages out to two 7 hour days.