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!