Wood for the Archtop belly

UPS delivered my wood for the Archtop belly yesterday. Curly Redwood. It felt very light. I mean it felt really light. I measured it, and weighed it. My senses were right, the wood is .36 SG. That's pretty light by any measure. Cool.



I trimmed the width off to 8 1/2" and then took the piece left over, and turned it into 2 braces. The cut was out of square some. I was hoping for that. It measured 1 5/8" thick, and I wanted to have about an inch in the middle to work with. So the first step was to cut it parallel to the grain. Then I planed the surface, and cut again, aiming for 9 mm width. The one is 9, the other is 8-10. Oh well. I noticed that the even one is a fourth higher in tap tone than the other. I'll put it on the treble side.



The wood is very lustrous when planed, and the quartered ends are very silky. It should look good when done.



I carefully marked out the splitting cut, even marking a 3mm kerf on every surface. I found a foolproof, (I think) way to cut thick pieces of wood out. I used to clamp them, and saw down from the end, but now I just do that to get the saw orientation right, and then I put it in the vise, flat on the bench, and saw it that way. I cut some on one side of the bench, and then go on the other side and work on that side of the line. I forgot to take a picture of that.



Let's say you go 1" on one side, then you go on the other side and saw until it is even and then go 1" more on that side. It works good. Maybe 15 minutes to cut out a 23 X 8 1/2" piece. I used my 11" ryoba saw that has 3 teeth every 2cm on the rip side. The cut wood, and chips smell like the Paperwhites that are flowering on the dining room table. Somewhat similar to Port Orford Cedar.



I found that one side taps about a third or so higher than the other. They are cut very evenly. 1" in the middle, and 1/2" on the edge; so it isn't a size thing. I might as well make the high side the treble side. So I guess that they will be glued up just like I have them pictured here. I'll make a cutout, and see where it might look the best vertically. It's about 3" long, so there is some choice there.

An Archtop?

I haven't posted on this blog in a long time. But I have things finishing up, and a new project.

I have a lot of things going on. I have a violin that is determined to not want varnish on it. I will strip it for the second time, and bring it under submission. I have a Gofriller violin that seems like it will be my best so far. It is almost ready for varnish. I think that I will varnish them together.




The newest idea is to make an Archtop guitar for myself. I saw an outstanding one on a site of an excellent maker in Chicago. He calls it his Amati. Cool. Yes it is:

http://koentoppguitars.com/blog/the-hog-amati/

I have a big slab of European sycamore that I bought for a cello back. It is big enough to get an Archtop out of the top half. The top is maybe 16.5" where the widest part of the lower bout would be, made a little wider, but the bark is there on one side cutting the width down. I'll probably do it bark side down, so I drew it out about 16" wide. That will have to do.



There's nothing quite like using a camera with no flash on gloomy days inside the house.

I have a piece of old curly redwood coming from Orcas Island Tonewood. It looks cool. I should be able to cut a couple of bass bars, well, diagonal (they call them parallel?) braces out of it, and get the height out of it by careful sawing on an angle. The "Hog" has X bracing, but I am going to carve it from the inside with X arches, so the stiffness there will be built in. I hope. The so call parallel braces are supposed to make a crisp, clear sound. A sound clip of one of Dan's Chicagoans being played that has parallel bracing sounds almost harp-like. I would call that crisp and clear.



http://koentoppguitars.com/blog/shop-concert-with-nate-wilkinson/


I have a cool piece of curly Bubinga for a fingerboard. I'm thinking of playing on the darkness of that; and the fact that I don't have a piece of wood big enough for a solid neck; to make a laminate neck. The outsides will be from the top half of a Birdseye piece I have. It was discounted because a third of the top is funky. But I should be able to cut out 2 neck sides, and a faceplate out of it. I should have, or be able to find some dark wood to use for the middle.



The tag on the wood says 06/15/11. It should be stable by now!

I just finished making a convex bottom hogging plane made around the Lie Nielsen Scub plane blade. It worked well on a test piece, we'll have to see what it does on the real stuff. It looks good though.



Everything should be pretty straightforward except:

Truss rods. It's a new animal for me. I'm thinking that I will use a 14.5" 'hot rod' double action truss rod. Adjustment under the nut. That should put the other end just before where the fingerboard extension will be dovetailed in.

That brings up the only other part I can think of now that is a puzzle(I'm sure more will come up). It seems like the fingerboard extension gets glued right on to the upper block besides into the neck. Is that the case? It seems like that would transmit a tremendous amount of sound that way.

I looked into scale length and string tension. It seems that .001 up in string diameter makes 3 times or more difference in tension than .5" of scale length does. When you read about it, people seem to think that scale makes such a difference. If it does, I don't think that it is from tension. Maybe the D'Addario formula I was using was printed wrong. I have that each .25" of scale changed the tension 1%, but .001" of string diameter changed it 8%. I haven't settled on that yet. 27" baritone? Now that would be different.