The past two weeks have been hectic. I'm doing LOTS of stuff but not making much progress in any of them.
At last weeks guitar building I was able to get my mold glued up. It's 6 layers of 3/4 inch particle board; and about 900 pounds. Next week I will cut out most of the insides and it'll be ready for side bending.
Also, I ran the top through the giant drum sander to get it down to about .100 of an inch. After each pass through the sander you check the boards with a digital caliper and give the machine a 1/4 crank and shove it through again. After 10 or 12 passes, its ready for the next step. Cutting out the rough body shape and doing the rosette. More on that later...
I'll get some photos up when I can.
Playing wise, it's been hard to sit down and practice. Too many other shiny things have caught my eye. Stuff like going to see my guitar teacher's band play, re-roofing the garage and fixing Joels' quad, but I digress.
I'm currently working on two different and challenging pieces. One a manouche piece called Valse a Django and Asturius or Leyenda by Albeniz. Asturias is a great classical piece that is all overt the neck and has some wild parts, making me concentrate on finger and arm positioning. Because you have to hold these chord-like positions, moving fingers around but staying in position it's painful. My fingering is getting better as a result, at least my left hand. I need to tighten up my right hand now. The picking has pedal tones, played on 1 string, then 2 strings then 3. It's a good division of attention exercise. Fun stuff.
2 comments:
looking forward to seeing the pictures. I knew a gentleman from my skating years that custom made guitars.
The top you had to thin out, this would be the part that wraps around the outside edge?
So is this built kinda the way a Les Paul would be?
As opposed to your old Fender that was a fairly solid chunk-o-wood.
Mine is an acoustic guitar. That has much more architecture than a solid body (although I would love to build one of those too). The top is also called the sound board. If you look at a guitar body like a drum, the top is the drum head. It vibrates like a drum head does and creates the sound from the buzzing strings.
The part that wraps around the edge is the "banding". It's used to protect the edges. I'm going to use Ebony for mine. I may need to thing it down too as it's rather hard to bend...
Les Pauls are solid mahogany with a piece of carved maple on top. Heavy. They too have a glued-in or "set" neck like accoustics. Fender goes with simpler bolt-on necks.
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