I decided!

I finally decided on which guitar kit I would get… and we ordered it!! Yea!!

Almost getting to the point where I can start the building process.

I suppose the next logical thing would be to tell you which one I got, Mahogany or rosewood.

I ended up choosing rosewood. It was very hard to decide, I thought mahogany would be nice, but the main factor was that rosewood is a more durable wood.

So, we ordered it on Sunday which hopefully means that it shipped today :)

Guess I’ll have more when I get the box, first thing I’ll have to do is check to make sure everything is there.

A real Luthier

Well last Saturday 9/10/11 I went to a local Luthier Dr. Muiderman.  We got to look around his shop and ask some questions.

It was pretty cool, learned some good stuff. I learned another technique to put the back and top on the guitar so I might not even need all the spool-clamps that I made, haha. Other than that I learned how he does some of his stuff, and saw a ton of tools he made, which made me happy because I can make them : ) lol.

We also talked about the different woods, I’ve got two choices Mahogany and Rosewood.

I still haven’t decided what kind of wood yet so that will be my next post :P

Tools!

Before I can actually start building my guitar, I need to have some tools, one of them looked rather easy to make, so I got to work on them.

This tool is a spool-clamp, it is used to clamp the top and back of the guitar to the rim when gluing.

Well I started out with a piece of plywood, and a drill. I had to drill sixty of these little spools. Unfortunately I didn’t get any pictures of this, but this is what the wood looked like after drilling five of them out. After this I had to sand them down a bit, as they had some rough edges, there is my stack of sixty after getting them all cut out and sanded.

Now I had to drill larger holes in the center because the ones there were not big enough. Here I used a special drill bit to make in indentation in the wood so I wouldn’t miss drill the hole. Then used a regular drill bit and drilled out a larger hole. Since the drilling caused the wood to have some rough edges again I had to do a little bit of re-sanding.

I then applied glue to the spools to adhere a metal washer, this was so the screw wouldn’t notch the wood. Once this dried I could put two of the spools onto the screw attach a wing-nut and I had my spool-clamp.

I also put a piece of rubber tubing on the bolt so it also wont scratch the wood.

Here are the finished pieces!