More on building the Parlor Guitar

After joining and gluing the Australian Cedar halves together for the back and top I then cut out the shape of the guitar using a Coping Saw. I had made a 3mm-thick MDF template of the shape I intended. I didn't follow the shape on the plan slavishly but came up with a shape that was pleasing to my eye and didn't have too sharp a curve at the waist as I had had problems previously with Cedar buckling when bent to tight curves. I traced the shape onto the planed surface of the Cedar soundboard plate and began to cut the outline. I made my first mistake. I had previously drawn the outline of a different shape on the wood and accidentally began to follow the wrong line. I realized my mistake just in time. I redrew the shape onto the plate with a thick 2B pencil so that I wouldn't make the same error. Thankfully the plate was large enough that I could flip it around. However, the cut I had made encroached onto the soundboard a couple of millimetres, so I'm going to have to cover this mistake somehow later on. Having cut out the shape I set about hand planing the plate. This was the first time I had hand planed Australian Cedar and found I had a lot of difficulty. The iron would skate over the wood instead and digging in and when it did dig in the shavings would clog the mouth of the plane. I tried all my different planes and found the same problem. I also got a lot of tear-out. I tried sharpening the plane irons on my trusty antique oil stone and found it made little difference. I looked up online about planing Australian Cedar and read that "some difficulty may be encountered when planing interlocked grain". Very frustrating. I began to wonder if I would have to abandon trying to hand plane the soundboard to thickness and resort to a thickness planer. I decided to put the top and back aside and rethink the whole thing! I turned my attention to the Mahogany neck blank and began to plane it to square. The Mahogany planed easily so maybe it was the Cedar I was using that was the problem and not me? I'm thinking That I will probably machine plane the soundboard to thickness as I have access to such a device. More research required...

Becoming a part-time Luthier part 2

With the crude Jarrah guitar that I had in my hands all those years ago I felt an enormous sense of satisfaction from having made something that worked and sounded great with my own hands. I wanted more of it. I bought Denis Waring's book Making Wood Folk Instruments which described the making of a whole range of different musical instruments from very simple to relatively complex. I built a small Psaltery from scrap wood and guitar strings and then started to work on building a plywood Appalachian Dulcimer. I began to purchase the hand tools that the book said I needed. One of the first was a Kunz flat-soled spokeshave the same as this one:

I liked the way that the tool shaved off wood from the edges of my Dulcimer. I soon also realized how little I knew about woodwork. I read up on how to sharpen a chisel and how to use a handsaw and just about everything else I could get my hands on regarding wood and tool use. The learning curve was steep and I made lots of mistakes. For instance, i washed my nearly completed Dulcimer with water to remove sawdust only to have the glue joints let go. I didn't know that PVA glue and water don't go together. I'd not heard of Titebond at this stage. This was before the World Wide Web became popular and I had to rely on books and bits of advice from friends. If something went wrong (and it often did) I was on my own. There were no internet forums to consult, for instance. Friends complemented me on my work which was encouraging to me. I don't have any photos of these early instruments and I've lost track of what happened to them. I began to purchase more books on stringed musical instrument making. Being a guitar player I wanted to build instruments that I could play, so I stuck with strings. One of the books I purchased was Irving Sloane's Steel String Guitar Construction. I decided to have a go at building a full-size guitar. Via an ad in a woodworking magazine I learned that Gerard Gilet in Sydney sold tone-wood sets by mail-order and I completed an order of what I thought I would need. I remember getting a phone call from Gilet asking me questions about my order. I knew so little that I wasn't sure how to answer and tried to sound like I knew what I was saying! Anyway, the package arrived and it contained a beautiful Tasmanian Blackwood back and side set as well as a Spruce soundboard black. There were also odds and ends such as binding strips and machine heads and a piece of brace-stock. I thicknessed the top back and sides with a belt sander as that is all I had access to. I left the sides way too thick. I purchased a propane gas torch and made a found a piece of aluminum pipe to bend the sides. First time I tried bending I found I had trouble scorching the wood, the iron being way too hot. Nonetheless I bent the sides but couldn't get the curve of the two sides to match. For me, at this time, it was good enough. I sanded off the scorch marks. I followed Sloane' instructions for making the top and back and ended up with reasonable results. Not bad for a first try I thought. I made a neck from a piece of hardwood and fitted it to the guitar according to Sloane's method. I then accidentally knocked the unfinished guitar over and the head-stock that I had carefully fashioned with a chisel snapped off!! I was devastated! What to do! More soon...

Building a Parlor guitar part 2

I kept sawing the board. When i had finished sawing I glued the three pieces together to make a quarter sawed blank.