421 days ago
by kem |
3 comments »
The first step for the sides is to thickness the bookmatched sides. In the kit, these sides are about 4 mm thick. They need to be brought down to about 1.8 mm thick. We first used something called a Safe-T planer which is a drill press attachment that can remove material very quickly. Just like a regular thickness planer it creates a big mess quickly.
A drum sander was used to get down to final thickness.
Next we jointed one edge of the sides. This edge will be the edge wher...
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381 days ago
by kem |
8 comments »
The kit for this classical guitar came with a bookmatched pair of Engelmann spruce boards for the top. My pair has some beautiful silk in it that I hope will come out in the finish. After jointing the inner edges of the two boards and tapering the opposite edges. We used a wedge jig to glue up the top. The wedge applies the clamping pressure to the joint in the middle of the top.
I then used hand planes to surface the outside of the top.
The next step is installing the rosette t...
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448 days ago
by kem |
2 comments »
The first step in making the neck blank is to make a scarf joint. This creates the tilt back headstock. I laid out and cut a 15 degree cut on the neck stock with the bandsaw.
After cleaning up both sides of the scarf joint with a jack plane, I glued the joint together. You can see the short piece from the cut is flipped over and glued to the back side of the neck stock to create the angled headstock. The long piece should overhang the shorter piece a little bit.
I made a little ...
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448 days ago
by kem |
3 comments »
I have started taking a classical guitar construction class at Red Rocks Community College in Lakewood, CO. I’ll be blogging about it here as my journal through the process.
The kit that we are using is the KLC guitar kit from Luthiers Mercantile International . The kit has all the wood and hardware for building a classical guitar. It also comes with a DVD – “Build a Classical Guitar with Robert O’Brien”. Robbie is the teacher of our class. He teaches several...
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379 days ago
by kem |
1 comment »
In this part of the series, we’ll look at making and installing the back braces, making the back, and prepping the sides for the big glue-up.
In this guitar, I put in four back braces. These braces were made from 7×15 mm strips of Spanish cedar ripped on a bandsaw. The braces were given a rounded profile on the side facing up when you look through the sound hole.
After cutting the braces to length, the ends of each brace on the rounded side were chiseled flat. This would ...
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421 days ago
by kem |
1 comment »
The next step in the construction of the neck blank is attaching a heel block.
In this guitar, we are using a Spanish heel to attach the neck to the body of the guitar. The Spanish heel uses two slots separated by about 11 mm in the sides of the heel block. The guitar sides will then be inserted in these slots. You can see the slot in the next photo, but this will become clearer when we attach the sides.
In roughing out the shape of the heel of the guitar, the first cut (done wi...
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