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 be the side glued down onto the kerfing.

The back of this guitar will be slightly rounded to a 15’ radius. So before installing the back braces, the kerfing on the sides were radiused using a 15’ radius sanding dish.

In this photo, you can also see that I have already leveled the kerfing on the top with the sides and notched the kerfing to receive the cross braces on the top. This was a painstaking process because you want the top of the sides to be dead flat when you glue on the top. It involved many iterations of flipping the guitar upside down on a dead flat surface, looking for gaps, flipping the guitar back right side up, and shaving material off to reduce the gaps. Occasionally, I would break off a piece of the kerfing and have to glue it back in and wait for the glue to dry.

With the back kerfing properly radiused, I notched the kerfing with chisels to receive the back braces.

The first brace was placed at the waist and then one brace was placed to roughly divide the upper bout in half. The last two braces were placed to divide the lower bout into thirds.

I chose to place the braces so that the notches fell on full kerfs. This made the braces not perfectly parallel, but I figured I wouldn’t be able to see that anyway in the finished product. This picture is also nice because you can see what the inside of the guitar would look like with the back removed. Kinda neat!

The braces were glued in without any clamps, just placed in the notches. The braces now had to be properly radiused. A block plane was used to remove most of the material.

Then, the sanding dish was used to arrive at the final radius.

The back panel can be glued up in the same way as the top. The only wrinkle is the added center strip. We actually glued the panel up with a technique that involved eight hands, CA glue, accelerator, and frustration. I think I prefer the simple wedge jig and yellow glue.

My back was made from a bookmatched pair of East Indian Rosewood. This LMI kit came with some great looking wood!

The final piece of the back was the center strip which was glued in using the go-bar clamping system that we saw in the last post on the top.

After scraping and sanding the inside surface of the back, I laid out where the center strip had to be notched to receive the back braces, heel block and tail block.

Here is the back after notching these areas out with a chisel and scraper. The final step before gluing up is rough cutting the outline of the back slightly oversized on the band saw.

Next time, the big glue up!

I then used hand planes to surface the outside of the top.

The next step is installing the rosette to this outside surface. We used a Dremel and a circle cutting jig to make the channel for the rosette.

To glue the rosette into the channel, we used the go-bar clamping system. I didn’t get a picture of this but you’ll see plenty of examples of using this clamping system as you read on. I flushed up the rosette to the top using a block plane and cabinet scraper. You can see some of that sweet silk in this photo!

Using a drum sander, the top was thicknessed to 2.6 mm.

For the bracing pattern, I used the one included with the kit which is the pattern in Segovia’s Hauser guitar.

The first piece to be glued in is the bridge plate. I made a bit of a mistake here with the bridge plate. You can see it doesn’t really match the pattern above. That’s because I made it before consulting the pattern! Oops.

Here are all of the spruce braces after cutting them to size and roughly laying them out.

You can see some of the braces need to be notched to fit over the bridge plate. Robbie showed us a clever way of doing this using a bandsaw. Check out his youtube video.

Here is a picture of the first set of braces to get glued in with the go-bar clamping system. This system uses flexible rods bent between two decks to apply pressure.

The reason for gluing the braces in in steps is to give you room to shape the braces using small planes and chisels. Here is how I shaped the fan braces.

Here’s the final glue up of the remaining braces.

And here is the inside of the top after everything has been shaped. At this point, you can tap the top and hear a satisfying resonance that sounds like a tuned tom-tom.

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 where the top sits. The back edge of the sides has a slight taper from where the waist of the guitar will be to the neck. This taper gives a first approximation to the radius on the back of the guitar. It will be refined later using a radiusing dish.

It was now time to bend the sides. We used the following jig to bend the sides.

Each side was first wet with water and then wrapped in moist paper towels. This was then placed on the jig making sure the taper was facing the right way. A rubber heating blanket and flashing was placed over the side.

As the wood heated up, the side became more pliable and could be bent into the shape of the jig.

A tail block was made with a slight curve to match the form that was used for the guitar. The sides were glued on to this tail block.

Next the sides were glued into the Spanish heel making sure to keep the top edge of the sides flush with the top side of the end of the heel block. It only took a couple of drops of super glue on both the top and back side of the heel to hold this in place.

Here’s the assembly in the guitar form.

Next, I scraped and sanded the inside of the sides to remove the marks left by the drum sander.

After planing the top edge of the sides and tail block so that these lay completely flat, the back edge of the sides, tail block, and heel block were shaped to conform to a 15’ radius. This was done by both planing and using a radiusing dish. I didn’t get a picture of this step, but I’ll have another chance when we radius the back braces.

With both edges properly shaped, the kerfing was glued onto the sides. To hold the kerfing in place while the glue dried, homemade clamps made from clothespins and rubber bands were used.

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 with a bandsaw) is the curve shown above. The second cut with the bandsaw forms a ramp on the side of the heel.

At this point, I finished shaping the end of the heel block which will be inside the guitar. Then, I sealed the end grain with shellac.

In this picture, you can also see a wide rabbet on the end of the heel block. This is where the top will be glued onto the heel block.

Back to carving the heel, the third step is to put a curve into the ramp that was formed in the second cut above. This was done using chisels. I used a little template to help me make this slight curve the same on both sides of the neck.

The primary facet was then carved. I tried to make the facet look the same on both sides of the neck.

Secondary facets were then carved on both sides of the primary facet and from there it was a simple matter of smoothing everything out.

This was my first experience carving wood and it felt good being close to the wood with just a chisel. This mahogany was really nice to work with.

I’m done with the neck blank for now. I’ll finish carving the neck once the guitar body and fingerboard are attached.

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 mistake gluing this up with my caul on top overlapping the joint. I had to re-clamp after moving the caul back, so it didn’t end up glued to the neck blank.

The next step was to thickness plane the headstock and neck. The final headstock thickness should be about 22 mm. Since the two headstock veneers were about 4 mm thick. I had to make the neck blank 18 mm thick on the headstock end. This was done using a bandsaw and jack plane.

The scale length was then tapered from 17 mm on the nut end to 23 mm on the heel end. This was done by repeatedly making three passes on the jointer. The first pass going a third of the way down the neck, the second pass two-thirds of the length and the third pass full length. I made these three passes on the jointer three or four times to get down to the desired thickness.

Next the two veneers, a thin white and a thick rosewood veneer, were then glued onto the headstock.

Headstock template
For the shape of the headstock, I sketched a number of different designs. I cut out the final design and traced it on a piece of 3/8” MDF.

I used a bandsaw and oscillating spindle sander to cut out the outside of the template.

To cut the inside of the template, I taped another template on top of mine and used it to guide the interior cut.

The cut was made using a drill press and a special bit made by our teacher. The bit was made from a drill bit blank with an edge ground into it. The length of the edge is two times the diameter of the bit.

Taking small bites, the bit transferred the pattern onto my template.

The Headstock

Unfortunately, I think the old template moved a little bit so you can see the holes on my template don’t line up exactly. Anyway, the centerline of the template was then aligned with the center line of the neck blank. The template was positioned such that the nut end of the string holes would be 30 mm from the apex of the neck/headstock angle.

The outside shape of the headstock was then cut using the drill press and special bit.

Next, I used a drill guide to drill the holes for the tuners.

Here you can see the quality of the cut with the homemade bit. Not bad!

With the tuner holes drilled, it was back to the drill press to cut out the interior holes of the template.

Here’s the result with the tuners in place:

One other step here was to trim back the veneers that were glued on with a slight overhang over the scale length. This was trimmed by placing the neck on a spacer and using the table saw so the blade only cut the veneers. I went a tiny bit too far so you can see the slight groove (dado?) just below the veneers. I’ll have to sand the scale length down to get rid of that groove.

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 classes each semester and also offers private instruction. You can see and hear an example of building this kit on YouTube .

Here are some pictures of the wood that comes in the kit.

The bookmatched Indian rosewood sides and back.

The bookmatched Engelmann spruce top.

Bracewood, kerfing, etc.

Mahogany neck, ebony fingerboard, headstock veneers, etc.

All the wood looks (and smells) great! Not pictured above are the fretwire, tuners, guitar plans and dvd that also comes with the kit.

My next entry will look at building the neck blank and headstock.

For the face vise, I decided to use the Veritas twin screw. It’s about the same price as wooden screws and I liked the prospect of one-handed operation due to the chain drive. This vise requires two support blocks and a chop. Here are the finished pieces:

I made them out of hard maple laminations of 8/4 boards with 4/4 boards. The finished dimensions were 2.5×3.25×12.375 for the support blocks and 2.5×7.5×34 for the chop. I decided not to do the traditional roundover on the chop and fancy support blocks. I like the minimalistic look of these rectilinear blocks and chop.

Since the holes for the screws needed to be accurate, I used a brand new drill press and a 1.5” Forstner bit. I don’t know why I waited to buy a drill press! It was so much easier than boring that dog hole in the end vise with a brace and bit. I’m glad I got the press because as you can see in the photo above, these pieces required a lot of holes.

In the back of the support blocks, the nuts for the screws were mounted. I found out that the orientation of these nuts matters. If you’re not careful, your screw handles can be off by 90 degrees. But more on that later. The support blocks were attached to the bench using the bolts and round nuts shown below.

Using the brace and 3/8” auger bit, I bored the mounting holes through the workbench top.

On the top side, I counterbored with a 1” Forstner bit.

Here are the mounted support blocks:

Next, I lined up the chop and fully tightened the screws. The first time I did this one handle was pointing east-west and the other north-south. Argh! I decided to fix this by removing one of the nuts and rotating it 90 degrees. I don’t know why the instructions don’t say anything about this. It’s probably prudent to mount the nuts after checking the orientation with the screws fully engaged. After making this correction, the screw handles lined up correctly.

Next I attached the chain to the sprockets. My screws were 24” apart center-to-center so no links needed to be removed from the stock chain.

I added some wear strips to the underside of the bench to keep the front jaw from dropping too much as it gets extended.

After installing the chain cover, I found that the chain was dragging against the cover. So, I had to install one of the chain rollers included with the kit.

After installing that, the vise purred like a lovable little robot. To test out the vise I used it to cut some notches for the shelf that was to go in between the stretchers below. The shelf was just a piece of plywood 19.5×42.5. It fit easily between the twin screws!

I couldn’t do that with my crappy workmate! So cool. It was even cooler clamping the shelf horizontally.

The vise had no problem holding up that piece of plywood! What a grip! The one handed operation of this vise made it easy to hold up the plywood with one hand and crank the vise closed with the other. Sweet! I added the hold down below and finished cutting the notches.

Well, that was the last piece of the Holtzapffel puzzle.

I hope you all enjoyed watching me make my first workbench. I learned so much in building it and really enjoyed the experience. I’m ecstatic at how it turned out and how well it works for so many different tasks.

I have a coffee table I want to make in the remaining summer months before starting a guitar making class at Red Rocks. I look forward to blogging about that class in the fall. Stay tuned!

Since the last time, I flattened the top and applied some Danish oil to the bench. I also installed the end vise and have really enjoyed using it. Here’s a look at the bench while planing the chop for the end vise.

You can also see the slotted tool rack in the upper right from a design in woodworking magazine. This is really a sweet way of holding a bunch of tools. I also plan on adding a chisel shelf and a couple of display shelves for the planes (replacing the bookshelf).

Back to smoothing the end vise chop. I used an old, rusty #3 that I bought from ebay and restored to good working condition. With the new hock iron and chipbreaker, I love using this plane. I also have the veritas bevel-up smoother, but I can see myself reaching for the #3 quite a bit. It just feels good to me.

With the chop smoothed, I clamped it in position with the end vise and laid out the dog hole. I had positioned my dog holes a little closer to the face of the workbench so that they were not in line with the middle of the vise. So I had to position the dog hole in the chop in line with my dog holes.

You can also see in this picture that I made the chop extend out to the right quite a bit. I really like this detail because it allows me to stick up to a 6” wide board on end for dovetailing. With the quick release vise, it is very quick and easy getting a board in that position.

Boring a hole in this hard maple was not easy. After a couple of turns, I decided to try using a cordless drill.

The bit did not budge at all! It was back to the brace and just powering through the chop. I had to use the ratcheting mechanism of the brace, because it was too hard to make a full revolution through the stock.

That was some hard work boring that hole. After this experience, I wasn’t sure how I was going to bore the 1.5” holes that I needed for the twin-screw. So I ended up finally ordering a drill press. I can’t wait to see how it does with the twin-screw holes.

Here’s a pic of the end vise chop in use.

I’m hand jointing one of the boards for the face vise chop since I only have a 6” jointer. The quick release end vise is really a fantastic way to go. I can’t imagine a faster way of getting a board in position to plane (ok, maybe a planing stop). It is also very versatile with the extended chop. Hmmm … maybe I don’t really need that twin-screw face vise?

The finish line is in sight now! Just the face vise and a shelf to go. I feel a little sorry that this project is coming to an end. It has been a challenge and a lot of fun to build. What’ll be my next big project?

The next step was mortising the legs. I laid out the mortises for the long stretchers by laying the ready-made tenons on the legs. I decided to add edge cheeks and shoulders to hide the mortise a bit, so I inset the layout lines for the mortise a half inch in on the top and bottom.

I used a router and a 1/2” up-cut spiral bit to hog out the mortises. I used an edge guide and some clamps as stops. This setup worked ok, but the way my edge guide worked I had to reset my stop clamps when I moved the edge guide in and out. This was a major pain. It also would have been nice to have some way to fine adjust the edge guide. I probably won’t be making 1.25” wide mortises (requiring 3 passes) again any time soon, so I’m not in the market for a new edge guide yet, but I’m sorely tempted.

On the other hand, the shop vac did an incredible job sucking up the waste. The slight loss of visibility was well worth using the shop vac and dust collection attachment. Here’s a picture that I took right after finishing a mortise. No dust! I hadn’t realized that this attachment came with my router until now. What a fantastic attachment.

After routing all the mortises, I squared them up with chisels. Here’s one of the mortises for an end stretcher.

With the mortises made, I made the tenons for the end stretchers and reshaped the tenons for the long stretchers using the dado stack on the table saw. While I was able to make very fine adjustments and creep up on the right depth of cut to fit the mortises, I hated having sawdust thrown back in my face. I quickly learned to put a respirator on when doing this. I don’t know if this will be my preferred way of making tenons. The amount of sawdust created was probably a function of the XXL size of these tenons, so maybe it won’t be as bad on normal sized tenons.

Here’s a picture of the end assemblies and long stretchers. I used the drawboring technique to pin the tenons. I did some practice joints with some store bought dowels and found out that they were oblong and left nasty gaps in the finished joint. I decided to spring for the Lie-Nielsen dowel plate that I saw Mike use in his construction.

Basically you just pound a piece of wood through the hole to make the dowel. Here’s a case where I ended up with a bad dowel. Two faces on the square peg are not being cut by the dowel plate, so it didn’t create a nice round dowel. You really want the wood to ‘bloom’ all around the hole in the dowel plate as you pound the peg through.

Here’s a picture of the biggest mistake I’ve made so far in putting together this bench.

I had to shim the tenon on the bottom there, because as I was fitting the tenon I removed material from the wrong cheek. The really bad thing was that as I was doing this, I kept checking it by reinserting the tenon in the mortise and the faces of the leg and stretcher weren’t flushing up. So I kept removing material from that same cheek! ARGH! I didn’t realize my mistake until I had already removed a little more than a 1/32nd of an inch.

So, with the base together, it was time to attach it to the top. After maneuvering the base to get the front face flush with the edge of the top, I traced out the tenons on the top.

I laid out the mortises on the back side a little oversized to handle wood movement of the top.

Here’s my last mortise. I was glad to be done with routing and chiseling these bad boys.

The moment of truth! Is it going to fit?

Yes! It fits!

Okay, it didn’t really go in all the way the first time. I had to wrestle the base out of the mortises and do some tenon trimming a couple of times before it went in smoothly. But it sure was a good feeling when it all came together!

This was quite an exercise in making mortise and tenon joints. I learned a lot from my mistakes and I’m sure making mortise and tenons for normal sized furniture will be cake compared to this.