Guitar Resto-Mod underway

[nuhobby]

Following up with the custom router-guide described earlier this week, I channeled out the full perimeters of the guitar faces. As you can see, the interior kerfing strips are really holding the body together at this point. The removed material will be replaced with decorative + structural curved binding borders:

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On my 2022 guitar project, I messed up the bindings. The ones I bought, black plastic flexible strips, weren't quite big enough to cover the full ugly exposed parts of the interior. Long story, but an important learning experience. For 2024, I decided to make my own bindings out of wood, to guarantee they are big enough, and to save some money. Once again I used the curling iron to pre-curve very thin strips of wood.

I glued them on, a bit at a time, using up a lot of tape "like water". All the tape and the unusual clamps are attempting to keep these bindings in their intended channels:

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Still, there's a lot more yet to do. But at least I've got about 40% done, and once the glue dried I could shave and scrape the excess material:

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[algale]

Nice work!

[nuhobby]

Thanks!

Here are more "exploded" steps toward a convergence in the future:


The neck is now glued up from the stock blocks; at the far right end a piece has been cut at an angle and re-joined as a "scarf joint" to put the final cant on the tuning end of things:

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For the stacked "heel" area, I have started cutting in the one half of a compound dovetail joint:

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A similar compound dovetail joint receptacle is being cut and bored into the body. This cut / cavity goes into a fairly sturdy block of wood inside the body:

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For now, a loose dovetail initial fit and a basic visual arrangement of pieces show what's on the way for the convergence:

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[BuckeyeDennis]

I never followed an acoustic guitar build before, so this is fascinating. What's going on in the glue-up with all the C-clamps?

[nuhobby]

The several C-clamps are at an area where the neck is transitioning to the headstock -- this is where I used a very basic scarf joint. (It looks strange because I left the headstock end a bit too long at this point.). The headstock, where all the strings will wrap around tuner pegs, works better if it's not in the same plane as the rest of the neck. The strings in the angled-headstock scenario "break" over the nut (or 0-fret), and define a nice tight "end" to the playable string.

[nuhobby]

Some more incremental work...


For the guitar neck, the compound dovetail joint is super fussy and has a lot of positional "degrees of freedom" depending on which of the several joint surfaces is shaved or shimmed. I worked a good while to at least get the neck wood to be in the correct plane with respect to the guitar-top. There is further work to do, but that achievement enabled me to make some next steps:

Once the neck block was fairly established, I could cut a channel for the truss-rod to install. The right end of the neck wood here is the dovetail part that inserts into guitar body. The rod slot is being cut with the table saw, which required the headstock ("tuning end") of the neck to be narrow (not at its full future flared width):

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With that channel cut, then I could start "filling out" the headstock / tuning end with extra pieces of wood to make it a wider piece. All these will be trimmed to shape in the future:


Full screen, showing the blue-coated truss rod lying in the rough channel:

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"Zoom" for the headstock ganged & glued pieces for extra width:

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Have a great weekend!

[rlkeeney]

Getting the dovetail right is a big deal.

[nuhobby]

Continuing on;


The scarf-jointed angled headstock has visible glue lines and non-matching woods. So, a cover veneer is needed -- glued on, and then later trimmed to shape:

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The rosewood fingerboard needs about 17-18 fine slots with the finest saw I have. I made up a custom little miter box so that the fingerboard doesn't wiggle while being sawn:

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Fret marker dots are usually purchased as pearl-like round inserts, but I'm making some hole plugs from contrasting wood:

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The side of the fretboard seen by the player (on edge) also needs markers. I am laying in some fine wood strips into small slots, on the backside of the board, to be leveled and flushed later, so that only a little 1/8" by 1/8" square is seen:

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Now the whole neck assembly is looking a big step closer to the intent

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Have a great week!

[rlkeeney]

I have a guitar that has brass screws for markers.

I think wood plugs will look great.

[edflorence]

The project is looking great...maybe when done you can post a YouTube recording of how it sounds. Pretty slick miter box for the fret wire grooves - two questions: 1) how did you control the depth of each fret wire slot when you cut it, and 2) how did you lay out the fret locations. And, another question I just thought of, will the bridge be angled for "compensation?" Calculating that compensation angle seems like a dark mystery. Years ago I built a few mountain dulcimers and have always thought I should try a ukulele. Your pictures are inspiring! Thanks for a great job of documentation.