11/5/2004

The 3/4" radius router bit I order came the other day and I've been dying to use it. So, tonight, I ran into the garage for about 20 minutes and made a tone of wood chips with it. Making multiple passes and raising the bit a little each time, I rounded over the top and back. I love the way it looks. I still have the arm-carve and back contour to do but this really let's you start seeing what the body will look like. For some reason, the rounded edge makes me want to tung-oil it. Here are some pictures of the body after it's initial shaping.

2/6/2005

A couple of weeks ago I turned my attention to the rounded edge on the body. The roundover bit I used put a nice bull-nose on the top and back edges but left a flat spot all around the middle. I completed the roundover by hand using very coarse sand paper. I started with 36 grit and came back to 150 gradually. It took two sessions over the course of two days but it came out great.

3/20/2005

Today, I decided to do the arm carve. This was a little un-nerving since it involved hand-work. I generally like doing woodworking by hand because it's therapeutic but I didn't want to screw up the body at this stage. I marked off the curve in pencil using a French Curve. Then, using a rasp file, I started roughing in the shape. After the shape was done, I used a wood block with sandpaper tacked to it to do the final shaping. I love the way it came out.

3/21/2005

Today I turned my attention to the belly-carve on the back of the guitar. I marked it off in pencil using a French Curve. I positioned it based on the fact that I play with my guitar on my left leg when I'm sitting down. I used a freshly sharpened Stanley spokeshave. It's a cheap one I got off Amazon.com. Staying within the pencil marks, I shaved until the curve of the guitar's waist got in the way of the spokeshave's iron. Then, I switched over to a scraper. I used the flat side of the scraper in the picture. The scraper allowed me to fine-tune the carve. When I was happy with it, I smoothed it out with some 80 and 120 grit sandpaper. This was one of my favorite parts of the whole project. I can't wait to do a carved-top body.