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Neil, I have to tell you, your back end treatments look like they are meant to be there.
Good job. It is all looking good.

Kevin

yeah, coming along nicely.

Soooooooooooooo close! It's coming along nicely. Good touch with the picks and the purfling around them - great idea.

Thanks, guys. This finishing thing looks to be a two steps forward, one step back thing. If you look at the cloesup you can see that my first two tries with pumice didn't completely fill the pores and the first layer of 2 pound cut shellac was still not smooth. Before that I'd rubbed at the finish with a pad soaked only in alcohol and it smoothed out some areas but left others bare. So tonight I went at the back with 400 grit sandpaper wrapped around a piece of plywood board to get things smooth then systematically went back in with the pumice. It looks much smoother now. Next I'll move on with another coat of 2 pound shellac. I need to read up on what to do between coats though. Rubbing it out with alcohol had much better results with regards to smoothness than sanding IMO but you really have to be systematic about it (not overlapping and keeping an even pressure) and not too aggressive or you'll just rub the shellac off. BTW, I haven't even used any oil yet.

French polish is progressing nicely. There are still some boo-boos that I need to work through but I love shine:

Some pics from tonight as I flossed the tenon on the neck joint to regain the centerline that I lost due to being anal.



Here's a closeup of the bridge. I've already begun sanding the underside of the bridge so that it rests flush against the top. I opted to just tape a piece of sandpaper to the top of the guitar and use that as my guide. As you can see, I was careless and chipped off the edge of one of the wings so I'll have to tweak it to make it symmetrical.



It's close enough I think so I did some measuring and remeasuring with the Stewmac saddlematic tool and my good ol' straightedge:



The neck angle is about there too. The rule is floating about 1mm above the top of the saddle:



Just for curiosity's sake, I had to check to see if the scale length was about where it should be:



These are of course preliminary measurements which I will take again when I'm ready to actually mount the bridge.

I finally glued on the bridge today with hot hide glue:



I took the clamps off after 6 hours and the bridge is stuck firm but the wings still came up a little so I wicked a little more HHG underneath and put the cam clamps back on the wings. We'll see how it went tomorrow...

Neil

The shot of the scale length show it to measure about 25.4" to the center of the saddle in the center of the bridge - is this the scale length? I have only built 3 guitars but what I have read and have had success with was that you want to add about .1" to the scale length and put the center of the saddle at that point for the high e string. Then the saddle is angled about 1/8" over its length to the low E.

If your scale is 25.4, it appears that you are .1" plus about 1/2 of 1/8" short. Do I have this wrong??

Ed Minch

I'm not sure. I used the Stewmac saddlematic tool. It has two pins that figure into that but I have a premade bridge with a precompensated saddle so I was basically double-checking someone else's work. If I got the mounting position of the entire bridge wrong that's on me.

BTW, IIRC the scale length on this guitar is approximately 25.34".

Looks really good! you will be playing the guitar soon.