No. 4 - my attempt at a mahogany/sitka folk size

[nkwak]

I've shifted on to bracing the top. This may not be popular for some here, but I've inletted the bridge plate into the X brace:



Bear in mind that this is just my fourth build so I'm still experimenting and learning. I feel like it will keep the bridge plate from lifting and that since this is still technically a student work I can monitor it over time to see if that works out.

[nkwak]

I'm also trying to employ the use of dowels to align the plate position with the mold, but I admit that my execution is not successful so there's still measure of "eyeballing" it.

Regardless, it at least helps me with finding out where to notch the sides. Here I'm doing to the top side notching after intentionally leaving the ends of the braces to the full height. This allowed me to reach in with a pencil and a blade from a hacksaw to mark where to cut the notches.

[nkwak]

Once I got that done I then took a scrap of the offcut from the top to use as a guide on how low to taper the ends of the X braces. That helped me to get at least 3 of the 4 notches right. The 4th is a tad deep but I'm confident the binding will cover it. I also tapered the finger braces and lower face tone bars to be well short.



On the Number One brace I'm doing something a little nontraditional and something that Ervin Somogyi reputedly does: but the ends of the No.1 braces against the sides to promote rigidity in the area:



Again, we'll see how this works but I wanted to give it a try.