Humidity issues

[MuddyFox]

Hello all!

I'm sure this horse has been beaten many times both before and after death, but I'd really like your take on this... especially from fellow apartment builders.

I'm living in a smallish apartment in a house by the lake. The area has humidity swings and at my location even more so. 20-40% during winter, 60-80% during summer. We have AC but we also open windows a lot so the little one can get fresh air. The apartment is south-facing so I also get daily wild swings in temperature. In a nutshell, there's no way I could effectively control humidity on the large scale. Being a small apartment, it also provides no building space other than the kitchen table when the little one is catching Zs.
A logistical nightmare, yet I still have a strong feeling that I should attempt building an acoustic (even though I have NO IDEA where I'm gonna keep it once I'm done :) ).

Now, several options come to mind.
1. Watch the humidity on my flakey chinese rh meter and only build on appropriate times. With daily swings, highly unpractical.
2. Do an Adaboy. Large ziplock, work in the bag. Controlled RH, but problems with glue squeezeout and the fact that I have no place to keep a gobar deck (don't really like the idea of it all that much anyways).
3. Some sort of 1. and 2. combination. Right now I have two ideas.
a) I have a 6x6ft space in my building's basement and, while uncontrollable on the large scale because other apartments have "cubicles" there too, it may be possible to maybe seal off a bit of it using plastic sheets. I have no idea if this is even possible, walls and floor is bare concrete and I don't know if that can be sufficiently isolated, humidity-wise. Since there's no electricity in the basement, the humidification/dehumidification would have to be done with dessicants of some sort. Sounds scifi-ish but I thought to mention it just in case.
b) I have sort of a pantry in the apartment which has a doorless MDF closet in it, with shelves being roughly 30*30*30 inches, wood on 5 sides. I was thinking of maybe sealing off one or two shelves with plastic and duck tape to store the woods during construction and maybe even do the gluing in there. Again, dessicants would be needed but with it being a rather small space it just may be doable.

Any of you guys see any of this making sense and having a chance of working out? Any and all suggestions are welcome. Off the wall ideas and all...

[tippie53]

if I may add one thing , A de humidifier is not very expensive and will help you control RH.

[MuddyFox]

Certainly you may, but I still feel that it's not the way to go. My apartment has virtually no doors, it is an open space with some walls for separation and a few glass sliders for bedroom "privacy". A humidifier that can handle that kind of space would probably be rather large and noisy, which my significant other would have strong objections to.

Also, we keep our windows open pretty much all the time (at least partially) and I seriously doubt a humidifier machine could keep up?

EDIT: we also cook, shower and hang clothes to dry inside pretty much the same space. So humidity is too high more often than too low. When the heating kicks in during winter I can get it down to manageable levels (drops further, down in 30s)...

[Tony_in_NYC]

Store everything in a humidity controlled, sealed plastic bin. All of your wood, bracing, etc. Take the parts out to work, then return them to the box. You can buy a humidipak or three to keep the humidity at 45% in your "special box" and you should be OK. I would actually recommend a lower storage RH, but once you take the top and back plates out of there, they will cup faster if the ambient RH is much, much higher than the special box.
Not much fun trying to build a guitar with a soundboard that looks like a potato chip.

[MuddyFox]

If I have a "special box" at say 40% and my living room at 55-60% (that's normal for most of the year), and I take wood out to say glue it (which takes time), wouldn't that be "building stress into the guitar" (I believe those are Ken's words?)? Glueing things that are expanding doesn't sound right.

However, people have built guitars way back when they didn't know what humidity even was (measuring RH only goes back to 18th century or thereabouts, IIRC). Am I overthinking this? OTOH, why take chances if I can avoid it?

FYI, right now RH is at 50% and I haven't seen it this low since we stopped heating the place two months ago. I will look into getting a dehumidifier but I'd much rather spend that money on actual tools and wood (yes, I understand that in my case, a dehumidifier actually IS a tool :) ) if I can find a workaround for this humidity issue.

[Tony_in_NYC]

This is what I do here in NY. I do it to prevent future cracks in the guitar when someone let's the humidity get too low, but it should work for you.
Brace the plates during the lowest humidity time of year and glue them to the rim. You can take your time with everything else and use up the rest of the year working on other parts. But you do not want to brace the top or back in high RH and move to low RH. You are more likely to cause the top or back to crack that way.
Hope that helps.

[MuddyFox]

Tony, that's a sound advice and if push comes to shove and I end up waiting for proper conditions to glue instead of creating my own environment, that's exactly what I'll do.

In my case, that means gluing sometime in Oct/Nov so I have a few months to procure woods and at least some clamps. The way I see it, that's pretty much all i need to get majority of the box gluing done.

I'm glad that the rest of the build isn't that RH sensitive. :)

[tippie53]

Building in a wet environment ( above 55% ) can cause so many issues down the road. I like to work under 50% for glue ups I hold my shop to 40-50%

[MuddyFox]

Well, if I wait for RH to be around 50% and try some temporary dehumidifying, I just may get it to be below 50% for a few hours.

The problem is that there's no way in heck my wife would put up with a dehumidifier compressor sound for any length of time so my best course of action is to build (glue) in fall/winter when RH drops to around 30% due to heating. It's way easier to bring that up by opening a few windows and doing a few baskets of laundry than to lower RH from 65% that I'm having today to 40%...

[Kevin Sjostrand]

Muddy,
You have too many issues to deal with, I don't think you should build a guitar. Send me a check for $3500 and I'll put one together for you including a nice travel case.

Kevin