A pair

[B. Howard]

Here is a shot of my scraper plane in action and you can see the shaves it is pulling from the plates.

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The plates are then turned over and the thicknessing begins. This is done with my 3-1/2 Bailey in a pattern of two passes each straight with the grain, diagonal one direction, diagonal the other direction and finished with the grain. Eight passes per lift.

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After about 3 lifts I am really close, I have gone from .150 to just about .100. one more pass withy the grain and it's time for the scraper plane again. This is followed by my large card scraper to make a nice surface.

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[B. Howard]

Now I am ready to use my first sandpaper of the job. The inside is sanded with a cork lined block and some 180 grit. Next the back graft is glued on with go bars and then it is shaped with my #220 block plane , sanded and the slots cut through it with a razor saw for the braces. these slots are carefully chiseled clean only to the Rosewood, removing to much material will cause a void in you brace glue up.

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The braces are then glued on using my special cauls. the braces were already made up. When I do chores like make braces, I make braces, lots of them, till I run out of wood almost. Next time I make some I'll show how I do them.

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here is my pile of shavings from the two backs. a quick sweep and the shop is clean.

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[B. Howard]

The oils in the EIR has made my soles a reddish brown tarry mess, I clean them thouroghly with DA and put fresh edges on the irons before moving on.

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The tops are thicknessed in the same manner with hand-planes except it's thickness is determined by a deflection test procedure. I use a dial indicator and my calibrated test weight and thin each top so it meets a certain specification.

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This shot shows the first pass with my plane and you can see a low spot after the first pass. This means that the surface was not truly flat, yet it had been sanded with a drum sander. Something to ponder...

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[CavalierKingCharles]

Very cool, I really like the way you use hand tools to build.

SA

[B. Howard]

Here is a shot showing the cross hatch pattern left by the two diagonal planing operations I mentioned earlier. I use the same patterns as when I planed the backs except I am taking finer shavings and only doing one pass each direction rather than two. I make a series of passes and check my deflection, and repeat until I am at my specification.

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After that it's time to start on the rosettes. I use my small router and a base I made for it to rout out the channels.

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[B. Howard]

The rosettes on these guitars is made from a favorite material of mine, Black Palm. I re-saw thin slices off a billet and process them into radiused tiles for use in the rosettes. This is done with a few things I have made specifically for the task. One os a sanding drum that is the same size as the inside diameter of my standard rosettes. The other is a small jig that can be set up to give me whatever I need as an outside radius. Here it is set up to do the outside of the tiles.

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The tiles are then cut in my specially made rosette miter box and assembly aid. It puts a perfect mating tangent on every tile. It can also be used to glue purfling to rosette tiles when needed as well.

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The tiles are sized to fit very snug. I did the rosettes on these two guitars slightly different. One with a single mahogany purfling at the edges on the dread. This one was also made a little larger so as to look better on the larger body. The one on the GA has no purflings at all, a tricky fit but I think I really like it. It may become the standard on this series of guitars. I simply glue everything in with a white PVA glue. I do not like CA fr this as it can stain the spruce something awful and honestly if you are sealing your channels with shellac, you might as well use shellac for the glue as well. It becomes the weak link in the final bond.

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[B. Howard]

After the rosettes are dry I plane them down with my #220 till they are a few thousandths tall of the surface ( I need to work with the Black Palm a bit thicker than I usually like or it becomes to brittle) and then scraped flush.

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The soundholes are then cut out using the same rig I used for the rosette channels. I do not do this as a single cut. I typically make 3-4 cuts to get the entire way through the soundboard.

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Now I can lay out my bracing pattern on the inside.

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[B. Howard]

Now I can start gluing all the flat braces to the tops. These are the braces that I do not put a radius profile on. They are the finger braces, the soundhole braces & the upper face graft.They are all glued on as just flat sock at the same time.

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I then lay out the braces for carving. I mark the peaks and the thickness I want the ends. I carve them with my chisels, shaping the top profile first and then paring in the sides.

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[B. Howard]

After the braces are shaped to my liking I sand them with 180g paper to take out any tool marks I may have have left.

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The ends that intersect other braces are now pared to the proper layout lines with a razor saw and chisels. and the first set of radiused braces are glued in place. These are the upper transverse and the lower tone bars.

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[B. Howard]

The back braces are carved and shaped just the same as I did the small braces on the top. I rough in the ramps at the end of the braces with a chisel and then use a pillow block and a coarse bastard to make them uniform and the proper dimension to tuck into my linings.

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These are then blended out with a chisel. The braces are sanded at 180 and then the final step. I use grey scotchbrite and go over the entire surface to bring everything to a nice even sheen. For me it's little things like this that only I may ever see that make the difference.

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