Wilborn Guitar Attempt

[scamp]

Great job! If it’s any consolation to you, Dale Fairbanks made a guitar for me with an arm rest. He never told me the whole story about it, but I suspect it was the first and last bezel he will ever do.

You really don't want to try and do one of these without practicing on something you don't care about. It is really easy to mess up. The good news is if you do it's recoverable ( vs many other guitar making mistakes ). Just chisel out the veneer and try again.

[scamp]

Following my general guitar making rule...... Why do things once when you can do them twice... I went off today and made another bridge. Why you ask.... On the first bridge something happened when I routed the saddle slot and it got a bit wide. It was supposed to be 5 mm wide but came out closer to 6 mm. Not the end of the world but bothersome. I did the slot in two passes with my router ( each pass about 1/8 inch ) and I think the bridge moved in the routing gig ( it was double sticky taped down but maybe not good enough ) . That said... when I started to polish the bridge I noticed a slight crack/imperfection in the wood on one of the wings. Tried to convince myself it was ok for about 12 hours or so and then gave in and decided to try again with a spare bridge blank I had.


Here is the crack/imperfection

Bridge Imperfection.JPEG

Here are the two bridges.... New one on the top.

Two Bridges.JPEG

Ahhhh ... the joys of building guitars

[scamp]

In a long list of things I have never done before is laminated sides.
For the "real" guitar I want to build, I need to have a three layer lamination.
At 0.6 inch outer "pretty" layer... A 0.4 inch hard maple layer with the grain running perpendicular to the sides to add strength and keep the sides from splitting ( how you get this is another story left to another post down the road ) and a 0.4 inch inside layer ( probably cheep rosewood side material ).
I built an outside caul using the mold ( as previously described ) and an inside caul out of three layers of hardboard bent to match the sides and some MDF blocks. For a tutorial on this see Bogdanovich guitars.....

https://www.jsbguitars.com/learn-guitar ... 2WKGyXTrxH

I struggled with what glue to use. Bogdanovich uses Titebond Original to glue the sides. According to him it works fine but it freeks me out using water based glues on thin veneer type material. Had a bad experience gluing thin veneer on a headstock plate. Curved up like crazy. So.... I decided on Epoxy. Decided to use West Systems 105 resin, 207 hardner and some silica thickner.

So... rather than screw up a real guitar with my first attempt at this I dug up a pair of old mahogany sides I used to practice hand bending on a bending iron and re-bent them to match this new guitar and tried to laminate them together. Not perfect. They don't match since they were trimmed for different sides, they are the wrong thickness ( both are about 0.7 inches ) and there are just two layer vs three. But... it should give me a feel for what it's like to use epoxy and see how well the cauls work.

Here is a picture of the sides in the gluing caul. Made a bit of a mess with the epoxy but not too bad. Learned a lot and next time I'm sure it won't be as bad. Now... just need to wait 24 hours and see what comes out.

Epoxy Laminated Sides.JPEG

[Kevin Sjostrand]

Your bridge could have been okay. With ebony just fill the cracks with CA and sand flush. You'll never see it.
Nicely shaped bridge. I like it

[scamp]

Your bridge could have been okay. With ebony just fill the cracks with CA and sand flush. You'll never see it.
Nicely shaped bridge. I like it

Thanks for your experienced feedback. I was thinking that it might just be cosmetic as you say and I could fill it it with CA glue but I was concerned it was structural. In the end, I believe your right. Oh well.... now I have a back up bridge. The bridge is a knock off of the bridge Ben uses on his Coma series guitars.

[scamp]

Pulled my practice laminated sides out of the mold today.
Confirmed again why I find it important to practice before you try something new on the real thing.

Learned the following

1) Be careful with the epoxy. Take your time and keep it off of the visible sides. When I applied the glue on the sides I used gloves but some epoxy got on the gloves and hence the wrong side of the guitar sides while I was handling them. It takes a lot of effort to get epoxy scraped and sanded off.

2) Used wax paper to keep the epoxy off the mold. It's easy to rip it and if it does it sticks to the mold. Had just one spot where this happened. May look at alternatives to wax paper.

3) Take extra time to make sure the layers are properly aligned. I was a bit off.

4) Keep the sides in the center of the mold so the squeeze out has somewhere to go. In my case, the sides were right up against the bottom of the mold and the squeezed out epoxy had no where to go except pool and make a bit of a mess.

5) Use a little less epoxy. A thin layer is all you need. Excessive squeeze out makes a mess.

That said... the end results are rather amazing. The sides match the mold almost perfectly. They are amazingly flat and won't need much sanding. They are incredibly stiff. Just for fun I put the mold on top of it ( it's rather heavy ) and it supports it with no problem. Far as I can tell... you don't need much in the way of spreaders etc.

Here are some photos...

Practice Lamination 5.JPEG

Practice Lamination 1.JPEG

Practice Lamination 4.JPEG

Practice Lamination 2.JPEG

[Kevin Sjostrand]

That's very impressive. A bit of work over just bending a side but still pretty cool. So the laminated sides are supposed to have an affect on the sound?

[scamp]

According to various “ experts “ lamented sides do improve the sound. They are stiffer and a bit heavier and as a result the impedance difference between the top and sides is greater. This greater impedance difference causes more of the acoustic energy radiating from the bridge to reflect off the top/side interface and hence you get more pronounced top resonances. Some use an analogy of waves in a pool reflecting off the cement sides of the pool. Trevor Gore talks about this phenomena. Instead of laminated sides he actually adds weights to the sides to cause the same effect. Other luthiers are moving in this direction including Chris Alvarado at Driftwood Guitars, John S. Bogdanovich at Bogdanovich Guitars and Ben Wilborn at Wilborn Guitars to name a few. It is a pain to do but there are definitely some advantages in terms of stability, durability accuracy etc. As far as sound… we shall see.

[scamp]

[scamp]

Finished slotting the multiscale fretboard and trimming it down so I can bound it.
Glad it's over ... a bit nerve racking.

First thing I did was spray paint it white so I could see the marking I was making using a scalpel blade
Then marked out all the frets using the MDF templates I made with a scalpel and utility knife.

Marked Fret Board.JPEG

After that... I was able to use the fret cutting jig I already had to help cut the slots ( thank God ).
The jig is designed only for standard fret boards but I was able to tilt he fretboard the appropriate amount in the jig for each slot and use the included hardware to firmly hold the fretboard down while cutting.
The jig held everything in alignment once you had each fret slot lined up and it kept the cuts perfectly perpendicular and to the right depth.

Fretboard in Cutting Jit.JPEG

Completed Fretboard.JPEG

As an FYI.. When I was investigating doing a multiscale fretboard there were videos on line of people doing this totally manually. I tried this on some scrap material I had and I can't imagine trying to do it this way and actually having it work.