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| Neck shaping complete |
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| About to finalize neck thickness and shape |
The current batch of instruments is now just a handful of hours away from the start of the finishing stage. They've been fretted, had their necks shaped, and had all scraping
of bindings and surfaces done. Early next week I'll do the final sanding, make and glue on the bridges, and get under way with varnishing and French polishing.
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Neck shaping complete - this is
the spruce/maple guitar |
In the past week I also took a break from the current guitars to do some action and French polish work on a previous client's instrument; and to make a few jigs that I've been thinking about for ages - here are two of the jigs....
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| Tentellone fence and stop block |
I ordered a special tablesaw blade to use for kerfing linings and cutting tentellones without tear-out. One of the new jigs is a simple fence and graduated stop block for cutting tentellones of different widths, the other is a no-brains-required kerfing sled. The photo of the tentellone jig is probably pretty self explanatory. The stop block makes tentellones from 4mm to 9mm wide and registers in the table saw's mitre slot. It is held in place by rare earth magnets inlaid into its bottom. Essentially fuzz-free tentellones can be cut two at a time by stacking two triangular strips together.
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| Auto-advance kerfing sled |
As for the kerfing jig, I knew exactly what I wanted it to do - use the table saw, with some sort of automatically fed indexing fence to quickly (and safely of course) kerf many linings at once without eye, finger, or back strain. I did a quick google search to see what others have done to solve the same problem, and the jig I built is based on one made by Brazilian luthier Antonio Tessarin. It can kerf up to 7" worth of lining strips at once, for me that's 10 individual linings. The long stick of wood with all the vertical notches in the photo is a template stick. It is fastened to the lining stock by tiny nails that protrude through its bottom surface. The nails poke into the lining stock at points that will later be cut away when I saw the wide kerfed slab into individual linings. To make linings with differently spaced kerfs, I'd need to make a different template stick.
