Long time no blog.

I've been in the meta-woodworking phase for a while now.

I designed and have mostly constructed a dust collector from a used furnace motor, rescue plywood, some steel for reinforcing the hangers and sweat equity. I started to do the dadoes for the channels to take the filter elements and realized I've been pretty sloppy on my table saw dadoeing.

So... First build a high detachable fence to ride on the ripping fence. Then an adjustable feather board tied to an Incra miter slide and finally a feather board for the top.

The long dadoes were spot on!!!! I'll include some pictures at some point. I'm also getting tired of my very useful but clumsy shop vac/Dust Deputy Cyclone siamese twin combination. It tips over and gets caught on everthing, so the next not-planned-for project for is a dolly for that. At least I've got all the parts.

Meanwhile, I unloaded an amplifier I never use and used to proceeds to buy a Steward MacDonald fret saw and miter box and a Safe-T-Planer to use with the drill press (Du-oh, need to build an auxialliary table/fence for that too!!!)

Slow and steady

Had an old dial indicator and lots of left over MDF. so......



A Charles Fox style thickness gauge. Thank you Kathy Matsushita for the idea.

I found some rosewood for a fretboard, and for a bridge. Onto the ukulele top.

Bench #1 done!!!

So I finished my first workbench. Its 49 x 24 with a 7" vise. The top has a array of 3/4" holes for hold-downs and bench dogs. The front jaw of the vise as well.



The top is 3 3/4" layers of MDF skinned with 1/4" hardboard.

The thing is on casters so it can be moved around our small shop/laundry.


Finally, I found a used 15" drill press, so not more excuses.



I have the requisite minimum set of power tools to build. So.. Onward!!!!! Oh, and the Ikea counter top is now, of course, dead flat. It will end up being the top of bench #2, whenever that happens

Well........

Its been raining here in the greater DC area for several days (or has it been weeks). I cut the two MDF boards to size for the top of the bench and picked up the 5/8" IKEA top to cut it and found...



I mean serious warped. The center the bulge is about 1/4" high (low). The MDF is fine. I suspect the nice people at IKEA oiled the top surface and not the bottom (which is the side that swelled).

I've decided to go with a third layer of MDF and laminate 1/8" hardboard all around to finish it.

Maybe the hardwood will flatten and can be used for a table. Or a bowl.

Rolling benches

So four hours later, the frame has retractable casters. Essentially, there are a set of rails



inset inside the legs (from 2 x 4s) and a pair of 2 x 4 hinged with two 2 1/2 swivel casters. The picture on top is the caster plate folded under the frame, lifting the bench about 3/4 inches off the floor. All held together and to the legs with lag bolts. To engage/disengage the caster, lift up an end and grab or kick the casters with your foot. Lower tech than the table saw base. But it works well.




Next, gluing up the top. But first, need a cutting guide for the circular saw. Meta projects.

Benched

I've been off-line for a bit. Suffering from the dog-in-Rome syndrome. I started getting parts in for my drum sander (24" width). Then I got a bunch of great cigar boxes and thought, "I'll make a CB ukulele". Then came a dial guage and I thought, "I'll make a thickness guage". I then realized, " I have too many projects started and nowhere to carry them out."

So the current project is the bench above. Its 24 x 49 and ~35" high. It will have a 7" vise under the overhang. The top is two layers of 3/4" MDF and an IKEA 5/8" counter-top. The base of 4x4 legs with 2x4 spreaders and 3/8" threaded rod to hold it together. I plan to put casters that fold out of the way so I can move this around.

The Bends, and the Bender

So here is Big Bertha, the side bender.

I abandoned the idea of using the hot plate controller when 1) I realized the little nichrome coil is a "booster" that compensates for the heat loss of the huge aluminum bracket that thermally connects the heating element to the bimetallic strip contact. So it would not have really worked. Since the charcoal-starter was 500 Watts, a simple 600 watt dimmer works just fine and is more compact. And a mere 6 dollars

Bending the heater was tricky and in fact, I overbent it producing a "crack" in the outer copper, which is filled with a long nichrome coil and sand.

The exposed coil was not shorted to the copper shield and still heats evenly so I stuffed it down the 2" pipe, supporting the terminal ends with a wad of aluminum foil to keep the leads centered and not shorting each other. This was wired to the dimmer. The whole things sits on rescue plywood.

I plugged it in and...... no go. So out with the multimeter. And it was fine, but I had the "on" and "off "confused. The exposed nichrome makes a handy initial heads up for whether the coil is heating. I'll borrow a IR temperature gauge from work on Tuesday and calibrate.

Meanwhile, I had to try it. I trotted off to the local Woodcraft and bought a couple of pieces of 1/16" walnut. On and "sizzling", I tried to start bending. This is an incredibly tactile process. Initially, nothing was happening even with the wood drying out and sizzling. At some currently unknown temperature, the springy, stiff board yielded like soft metal, wrapping itself around the 2" diameter pipe almost effortlessly. Its a magical feeling to hold this sinuous piece of wood that was just moments before a straight board.

The wood was 1/16" which is a little thin for guitar side (0.090" to 0.085"). I am planning to build a thickness sander next from plans I got off the web (that will take a while), so I am looking around locally for a place to get some wood (mail order) and thickness it elsewhere.

Off to Baltimore for fireworks tonight and Community Forklift tomorrow (a Federal holiday) to look for rescue wood, steel rods and pulleys for the sander. TTFN and a Happy 4th.

Scrounging parts - The physical chemist's trade

I've started to build the bending iron from a design on the web shown here. I bought a foot and a half of 2" diameter steel pipe, 3 feet of 5/16" threaded rod and an appropriate number of nuts and washers. The poor dead beast above just needs the heating element and to be attached to a platform. The electric charcoal starter is on the way (Home Despot no longer sells them). I've got ridiculous amounts of scrap 3/4" plywood to make a base. One remaining question. How to control the temperature?

Being an out of practice physical chemist, I thought, buy a temperature programmer, but $150 later, it seemed less appealing. The the idea of a 1000W dimmer seemed crude. No good way to get reproducible settings. Then I remembered the words of my Ph.D. advisor: "scrounge". I dug out the old Thermolyne hot plate behind my power tools collecting dust (so much for the grand organizational effort).

I opened it up and found the answer, a bimetallic heat control in parallel with the hot plate surface. So all I need to do is disconnect the hot plate element (the red wires) and connect the charcoal starter. Voila! The best part is, it doesn't destroy the hot plate so I can use if for heating other goodies at a later date.

Stay tuned!!!

A sense of accomplishment - The Mold

So with a long quiet afternoon, and the shop now non-chaotic, I finished the mold. Most of the actual work was leveling the pine "walls" of the mold to the plywood faces. I found the best tool for this to be a surform rasp. It gobbled up the pine and left the ply mostly alone.

I measured the final dimensions - lower bout 15 1/2 inches, waist 8 1/2 inches and upper bout 10 inches. From the nut to the tail - 31 1/2 inches. Note that the space for the peghead is oversize so that I can make a variety of headstock designs on this basic body.

Now onto the electric charcoal grill starter-based side bender...Later

A pause in the action

I need to put building on hold while I organize (note I did not say reorganize) the workshop. At least guitar building. I am going to make a mobile base for the table saw. The old Sears casters are poor at best. Here is the model I'm following.

About the shop.....

I don't have one. I share our "basement" with the water heater, washer, dryer, pantry and storage. So things can, and will get chaotic. One thing I have invested in is a dust collection system. Its minimal, but works well. Its a Dust Deputy.I bolted it onto my aging Genie (no longer made) shop vac. No more filters, no more dust blowing out the top. No more sawdust in my dress shirts. Nice.

The first mistake, but only virtual

Well, I don't think there is a spindle sander in my immediate future, so I got out my files, rasps, sandpaper, palm sander and a hunk of steel pipe, and started smoothing and contouring. Pioneer style. Its a funny process, feeling where a curve is not curving, where the subtle humps are and feeling them go away. Very tactile.

That done, I went back to my drawings to layout where the braces on the top would go. I realized immediately that the soundhole in my original drawing was drawn on the lower bout side of the waist and no x-bracing was going to fit.

Then I panicked and thought I'd made the whole guitar too short. A perusal of other's designs (pictures on the web of other home builders and the"guts" of their wiessenborns) re-assured me that 31 1/2 inches from the nut to the bottom of the guitar was just fine. I moved the hole up into the upper bout and got the bracing pattern to work out. I lost 2 frets, but, hey, its a weissenborn and the fret board are more ornamental than functional.

Note the stolen Taylor style bridge borrowed from a SketupUp file posted on the Google SketchUp "Warehouse". Its where I got the beginnings of the tuning machines as well. A note on those. I play dobro now and I find reaching around to tune the top three strings a pain. Hence the slotted head and inverted (knobs up) tuners.

I was on hold for a while, but today I contracted laryngitis and was stuck at home. I took the opportunity to tweek the mold (still in the "stack of tops and bottoms" stage) and cut 40 pieces of 1" x 2" x 3" pine blocks

from two leftover peices of stud in the basement. These are the spacers between the top and bottoms of each half of the mold and create the inner surface of the mold. I am using the type described by John Kinkhead in his book "Build You Own Acoustic Guitar".

Next: Gluing together the mold and the assault on the barbecue starter-side bender!!!!

The start

Well, I dont have a large format printer, so I layed out a grid on a piece of Masonite (1/8") and using SketchUp, I figured out the profile to the nearest 64th of an inch. Then on the masonite, I used a digital calipers to transfer the profile.

I cut out the profile on the bandsaw. Four pieces of 3/4" plywood are screwed together the outline traced onto the top piece. Then took this good awful heavy 3" x 10" x 40" chunk of wood and started cutting out the profile. Below is the result

Its a lot lighter now. Now I have to find a spindle sander to smooth the inside surface. I have left hints for Father's day. We'll see.

Introduction

I've been playing guitar (seriously) for about ten years. I fooled around with it before that. On youtube, I discovered a world of fellow travelers, fingerstylists, accomplished and just learning. One of the more accomplished is a fellow from belgium named "daddystovepipe". Carl (his real first name), is a master of blues guitar, and was playing a "lap steel guitar" in a number of his videos. I was intrigued enough to look around and get hooked. Then I heard David Lindley play one in concert and had to have one. I tried the ones available at local music stores, but they didn't sound like Carl's. I even visited a luthier in South Carolina while at a music camp, but his "affordable" versions were, well, flimsy and without soul. I settle on a dobro and while I like its sound, its has little bottom. Its all treble.

I played the dobro occasionally, but I got "distracted" with the luthier itch. My first attempt was a funky mandolin made fom a solid wood through-body neck and a sheet metal biscuit tin. Its called the moon cake mandolin. I've gotten enough positive comments on it that I figured I would try the next build, a weissenborn.

For the uninformed a weissenborn guitar is a Hawaiian lap steel. There is not neck as such. The body is hollow all the way from the bottom to the nut. It is played with a steel rather than fretted. So not frets to set or neck to carve. Here is Carl demonstrating a few.

This blog is a chronicle of this first attemp as a real guitar. I have a full time job and family, so progress will not be lightning speed.

Being the hacker I am, I figured, do it on the computer first. My wife introduced me to a 3d sketching tool called SketchUp (now provided by Google). I spend a couple of months tweeking a design

than incorporates a classical style head to allow the tuners to be accessed from above (see the picture. Here is most of the guitar and the mold. (more later)