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)