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!!!!
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