I made a shiny thing...

[mattia]

...for immortalradical's guitar. Been slow, like all the building stuff, but I've got this feeling the body's going to be together by this weekend. Perhaps hopeless optimism, but at the very least I should have a bent rimset and some braced plates; whether I get the top glued down depends on how the voicing/tuning process goes. And then it's off to bind two

Comments

[applez]

Is far too pretty (pant, lust, drool). :-)

Btw, remind me to make you my family doctor in future. :-)

[iainjclark]

That is a gorgeous piece of work.

[talvalin]

Beautiful. I'm almost tempted to dig out my old electro-acoustic and learn how to play with my fingers properly.

I just watched the Tenacious D film, and had to immediately get my guitar down and jam on that for half an hour. It's a silly film but very funny at times.

And your link tag isn't properly closed :P

[jem7v]

Very nice rosette.

Any good tips for bending sides? Do you use a bending iron, a bending form like the popular Fox side bender, or something else entirely? I found an easy way do it for a violin, and now I'm trying to find something equivalently easy and cheap-o for guitar.

[jem7v]

I do it with electric heat blankets and a solid MDF form - I'll probably post a few pics of the doolin-style bender I'm almost finished putting together soon, along with shots of the bending process

[hackerguitar]

The other thing to think about with a blanket is using a router speed control to vary the blanket's temperature. A good router speed control does a good job; regular rheostats or pots will cause you fits and overheat with the current draw.

Blankets and forms have another benefit, too: they allow for bending wood that has no business being bent at all. I've got some walnut which is unbelievably figured, and the form allowed for it to bend enough to line with yellow cedar (for stability). Bender == good.

[hackerguitar]

Nice piece of work. Is that one of the Rivolta tops you laid in last year?

I need to post Niles Guitar Works' latest bit for you as well - just put together a top of salvaged port orford cedar, standard three-ring rosette (5-9-5, herringbone center). The port orford's not as stiff as good Euro spruce but utterly resistant to splitting; it's salvage from a local architect's project, and it's great stuff.

And I just picked up some hundred-year-old redwood with about a billion and four grains to the inch (well, forty, anyhow). Stiff as can be, and glue actually sticks to it.

[mattia]

The Rivolta tops were this year, and while the top is from Rivolta, it's a relatively pale Western Red Cedar top (freshly sanded, so the colour will return soon enough, I'll wager).

Redwood's a very nice wood, though, have a little from Hank Mauel (some nice FA, TB and ST tops, whatever that means...the FA tops are particularly lovely and stripey) that I'm very much looking forward to building with.

[hackerguitar]

I thought it was spruce, just making the assumption that the color in the photo had been darkened. Nice top.

THe FA/TB/ST tops are all from specific trees, and the names are abbreviated to LS (Lucky Strike) and the like. I don't recall the rest of them but there were five or six named logs, which have made some amazing guitars.

[mattia]

Oh I know what they stand for, I mean 'it ain't magick wood'..FA = Fine Art, because of the mineral streaking/colour, TB = tono basso, ST = Signing Tree. Lovely marketing speak and all that, but they are very nice tops.

I'm occasionally tempted to get some of those sinker tops purely on aesthetic grounds. One of those coupled with a maple guitar seems like a lovely opportunity for an 'inverted colour scheme' instrument...