Part 3: Take yer top off!

(click on any of the images to make them larger)

As per usual - I'm making this stuff up as I go...

When I first thought about making this 12-string I was planning on giving it a 'carved top.' For those not in the know - a carved top is pretty much what it sounds like - you carve the top of the guitar so that it has shape. A typical example is a Gibson Les Paul. Les Paul's usually have a mahogany body with a Maple top glued to it. The Maple top is then shaped (either by machine or by hand) to have a bit of a radius to it - kind of like a small arc.





















I have no idea if this adds to the tone or not but it does make the guitar look pretty cool.

Some Fender Guitars by contrast have a flat top.













I was going to glue a few pieces of wood together to form the top of this guitar (similar to the maple 'cap' on a Les Paul) and carve them with a router to have that Les Paul (or PRS) curve. That all changed when I went to Woodcraft this past weekend and found these beauties.



What you are looking at are two pieces of flamed maple glued to a strip of Cocobolo (which has a small strip of inlay added to the surface.









If you look closely - you will see the cut line on the top.

And here are a few shots of the cut top. I started out cutting this with a jig saw but because the wood is so thin (1/8th of an inch) it was breaking it instead of cutting it. I switched to the router - which took longer but came out better and did less damage to the wood.
I'm now trying to decide whether or not to stain the maple wine-red or coffee brown.
Decisions...

Part 2: Hog'n it

(click on the images to enlarge)

Who ever came up with the term 'to hog' captured so much with so little. I hogged out all of the wood from the chamber using a 1 1/4 inch forsner bit on the drill press. It made short work of that stuff and it means that I don't have to spend the next few weeks with my router. I didn't take a lot of pictures of this but you get the idea. You use the drill press to remove the majority of the chamber and then clean everything up with the router.

One note: be prepared for shavings. I filled my shop-vac with the piles of curly wood shavings from this process. I also found it helpful to vacuum every 5 or 6 holes as it became difficult to see what I was doing (where I was drilling) with all those shavings. I like this drill press (a lot). It makes so many things easier and more precise.



So, once I finished with the hogging I switched over to the router. Sadly, I took no pictures of this process but here's how it went:
I clamped the second MDF template to the wood and used a router bit with a template guide to smooth out the chamber walls. The template guide has a bearing on it that follows the shape of my template (warts and all). I made three passes with the template clamped to the body as the router guide and one pass using the wall of the chamber (once it got too deep to use the template). As you can see from the images I'm going to need to do a fifth pass to remove the pilot holes the forsner bit left behind. Which is fine as the wood has about 1/2 of an inch left to give. I'm thinking I'm going to go down another 8th of an inch. This should get rid of the pilot holes and still leave me with about 3/8 of an inch thickness to the back.



The center block is three and three quarter inches by 10 inches. This should be long enough (and wide enough) to mount the neck, two pickups and the bridge.
You can also see that I made the butt end of the body slightly thicker than the rest of the body. This is for the end-pin (aka strap pin) to have a little girth to sit in and also allow the top to have something substantial to sit on. I think I'm going to use curly maple for the top (aka 'cap'). I have some nicely flamed maple but it's not quite the right size - so we'll see what happens.

Some of you might be asking - 'hey - how come you haven't cut the body out of that block of wood yet?' I figured that since I had so much routing to do - it made sense to keep as much surface as possible (for as long as possible) for the router to sit on. Once I do the last pass with the router I won't need the extra wood any more and I'll cut out the shape.

Next up: 5th pass with the router and freeing the body from that block of wood.