Wheelie's 2012 Challange Build Thread -- COMPLETED

I've got some lumber, an idea and might have the time. We'll see where it goes from there.

Steve

 

Thanks Roger and E!

So I should post this. I hope we don't get points off for bad photography.


What we have there is Ipe and Birdseye Maple. There is plenty of ipe to make a body and way more than enough maple for the neck. That wouldn't be all that much fun and you certainly would not want to it hang around your neck for any length of time. So that leaves us with way to much ipe for a neck and not near enough maple for the body.

I marked out the maple.

Cut it to length.

Ran it through the jointer.

And we'll set this aside for a while.

 

Ipe.

It's heavy, really heavy. It will sink in water. It does have a reasonably low damping rate and is tough as nails. Makes a great fret board. So I roughed one out.

Here's some table saw, bandsaw, thickness sander action.





.357" , that's a little thick, better than a little thin. It's only about .040" over as the stock for the neck is only 11/16" thick, so I'll need 1/16" more fret board to get to a 1" neck.

 

Started the neck. Since there isn't enough maple to make a body, I went neck through to stretch the resources.
Marked it out, bandsawed pattern routed, all the usual stuff.

 

Drilled tuner haloes and then on to the thickness sander. The two other pieces are to build up the neck in the body area.



Thickness sanders get you close to where you want to go but we need a bit of help to really fine tune a joint. I use this piece of steel that the brother-in-law ground flat for me to get that last little bit. I put a fresh piece of self stick 100 grit sand paper on top and did the scrub until the pencil marks are gone thing.




That's all for today.

 

I'll make sure and not post pics of the whole shop, that might be too much for some guys.

This is my first neck through so we'll see how it goes.

I did get a call and had to go back to the shop for some paying work. While I was waiting I attacked the birdseye with a few tools.

 

This is not good. This is a big steaming pile of not good. I've only got 1/32" of extra material to get these where I want them. Time for a plan B. Plan B has always been to force things back to plan A.

Time for beer.

 

Thanks Dave. Thanks Dilbone.

Muzikp, I missed your post yesterday. I do carpentry and woodwork for a living and sometimes forget that everyone doesn't have 9 routers and 7 sanders and a lathe and 2 band saws and 2 table saws... and there are still tools I need to get.

That is a pretty intense piece of Birdseye Maple, I hope I can save it. I lit up the supplier for selling me such poorly dried lumber, we'll see where that goes.

Had a few minutes to devote to this today, so I made a steam box to see If I can tame the beast. I still have to make some clamping cauls for when the wood comes out of the box, they have to have a bit of curve to them to compensate for spring back.




Nothing fancy is needed, just a roughly built box that's not too much bigger than required. The dowels hold the pieces up so the steam can get all the way around the wood. You build these boxes fairly tight because they have to trap steam, but too tight and they go boom. Put a bit of pitch on it and a small drain hole so the water can drain off. Missing from this pic is the steamer and the thermometer. We'll get to that tomorrow or Sunday.

Steve

 

I took part of the day off today and got back to the Tele thing.

Did some fretboard stuff.

 

I cut the taper close to dimension freehand on the tablesaw.


Then I did the headstock thing.

 

They say time heals all wounds. It seems the Maple has gotten over it's separation anxiety and is ready to play nice. No force needed just some thickness sanding.


Then I traced some lines and did some cutting.

 

And at the end of the day, we have this strange pile o' stuff.