Finished!

Thursday, November 19, 2009

Well, it’s finally finished. And much to my surprise and pleasure, it sounds good, too.

Here are some photos.

I must say it’s been a heck of a ride. I’m glad I took it and I hope everyone has enjoyed it with me. Now I’m looking forward to learning to play this for a while and then - you guessed it - get started on #2.

Short Update...

Saturday, October 24, 2009

Not much to report - I’ve been doing a lot of traveling as of late so I haven't had a whole lot of time to devote to this project. What little time I have had has been dedicated to scraping binding and applying finish.

I got to thinking after a comment from Wilbur in my previous post, that maybe one of the reasons I am having so much difficulty with hand-applying lacquer (runs, smudges, long drying times) is that I have been too impatient and have been applying it much to thickly and working it for much too long. So recently I started working the lacquer using a much smaller applicator (a small piece of t-shirt material folded twice) to soak up less, and applying it in very thin coats.

Working like this for several coats has proven to be the ticket, at least for me. Sure the first couple of coats on bare wood don’t give the glossy results I want in the end, but after a couple more coats I am now getting much closer to the results I am wanting. Hopefully, after I add a few more coats to some target areas, I’ll soon be ready to fit the bridge and string ‘er up.

Fitting the Nut

Sunday, July 26, 2009

Not having parts and then having to make yet another unanticipated business trip have really slowed down progress this week, but I have been able to get a little bit done.

As you might recall, one of the last things I did last week was to seal my test soundboard with a mildly diluted hide glue formula. After it dried for a couple days, I spent about two hours hand-sanding it off to what looks like bare wood. It is my understanding that the goal here is to “clog” the otherwise open pores of the wood with the hide glue to prevent the stain from soaking in too much without inhibiting the stain from getting to the majority of the wood fibers. From what I have read of other people’s attempts at this, its almost impossible to sand it off too much. So, armed with my trusty 80 grit paper followed by some 120 and then 220 grit paper, I sanded off the dry hide-glue layer. Here is what it looks like.

One of the interesting things I found while sanding the glue off was that this is a really good opportunity to find and correct many of the imperfections in the contour of the top. The hide-glue dries just a little bit darker than the color of the raw spruce so each dip and valley, regardless of how shallow, shows up. I was quite surprised at the number of irregularities I found. I believe using this will really help the appearance of the finished mandolin.

With the fretboard now in place, it was time to install the nut. But before I could do that, I realized I needed a padded block to go under the neck while the mandolin is laying on its back to prevent hold the peghead off of the workbench. For this I picked a scrap piece of wood that measured about 1-1/2” x 3” x 4”, cut a shallow wedge in the center of the 4” long face, and glued a piece of soft leather to it. Here is how it looks.

NOW it was time to install the nut.

I started by measuring the width of my slot with my digital calipers. I measured both edges to make sure they were about the same, and much to my surprise, they were within .001” of each other.


I then measured my nut blank (bone - ordered and received way back).

Since the difference between the two was almost half the thickness of the nut blank, I decided to use my drill-press-drum-sander to get it roughly to size. (I used a piece of scrap would to verify the thickness before committing to the nut itself).

Once run through the drum sander, I measured again.

With less than 1/10th of an inch remaining to trim, I stopped there and finished sizing by hand.


I already new that the height of the blank would need to be trimmed but before I could do that, I needed to be able to mark the correct fret height on the nut and this could most easily be done once the nut was correctly sized to fit the slot.

Now to find a way to mark it.

I read somewhere that somebody had taken a wooden pencil, cut it down the center to create a “half” pencil and used this to mark the fret height - so that is what I did. Rather than try to cut the pencil, though, I used my drum sander again to sand away the unwanted half of the pencil.

Using my drum sander once again, I removed all but about 0.30 inches of material above the fret line and then hand-contoured it to shape before gluing it into the slot with Titebond. Here is how it looks now.


As you can see on the top photo above (if you look really hard, anyway) you can see I have marked where the notches for my strings will.

My brother-in-law read my last post where I wrote about buying and using feeler gauges for saws and offered up an old set that he had (and no longer used) for creating my “saws”. Not being one to look a gift horse in the mouth, I accepted and found that this set has a much wider selection of thicknesses.

And, last but not least, the remainder of my parts finally arrived late this week. Now that they are here and assuming I get to stay home a bit more this week, I should be able to get the rest of my binding on and try my hand at staining. I am really looking forward to the staining - if I am lucky, I may get to even try it on the mandolin, not just the test piece.

Slotting the Fretboard

Saturday, June 20, 2009.

Well, happily, it appears I lied (well, how about "was mistaken"). I was able to get a little a little bit done on the fretboard after all. Not only was I able to cut it to the ebony shape, I was also able to order, receive, and use my Stew-Mac fret saw and miter-box as well. I also learned a couple of valuable things.

The first thing I learned was that it is easier to shape the neck to the fretboard than it is to shape the fretboard to the neck. I’ll explain - the fretboard, as a whole, consists of the ebony veneer (or whatever hardwood you end up using - I am using ebony), the binding, and finally the frets. In Siminoff’s book, he has you shape the neck and then, later, go build the fretboard assembly. This is fine, assuming you are careful enough right from the beginning to not allow yourself to cut the neck too close to its finished width. I did and, as I now know, I also went to far in a couple of places.

Another way thai I now know about, is to make the fretboard assembly first (since it is flat and thin it is much easier to control its dimensions) and then use it as your template for the final shaping of the neck. Why is this easier, you might ask? Well, for me anyway, having the fretboard done first gives me a real-world limit that, for some reason, is just psychologically better than a template - I know that the fretboard is what I will ACTUALLY be using and I cannot afford to make the neck narrower than it or I have to start over. With the template, however, I'm never quite sure where exactly to stop. It might be just me, but there it is.

So for this mandolin now, I am having to make the fretboard a bit narrow to match the neck, but since it’s mine and not for anyone else, this is something I can live with. It’s a learning thing, after all.

To get the proper shape then for the fretboard, I started by cutting the ebony blank to the shape of Siminoff’s template. This gave me the correct length and shape, especially for the base. I then held the initial cutout against the neck and traced its shape onto the back of the ebony and then, because I am going to bind this with some 0.06” thick plastic binding, I offset the traced line by about 0.05”. I then re-cut the ebony to its new, narrower dimension, ready for the binding. Once the binding is installed and the assembly is attached to the neck, I should have just enough overhang to allow me to scrape the binding to match the neck without making it look too thin.

All of this I did last Saturday and, before setting out for my business trip, I also ordered my fret saw and miter box from Stewart-MacDonald. When I returned on Friday evening, there on my desk sat my new saw and miter box, just begging to get used, so today I did. This is also where I learned my other lesson for the week - cut your fret slots BEFORE you cut your fretboard to shape. Why? Because the wood is still square (or at least you should be able to make it that way) and this is really helpful when using a miter box which is, by design, cutting the slots perpendicular to its sides. Because I had already cut my fretboard sides on an angle, I now had to find a way to line it up so that my slots were cut perpendicular to the centerline of the fretboard. Here is what I did.


In the first photo, you can see I have screwed the miter box down to my workbench. Fortunately, the designer of the box builds the thing with three counter-sunk holes so it can be screwed down without interfering with the work. I then placed a wedge shaped piece of wood inside the miter box to hold the centerline of my fretboard perpendicular to the cross-cut of the saw. This is actually one of the two scrap pieces from when I originally cut out the fretboard from the ebony blank. Once I had this located so that the slots at both ends could be cut, I glued it in place with Titebond. After the glue dried, I cut a slot in it with the fret saw. This served as my locating guide and is shown in the second photo.

The next set of photos show where I lined up and made my first cut.



When I was cutting the first couple of slots, I held the wood with my left hand while working the saw with my right. I figured I didn’t want to mess with having to clamp/unclamp for each of the 30 slots and the slots aren’t very deep...This, I found, is not the best way to do it. Not only was I pulling the wood away from the guide pretty regularly but my left hand got really tired, really quickly. Enough, I said. I used clamps for the rest of the slots - much easier to clamp and unclamp than to try to manually hold the wood with a fatigued hand.

In this shot you can see where I am using some wood cauls to hold the fretboard rather than just the clamps. I initially had to do this because of the design of my workbench and where I chose to screw down the miter box rather than because of the clamps or the work itself. Toward the end as I cut the last few slots, though, it became necessary anyway in order to clamp the work securely, so close to the saw blade. I think this shows up pretty well in the picture.

And here it is after all the slots were cut.

This picture shows that some of the slots are off by a very small amount one way or the other. I credit this to the fact that I cut the fretboard to shape before cutting the slots. Had I slotted it first with a square piece of wood, I feel confident the slots would have been more accurately located and probably more square. Once again though, I think this something I can live with. If it turns out to be enough of an issue once I am finished, I can always remove it (I will be using hide-glue to attach it to the neck) and build a new one to replace it.

Neck Joint Cutting - For Real

Sunday, June 7, 2009.

Well I finally cut my neck joint - this was the step I feared the most (so far). Having never attempted a dovetail joint before, I was just new I would mess it up to the point that I would have to start all over. Fortunately, it looks like this won’t be the case - at least not for this reason, anyway.



Cutting the body side of the joint was really straight forward since the design has this cut square with the body. Since I have yet to attach the back, the rim sets nicely on my bandsaw and once the shape was transferred from the template, it was as simple to cut as you could want.

As you can see from the photos, I ended up needing to install a shim on one side of my dovetail. This is a piece of the same maple veneer I have used elsewhere and ended up being necessary once I got finished trimming and sanding the curved section of the joint on both the neck and the body. The veneer turned out to be almost exactly the right thickness right out of the box. All I did was to cut a section the right length and width, glue it on to the side of the joint and let it set up before attaching the neck.

You will also notice that there is a spacer that has been attached to the head-block. Because the fretboard will eventually extend over the body but not be attached to it, there needs to be a support onto which it will attach. Furthermore, the design has a binding strip that matches up to with the 15th fret (I will be installing that pretty soon) and yet another extension that will act as a support out over the body. This piece fills the gap between the neck joint and the 15th fret that would otherwise be there. If this is not all perfectly clear, I imagine it will be once I get that part done and some photos up. In the mean time, here are some pictures of the joint in neck.




And finally, here is the joint glued together.






In addition to the shim I talked about earlier, I added a very thin shim to the opposite side of the dovetail in the back. I installed this shim as my last step just after the joint was made up. It acted to really tighten the joint up and to add just a tiny amount of twist that I needed to square the plane of the fretboard with the body.

When you look at the back of the joint, you will probably notice that the base of the neck is set back a bit from the body. This is a result of my over zealous sanding way, way back when I was first shaping the neck. I realized pretty early that this would likely be a problem at this stage, but figured it was a small enough issue that I would go ahead with it rather than to make a another neck. Since I intend to finish this part of the mandolin quite dark and this is not a critical piece, I plan to make a maple shim to fit here.

This can be our little secret.

Now to let the glue dry and get started working on the rest of the fretboard.

Jig for Cutting The Dovetail Joint

Saturday, May 31, 2009.

In researching how to cut myself a dovetail style neck joint, Mr. Siminoff shows a jig for holding the neck at the proper angle when using the bandsaw. Unfortunately I find that he does not give any indication just how to build this jig, only a couple of photos of his in use. So, the last couple of days have been focused on making this jig and I think I’ve got it. Here is what it looks like and how I made it.

This jig has three important surfaces - the base, the flat that the peghead is clamped to, and the ledge where the base of the joint rests. The base and the ledge are pretty easy to figure since they are parallel to one another, but he flat for the peghead is a bit more tricky. Since the goal here is to hold the back of the neck joint perpendicular to the surface of the bandsaw table, this flat needs to be cut at an angle that combines the 6 degrees plus the angle of the peghead with respect to the fretboard. This means I had to find a way to layout, cut and then verify that the fretboard plane was, in the end, held at 6 degrees off of vertical.

The first thing I did was to I created a jig block by cutting up a 1x6 of hardwood and gluing it back together to create a 6x6 block approximately 12 inches long.

Next, I did some trigonometry to determine the rise and run of a 6 degree angle. This, I calculated, corresponded closely to 1 inch of rise for a run of 10-7/16 inches. Knowing this, I had a way to verify that I really had a 6 degree rise.

Then, rather than try to calculate what the angle of the flat needed to be, I chose to approximate this angle by holding neck and peghead in the approximate location and sketching a line. Once I was pretty comfortable that my sketch was close enough, I cut out the rough shape on my bandsaw and rough-sanded the peghead flat on my belt-sander.

Now that I had something to work with, I needed to be able to clamp the neck and peghead to the jig. For this, I chose to drill four 7/8” diameter holes in the sides of the jig. These holes are big enough to allow me to insert the fixed end of my small C-clamps and clamp without getting in the way.

With my peghead now clamped in place and the heal of the neck joint just clear of the ledge, I was ready to verify my angle. This was done using a flat scale I have and a framing square.


By laying the scale on the fretboard and holding the framing square against it, I am able to make a height measurement at both the “zero” position (in this case, at the edge of the peghead veneer) and then at the 10-7/16” distance. Since my goal is to determine an angle, not an actual distance, I don’t care what the actual measurements are, only that the difference is close to 1 inch. As you can see from the two photos above, that is what I was able to get - just under 3" in the first photo and just under 4" in the second one (the first time I measured I was a shallow, so I took the jig back to my belt-sander until it was good).

Now that my jig is ready, all I have to do is layout my dovetail, create a spacer block to mount to the head block, and work up the nerve to make the dovetail cuts in both the head block and the neck.

Meanwhile, here are some more pictures of the neck clamped in the jig.






And finally, here you can see that the neck joint and jig will just be able to fit into my bandsaw when it is in its most open setting. Thank goodness. I was afraid for a while I was going to have to shell out some big bucks for a larger bandsaw (or cut the joint completely by hand - I really did not want to have to do that!)

Later.