Staining the Back & Pre-Staining the Soundboard

Saturday, September 19, 2009

Since my last post I have finished staining the back and am really happy with the results and have spent a considerable amount of energy testing and researching how to stain the soundboard without ruining it - and I think I have figured it out.

First, lets take a look at the back.

As you will recall, I left you last time with the back and sides stained once with my Tobacco Brown stain and then sanded it off in order to bring out the shimmer of the maple. From there, I applied my finish stain.

I started by applying the Tobacco Brown around the outside edge and then feathered it up toward the center where no stain is yet applied.

Then, starting from the center, I applied Amber stain and worked my way out. When done (a pretty easy process, really), the hardest part was making the transition from dark to light smooth and not to dramatic.

Then it was time to start working on the test wood again to figure out how to stain the soundboard. As you may recall, I tried this once on my first junk soundboard and was not at all happy with the results. When I tried again this time, instead of preparing the wood with a hide-glue solution, I tried it without any preparation other than sanding. Sadly, as with the previous attempt, I hated the results. Here is what some of those looked like:

In this composite shot, the lower left area is actually a bit of a success since it shows where I made an attempt after applying a pre-stain (I will get to that in a minute). The other three areas show where the stain has been absorbed by the wood in way-too-random of fashion. My goal is to get a much more even distribution.

This shot shows my second sunburst staining attempt (disappointing) as well as where I am testing of my top coat.

Time to go back to the Mandolin Cafe again and do some research.

After reading many threads in the Cafe’s “Builder’s” forum, it became apparent that hand-rubbing a sunburst stain on a spruce soundboard is difficult, at best. Many of the pros have a hard time with it and some don’t even bother with doing it by hand but use an airbrush instead.

I don’t have an airbrush. And even if I did, I don’t have a place (or the knowledge) to use it.

In addition to this, however, I did learn a couple of ways to improve my chances of success.

First way is sanding. The level of sanding, the thoroughness of it and the attention to this bit of detail is CRITICAL to the success of hand-rubbing a sunburst stain. I already knew it was important to get rid of all the scratches left from rougher grit papers and scraping marks, but what I did not know was that sanding to too-fine of a grit is not good, either. By stopping at 220 grit, the surface of the spruce is left a bit “fuzzy” (I see this under my magnifying glass) allowing the less porous areas of the wood to absorb more of the stain, more like the way the end-grains do. On my two full-soundboard test attempts I had sanded down to 600 grit so for my smaller test areas I sanded again to a 220 grit.

The other way is to find and apply a store-bought Pre-Stain. Using a pre-stain apparently seals the end-grains enough to prevent the stain from soaking in too much, but not enough to prevent it from soaking in at all. The result should be to allow for a more even distribution of stain across both end-grains and straight-grains.

I attempted to make my own pre-stain on my first test using the hide-glue, but not having a good idea how to handle it and a fear that the glue itself would prevent the stain from “taking”, I might have sanded too much of it off again before applying my stain. In any case, that attempt did not work, so I went out and bought a can of Min-Wax Pre-Stain that is especially made for water-based stains.

Here is how one area of one of my soundboards looked after using the Min-Wax Pre-Stain:

As you can see, not only is the light-colored ring no longer there (this I attribute mostly to rougher sanding), but the end-grain has taken a lot less stain than it did the first time. It took a whole lot less effort to get this result, too.

So, now that I have a technique that looks like it will work, I will be staining my soundboard for real this weekend. This is how I am doing it.

Here is the soundboard before applying anything to it. I have sanded it down to 220 grit, wetted it twice to raise the grain and then re-sanded.

Using old T-shirt material, both inside and out, I have created a “swab” as an applicator. This is the same kind of swab I am using for applying my stain and finish later.



I find that the wood appears to soak this stuff right up, so I will be applying two coats of it. These photos are of my first coat and I have let it dry over-night. This morning I applied my second coat (that appears to have soaked in every bit as quickly as the first one) and will wait at least until this afternoon before attempting to apply the stain.

Carving the Replacement Soundboard

Monday, May 4, 2009.

Not a lot got done in the last week, but enough I guess to still say I am moving ahead even if much of it was put in to remaking the soundboard.

I started the week by removing the clamps from the peghead where I had glued the front veneer and then gluing on the back veneer. The front veneer is ebony wood and the back is simply a thin maple.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that virtually no glue got into the truss rod pocket so that little mistake didn't end up hurting.


Then I moved on to the soundboard. Unlike the original soundboard, the raw wood for this one came in a bit warped which made it a bit more difficult to glue up and then made it a lot more important to plane flat before starting to carve. This is not really a straight forward thing to do when your would is not flat on both sides but rather wedge shaped. Obviously, a method must be found to allow the wedged side to face down while feeding it through the power-planer. For this, I remembered reading that Lynn Dudenbostel uses a couple of strips of wood as supports - so I thought I would try it.

I dug out a long, thin piece of scrap wood that shipped as a stiffener with something else (I can’t remember what), cut it in half, and glued it onto the spruce blank.


Knowing that the areas where the glue is applied (pretty much only under the clamps) is going to be carved away anyway and that the strips themselves are nothing more than scrap, I figured the gluing was a pretty good method for making sure the strips stayed in the same location from one pass to the next. Seems I was right.


Once I had the one side nice and flat and my outline drawn on, it was time to carve. Here is where I am as of now.


As you might notice, unlike the first soundboard, I have begun carving the scroll as well as the body on this one. I decided to abandon the idea of carving the ivy leaves on the scroll as I had originally planned and go forward with a traditional scroll. I made this choice because I am finding that this project is challenging enough without this additional feature. I will, however, go ahead with the inlay as I had previously planned.

Carving the Soundboard

Saturday, March 14, 2009.

This week I started on my soundboard. As you might recall, I purchase my European Spruce Top Wood from Stewart-MacDonald back in January and only now have I really been able to get to work on it. I may well have purchased a bit early, as I speculated back then, but I’m certainly glad to have it now.

It arrived as a mostly precut, book-matched pair of pieces (see my post “Arrival!” in January for pictures) that I finished cutting in half using a handsaw. Next, using my hand planer, I planed the freshly cut section of each of the two halves flat. Then, using my truing board, I dressed the mating edges of each half in preparation for gluing. Below are the results of my truing process.

I was pretty impressed with the final results from the truing process and found that holding the two pieces together up to a light, there were no gaps. Not too bad, I think.

One note - If you choose, as I did, to make the top guide of your truing board from plywood (and I guess this would hold true regardless of what wood you choose), be sure to sand down the very top edge, not so much to effect the squareness of the truing edge, but just enough to get rid of any splinters that might be there. I neglected to do this and ended up with a pretty good sized splinter in the base of my thumb. The price of getting excited, I guess.

So here is the soundboard while the glue is setting. I used my 192 gram strength hide glue for the joint and really like the results.

After letting the glue dry overnight and most of the next day, I used my trusty hand plane again and got the interior surface nice and flat. I would have preferred to use a powered planer for this, but I don’t have one (yet) nor do I know anyone who does. I am really quite pleased with how flat I was able to get it, though, with the hand plane.

Next I traced the finished outline of the top onto the interior surface of the wood using my acrylic template.

MISTAKE #3 (well, really close anyway): As I began to carve, fortunately no more than just the cavity you see in this picture, I realized that I had traced the outline UPSIDE-DOWN. Had I not notice this, I would have ended up making #1 a left-handed mandolin! But because I was so early in the carving process, I was able to erase my outline (done in pencil, thankfully) and re-trace it and continue.

I decided to do all my soundboard carving using hand tools rather than trying some of the power tool methods I have read about (drill press, router, etc.). I did this mostly because I already have a pretty nice selection of woodcarving tools that I am pretty comfortable using and, well, because I don’t have most of the other types (yet). For the soundboard, I am pretty happy with this decision. It is pretty easy to do, goes pretty quickly, and I really like the feel.

As I carved and as Mr. Siminoff recommends in his book, I used my soundboard gauges regularly as I carved to make sure I didn’t go too deeply, too often.

Here are some more pictures of my carving process.



In this picture, you can see I went ahead and trimmed off most of the excess material around the edges. I did this in preparation for starting on the top side.

It may not be really clear from this photo, but I missed on my depths a bit in a couple of places (too deep mostly on the edges). I am hoping this won’t affect the overall product too much, so I am going ahead with it anyway.

Something I found rather interesting was an effect of lighting. All through my initial carving, I worked in my room under pretty normal light. Turning the part back and forth as I carved (I did not have my piece bolted to the bench) and feeling the surface with my hand as I went, I was pretty happy that the surface graduations were pretty smooth. After I got far enough along, I took my soundboard downstairs to shamelessly showoff to my wife a little. At this point it was early evening and the light at her computer where she was sitting was relatively dark so, when I turned the piece to get better lighting on it, the shadow effects from the dimmer light really showed all of the imperfections I had been unable to see before. The thing looked horrible (she ooo’d and aahh’d, anyway - she is so sweet). Now that I knew, I took it back upstairs and commenced to work some more, this time in low lighting. This worked out pretty well.

One of the things I read about in several places was that other (real) luthiers use “scrapers” to smooth the surfaces of their soundboards and backs. At first I wasn’t too sure about this but as I go closer to my desired surface heights I found that my woodcarving tools were just not right for the job and that sandpaper wasn’t doing it, either. Because I didn’t have any scrapers in my toolbox, I decided to make one myself from an old, large wallpaper trowel I hadn’t used for years. After cutting the metal blade off of the trowel handle using an angle grinder with a cut-off blade, I shaped one edge of it to rough shape with my belt sander and the finish-shaped and sharpened it with a hand-file.

Talk about a handy tool, this thing rocks. I used it not only to smooth out the obviously rough areas, but also to “plane” off larger areas that were just a bit too high. I love it. You can see it in the top right corner of the picture below.

This picture shows where I have traced an outline on the top side of the wood and an edge line around the perimeter in preparation of carving on the top. I also show the templates I will use to gauge my progress on it and my scraper.

Here is a closer look at the edge line I drew. By measurement from Siminoff’s drawing, the edge width should end up being just under 3/16” thick. To mark this on my wood, I found that my mechanical pencil, laying on the workbench, makes a mark just at 3/16” - good enough, I figure, to use for roughing the top surface.

Last night I spent about two hours rough carving on the top side. Here are my results, so far.


This picture shows how I am unintentionally “signing” my mandolin as I go. This blood is not from gouging myself with a tool, as you might expect, but from a small splinter that stabbed me in the finger while wiping away some chips from the soundboard. It was such a small stab that I didn’t even know it bled until I saw it on the wood. The wound had already quit bleeding by the time I looked. Oh well. Thankfully this blood spot will be carved off later.

Second Arrival

Friday, January 30, 2009

Yet another big day for the receiving department (me, at the front door). At about 5:00 pm, UPS dropped off the first of my two books and then at about 6:30, the Fed Ex guy delivered my order from LMI.



There’s that mandolin again, sneaking in for reference (camera hog!)


Inside the box from LMI were my 4 lengths of kerfed lining (taped nicely to a stiff backing board to prevent damage in shipment, 2 spruce end blocks, 1 ebony fretboard, and my hide glue. Though I failed to get it in the photo, the glue also came with a printed sheet of instructions telling me pretty much everything I should need to know for how to prepare, use and store it.


Here is a closer shot of the glue and blocks. The blocks nominally measure 3” x 5-1/4” x 1” thick.


And, finally, here is a close-up of the fretboard (with the Sharpie as a reference - had to shoo away the mandolin for this one).

On first inspection of the book, The Mandolin Manual - The Art, Craft and Science of the Mandolin and Mandola by John Troughton, it appears that it might be just a bit off the mark for me when building my F-style. I say this because within the first paragraph of the book is explains that “The ‘traditional’ Neapolitan instrument (the classification he earlier gave the archtop mandolin) is more difficult to construct that a flat-back and is beyond the scope of this book.” He then goes on to say that it is a good book for reference when building a bowl-back instrument. As I flip through it, though, it does seem to describe and detail a lot of how-to’s and things not to do. For an example of what not to do, on page 55, when describing how to prepare the edges of the book-matched top-wood for gluing, he writes “Do not feel tempted to use abrasive paper on a straight-edge to get the centre-join edges straight: sanding a true, straight edge is very difficult and in any event the abrasive rounds off the edges and tears up the grain...” and so on. Since it’s the hope of finding just this kind of information that prompted me to buy the book in the first place, I am still looking forward to reading it through. Once I do, I will post a more informed opinion here.

For now, though, I clearly need to do some more reading (especially after reading that about not sanding the joint) before I start butchering my material. So its off to the arm chair for me.

Until next time....

Arrival!

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Woohoooo! My first package arrived in the mail today!


It turned out to be my European Spruce Top Wood and my practice side wood (the mandolin in the picture is for size reference - I just couldn’t think of a better reference). This order came from Stewart-MacDonald and it arrived unbelievably quickly. I placed my order on Saturday, they got it out their door (according to their email) on Monday, and it was received at my doorstep on Wednesday. Pretty good service, in my book.

Here is what I got.


Each of the two items came in two pieces. The Top wood is a single wedge cut board split down the middle and the practice wood is two pieces taped together (mandolin for reference again).


It never occurred to me that the two pieces of the top wood would come still joined together, but it’s pretty obvious when I think about it that this makes it impossible for anyone to question whether they are a book-matched set when they arrive this way. This picture shows both ends and where they stopped sawing at the one end. Each of the two pieces is 6” wide by 17” long and measures 3/8” thick on the thin edge and 1” thick on the thick edge.


This just shows that the practice wood arrived as two pieces taped together. They are each 4” wide by 25” long and just a horse-hair under 1/8” thick.

There really isn’t a whole lot I can do with these right now, even if I wanted to. About the only things I could do are, of course, practice bending and separate the two top pieces. If the old axiom “use it or lose it” holds true here, seems like practicing bending before I’m ready to bend the real thing would be a bit risky. Likewise, since I don’t have the hide-glue yet with which to glue together my book-matched top pieces, there is not much value in cutting them apart right now, either.

Guess I’ll go do some more surfing...

Introduction

Sunday, January 25, 2009

Welcome to my blog.

Before I get started, I want to share something with you. I really have no idea what I am getting myself into here. I have never built a stringed musical instrument before, let alone been to a shop where they do. I do not (yet) have a shop full of lutherie tools (in fact, I don’t own ANY luthier-specific tools yet), nor have I had any training other than general woodworking things Dad showed me as a kid and one basic shop class in High School. All that aside, I’m going for it full-bore.

This project will be to build a highly detailed, customized F-style mandolin with white pearl inlays and a custom carved front. I will start with raw materials - no preformed or pre-shaped pieces (except, of course, for the tuners, tailpiece, end pin, and such) - and use typical instrument grade components like European spruce for the top, curly maple for the back, sides, and neck, and hide glue for my adhesive. I intend to use power tools to rough-out most of the waste materials (no CNC) and then hand carve and finish everything else including the top, back, and neck. I hope to do all this with only the help of some books I bought (see the next post for details) and whatever information I can find on the internet. I will be doing all this work at my house (with my wife’s blessing, of course) in either the basement/garage or in an upstairs bedroom where we currently store, and occasionally use, exercise equipment. As I go along, I intend to detail everything I buy, build, or modify including tools and materials. I also plan to share all the prices I find and, when it is not obvious, why I chose one selection over the others.

I have decided to start this project for three reasons: One, I am bored and have no real “hobby” I can get into here at the house. Sure there is yard-work, the honey-do list, etc., but when those are done (or being ignored - don’t tell my wife), I don’t have a project. Two, I have been teaching myself to play the mandolin for about 8 years, love the instrument, and now, with the price of quality instruments being what it is, I would love to have - but not spend all that money on one. Three, I love deeply involved, intricate projects, where the results are lasting, visually apparent, and impressive. This seems like a good way to satisfy all three.

So now that you know why I want to build a mandolin, you may be wondering why I have decided to build what promises to be about the most difficult level of mandolin build right out of the chute. Wouldn’t it be better to start with maybe an A-style mandolin, possibly a flat-top, or even a kit? Travel your learning curve on an instrument that is a little less costly? Sure it would. All those are much safer and probably far more intelligent approaches to learning the art and craft of lutherie. But that is not me. Traveling any of those paths would feel like a compromise and one that would likely end up causing me to lose interest, take short-cuts, or possibly even lower my standards as I build. I don’t want to do that. I want the extra challenge and the potential to finish with a result where people go “WOW...And this was his first one?”

Lets just hope I am up for the task.

I would also like to take the time to credit a couple of guys for some of the inspiration and information I have used to get started here. I anticipate checking back with both as I go along with my build.

If you haven’t found him yet, there is guy who has his own blog where has started building an A-style mandolin from a kit (clearly he is far more intelligent then I am). Check him out HERE.

There is guy in Japan, an amateur luthier, too, who has a blog detailing his build of a guitar. It’s quite impressive. Check his work out HERE.

I’m going to go ahead and end this first post here and get into details of what I have done so far in my next post.