I return, with more photos!

So, I know I didn't post for 2 weeks, but that was for a valid reason: I can't really make a meaningful progress post with just one photo, now can I? I've done it before, yes, but that was when it was something that caused both me and my aunt to literally burst out laughing. That one was special. Either way, though, I'm back, and I have new photos! First up, the photo from 2 weeks ago:

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Different environment from normal, and that's because we ended up moving to behind the workshop because we were getting a lot more sun than normal. Now, that may seem like a "steak too juicy, lobster too buttery" thing, but we were doing this 2 weeks ago, in what was essentially a heatwave. Not bad weather for working on guitars, but generally not decent for the British climate, which is "temperate". I consider myself to not live in the "temperate rainforest" bits of the UK, but Manchester is just coastal enough to feel it during the winter and summer, especially when we get the remains of the big storms from the US East Coast.

Anyway, you might think that it was done using a router. Well, actually, it was done "handraulically". If you haven't come across that one before, it's just a fun way of referring to manual, hand-level work. In essence, we carved that out using quarter-inch, half-inch and full-inch bevel chisels, along with that gouge there, and another quarter-inch gouge chisel. The idea is that we - yes, we, I actually had a real, proper hand in this bit - we would use the bevel chisels to mark along the sides of that Crimson Guitars router template I got in April. If you look back at the images from the previous guitar post, you'll notice it sat on top of the radius block we were using for the fretboard.

Anyway, the idea there was, of course, scribe into the cavity using the negative of the full cavity's positive. Don't worry, it makes sense - the template operates as a sorta matryoshka doll, in that it comes as 4 interlocked pieces: the main piece of MDF, the overall trem cavity shape, the spring and claw cavity, and the bridge block cavity. We used the overall cavity shape, with the spring & claw and bridge block cavity pieces removed, to manually carve out the trem spring cavity.

Speaking of the bridge block cavity, evidently the assumption is that, y'know, you'd go in from the top halfway, come out, flip over, and rout out the other half from the back, plus the spring/claw cavity. Small issue with that: we're not even slightly doing this normally. Remember, handraulics over power tools. As such, we ended up drilling out about a 14mm cavity where the bridge block goes. From there, we carved out the spring cavity until the top edge of the trem claw (i.e., where the springs don't hook on) was flush with the rebate for the trem cavity backplate. Speaking of that, we got that done yesterday:

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Yeah, that's totally worth 3 or 4 hours of work. Probably the first time in the entire build we've used a push saw, instead of a pull saw - and no, bandsaws don't count. Now, for the record, I still have no idea what I want to do for the control cavity backplate, but I have no less than four ideas, currently:

Idea 1: the Les Paul Personal, a semi-circular backplate with rounded "corners".
Idea 2: the Jackson Soloist backplate, a scalene triangle with rounded points.
Idea 3: the standard PRS "Boomerang" backplate shape, which is a distorted heart or, y'know, boomerang shape.
Idea 4: some other bullshit I'll probably figure out later.

One thing I'm certain on doing with the trem cavity backplate is, instead of six separate holes for the strings, like you see on vintage-style Stratocaster backplates, I'm going for one contiguous hole, a little bigger than the dimensions of the bridge block. I have experience with the vintage-style Strat backplate, and, long story short, I hate it. Even when it's just one string you're dealing with, like if you accidentally over-tightened the high E or G strings (the B string never seems at fault), there is a seemingly much-higher-than-zero chance that the ball-end of the string will randomly flop into the trem spring cavity. Mind you, that's on the Fretless, and honestly, I should really have made that using a string-through hardtail body. Oh well.

Now then. Further planning: what the hell do we do next? Well, as you would expect, we still need to put the fretboard on, and also put the frets in. More importantly, we need to carve out about… 4 or 5mm from the trem spring cavity, plus 0.5mm from the rebate of the trem backplate. You might be wondering why we need to remove up to 5mm from the cavity. Long story short, to prevent one of the main issues with trem springs, that being resonance, we're going to put each spring in heat shrink, which will dampen the springs while doing jack to the actual function of the trem.

From there, we've got quite a few things to do - we need to finish the craters for the knobs, we need to do the rebate for the switchplate to sit in (we could leave it proud, but good lord, no thank you, already got enough finger injuries), we need to actually open up the control cavity so we can do the wiring, which is kinda crucial for it to function (obviously), we need to do the finish, we need to put together the bocote pieces together. Then, from there, we actually need to do the wiring. It doesn't sound like much, but it's a pretty big workload. In fact, if you actually think about it, it's a hell of a lot of work, and I'm surprised this has only taken 1 and a bit years.

Do I think we'll get this done by August? Hopefully so. I don't really care if we get it done by then or not, it's just that it'd be really nice if we could get it done by then. But yeah, that's about it.

Catch ya on the flipside!

Les superbes rosettes créées par nos étudiants trouvent doucement leur place définitive dans la table... ❤️🔥

Le résultat d'un long chemin mené avec brio.

#lutherie #formation