Sunday, June 5, 2011

June 5-6 weekend update

This weekend I spent about 3-4 hours working on the guitar.  First, I went ahead and did a second cut with the Dremel router to make the pockets deeper.  Here is the result:
Pockets routed to final depth
Finally, after making this final Dremel cut I'm ready to start hand carving.  Before I began, I took a piece of scrap bass wood and drew a small section on it to mimic the hair from the guitar.  My goal here was to make sure I could actually carve using the hand gouges.  The result was not too bad, so I started on the guitar.  I think the body is going to be the hardest part to shape, so I started with a piece of the hair on the right side.  My thought is that I can "learn" how to use the gouges on the hair since the hair should be fixable, but the body not so much.  If I jack that up, it's game over.  One unfortunate thing I found when I started carving, is that the entire guitar body is coated in some kind of protecting layer that looks like hardened glue.  It's actually pretty thick (~1mm or so).  This means I have to carve through this layer first, just to get to the wood.  It's a pain, but I'm going to have to do this.  Anyhow, here is the result of the first part of the hair I did with the hand tools (i.e. no Dremel action).  It actually went faster than I though (~1 hour)
Laminate removed (from just the hair portion)
This is what the hair is starting to look like using the hand tools (not complete yet)

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