Planing Guitar Braces with Handmade Thumb Planes

-
In the long-ago land of my childhood we clearly understood the high desert country of southeastern Oregon as the actual world. The rest of creation was distant as news on the radio.

William Kittredge, Owning It All, 1987



This is a top that I made several years ago from Sitka spruce, originally it was braced entirely with old growth redwood, but I glued the bracing on when the wood moisture content was very high. That summer the top "potato chipped", I had to remove the "fan" bracing with a hand plane and glued on bars made from Douglas fir with fish glue. I took this photo this afternoon to show off the little thumb planes I made, whenever I show them to visitors to my shop they ask if they work. As you can see they do.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How to Make a Traditional Froe Mallet

-
Image
What holds the Holy of the Holies, what did Brahma become? Wood. Why will aspen always tremble? For the nails driven into the cross. What makes the color of wood? The soil it tastes. Cradle, fiddle, coffin, bed: wood is a column of earth made ambitious by light, and made of beauty by the rain. Kim R. Stafford, Having Everything Right , 1986. Rive , verb, to split Shake , noun, a split in a piece wood. (Heart shake, ring shake) Shake , verb, (Middle English), to split. I know I should have been in the studio working on my back log of guitars, but the day was so nice and warm with a tall blue canopy, I couldn't stay inside. I decided that I needed to make a proper froe mallet. This style of mallet is traditional to northeastern California , primarily Tehama (where I'm from), Butte, Shasta and Plumas counties where making shingles by hand from sugar pines was an industry. I don't know if it was used in any other region along the Pacific Rim, other parts of the United S
Read more

The Guitar's Scale Length, Your Hand Size and a Chart

-
Image
I will cite the case of a marvelous concert player, a Japanese lady who is barely 5 ft. tall and with hands that are real miniatures. She plays a 664 mm 10 string guitar and demanded that I build this guitar with an action 1 mm higher than normal, which she handles with incredible ease. This is serious study! Jose Ramirez III, Things About the Guitar , 1990 Here is the hand size and scale length that I found on the forum at delcamp.com . Thumb tip to pinky tip span of 250mm+,  664mm scale length Thumb tip to pinky tip span of 230mm to 250mm,  656mm scale length Thumb tip to pinky tip span of 210mm to 230mm,  650mm scale length Thumb tip to pinky tip span of 190mm to 210mm,  640mm scale length Thumb tip to pinky tip span of 170mm to 190mm,  630mm scale length Thumb tip to pinky tip span of below 170mm,  615mm scale length Here is my flexible imperial/metric ruler. Here is my hand properly placed on the flexible imperial/metric ruler. Today my reach from lit
Read more

How to Stipple Wood

-
Image
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. Albert Einstein, scientist, mathematician This morning I spent several hours grinding and filing on a spike (large nail) with the idea that in the end, I would have several wood stippling tools, also known as background punches. The peg heads on the guitars made by Hernandez y Aguado have carving channels on them that are stippled, and since I am making a very close copy of such of a guitar I need to figure out how to do the stippling. Since I no longer have my leather carving tools and those stipple tools (available at brownells.com ) cost about $27, excluding tax, I thought that I would make my own. They work, but not the way I wanted them to, and I found out that it is really hard to stipple bubinga! That is what I was practicing on. Off to the computer and the world of the Internet and after a little research I found this article . Please be aware that this article is at a website of shooting ma
Read more