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Showing posts from September, 2016

Late Summer, Early Fall and a Spruce/Ziricote Classical Guitar

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Thus begins what many residents feel is the Southern Rockies' most beautiful time of the year - Indian summer. Audrey DeLella Benedict, The Southern Rockies , 1991 It is sunny today with bluebird skies highlighting the golds and oranges of the aspen trees. Fog covered our little hollow all day yesterday, the sun came out at exactly 4:45pm and shone upon us for fifteen minutes, then the clouds came back. The aspens and ferns in the backyard... A few wildflowers are blooming, like this harebell... Our little flower garden is going to seed... I dropped six ponderosa pine on our property last week for firewood and fire mitigation, as you can see I have much work to do splitting and stacking the firewood. This is the latest guitar on the bench, a 1961 Hernandez y Aguado style guitar, with a Colorado Engelmann spruce top... and ziricote back and sides. I am in the process of pore filling, later this week I will start the French polish. It has an incredibl

I Made a Wooden Toothing Plane

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In the days before the belt sander, a cabinetmaker also used a toothing plane when smoothing such heavily figured woods as curly and bird's-eye maple. Michael Dunbar, Restoring, Tuning & Using Classic Woodworking Tools , 1989 I bought several toothing blades to use in my No.3 and No.5 Stanley planes to plane some "lower" grade East Indian rosewood back and sides. The irons work, but I have to be aware of the cutting depth of the iron, grain tear out is still possible using a toothed iron in a standard plane. At the time I made this plane, I couldn't find any decent wooden toothing planes for sale on the internet. That's a good enough reason to make time to build one. Following and adapting the plans for the "sandwich technique" found in Wooden Planes and How to Make Them , by David G. Perch and Robert S. Lee, which you can buy here , I started with a piece of 3x3 inch oak I had in my wood cache. I ripped the sides from the main stock o