Honestly, I have no idea how to carve wood. I can make really lovely rectangular objects, but once things get wavy, round and curvy, I'm lost. That's part of what I'm trying to learn building these guitars.
But I still want to succeed at this carving thing, so I developed a plan to start me out on the right path.
As I showed in the first post, I made
"contour map templates" of the top and back, based on the sections in Bob Benedetto's plans. Here's how I used these to rough carve the tops and backs.
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| I started with glued-up slabs of African Mahogany for the backs (and sides) and Western Red Cedar for the tops. |
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| I used my Wagner Safe-T-Planer (no longer made, alas, although you can find some here and there) in my drill press. I use brass measuring bars to set it at diminishing heights, starting with the first cut from the center of each blank. |
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| Here's my "terracing" setup. I made 1/8" cuts from the top down. The green hose is a directed fan clearing chips. |
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| After each cut, I marked the next level with the countour templates. I was able to use the same depth setups for the tops and backs, so I did them all in one shot - about 2 hours at the drill press. Not bad. |
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| After all the terraces were cut, I used a round-bottom spokeshave to remove the waste from line to line. |
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| With all the terraces faired together, I took a final pass with the Safe-T-Router to 3/16" along the area where the "recurve" will be. The recurve is a shallow negative curve along the perimeter of the tops and backs, which lets the tops and backs resonate more. It's also beautiful, and will be a challenge to scrape and carve. Here is an incurve on another archtop (not my work) |
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| A final rough-carved top. A little sanding to fair out the plane gullies, and it's ready for glueup. |
Hey Bob, the Safe-t planer did a really nice job and getting all of this done in about 2 hours is extremely quick (especially for doing this for the first time). The safe-t planer is also used in making the neck and headstock per the book but unfortunately it is pretty expensive on e-bay. Do you think that this is a tool that is really worth while getting? In other words, is this a versatile tool that you use it a lot for other projects or is this a specialty tool just for this project.
ReplyDeleteI actually use it a lot for other things. It is especially handy for "planing" stuff that would explode in my 13" planer. For example, I have several slices of cherry burls from my woods, which I'm going to use for headstock veneer. Impossible to run these through a planer, as it is with anything less than about 3/16". BUT the Wager tool does a great job, nibbling away a little bit at a time.
ReplyDeleteI'm going to make your day here: My local Woodcraft, in West Springfield, MA, has 2 of them on the shelf, at normal retail, which I think is about $50 or so. Give them a call at 413-827-0244. I don't know whether it's available through them directly on the web. If they won't mail order it to you from the store, let me know and I'll pick one up for you next time I'm there.
Hi Bob, If I could find one of these, you would make my week! I called yesterday and they couldn't find them. Where in the store did you see them? Perhaps I could direct them to the right place.
ReplyDeleteAlas... I was there today, and they're gone. Sorry.
DeleteThanks for looking!
ReplyDeleteHi everyone, pretty late response here, but if anyone's looking for a Safe-t planer, re-makes are available now at StewMac.
ReplyDelete