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Marc:The Wood Whisperer is brought to you by:
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Rockler Woodworking and Hardware, Create with Confidence.
One of the most common requests I receive on the website is
to build a musical instrument, and specifically a guitar.
If I were going to start a project like that I would really
want to learn directly from a luthier, someone who has years
of experience who could save me the heartache that I'd
probably go through the first round trying it myself.
Fortunately there are some people out there
who are braver than I am who just jump right
into it and one such person is a guy named Rick.
Rick sent me a couple clips of his first project,
well his first guitar project.
He started with a kit and built
this gorgeous guitar for his wife.
The clips were fantastic and I told him that I'd
really like to get ahead of the raw footage,
edit it Wood Whisperer style and put it out in
a presentation, several videos specifically for you guys.
He agreed and here we are, we have a great presentation for you.
Most of you know already that I'm a drummer but what you
might not know is I can play a mean guitar. Let me show you.
Hit it Blondie.
("If This Guitar Could Talk" by Old News)
♫ If this guitar could talk
♫ What do you think it might say ♫
(groovy brass music)
Hi, my name is Rick Urschel and welcome to my woodshop.
I've been woodworking for about 10 years and have
recently started looking for projects that would be more
of a challenge than the typical craftsman style side table.
A few weeks ago my beautiful wife Erin tells me
that she wants to learn how to play the guitar.
Suddenly a light bulb goes off in my head:
I can make Erin a guitar for Christmas.
If it weren't for my father in law,
whose name is coincidentally also Rick,
the thought of building a guitar from
scratch never would have crossed my mind.
Rick built his first guitar when Erin was just a child.
It just so happens that one of the guitars he built was
also played by a good friend of mine at our wedding.
Rick asked that I keep him up to date on the
progress of the build and it was my dad, Bob,
who suggested that I video tape the process.
This video will be the first of many in a series that will
chronicle my journey down the road of becoming a luthier.
If you'd like to send me feedback of any kind
you can e-mail me at buildaguitar@gmail.com.
Otherwise sit back, relax and enjoy yourself.
Because I didn't have a lot of time and I wanted to get the
guitar built by Christmas I decided that instead of
painstakingly trying to find all the lumber bits and pieces
that I might need, see if I couldn't find a guitar kit.
Luckily enough I found one at a great website, www.LMII.com,
for all of the items that you might ever need to
build any kind of guitar, whether it be classical
or steel string guitar, could be found.
(bright strummed acoustic guitar)
(strolling music)
Since we only surfaced two sides of our
neck plank we will now start to bring the neck
and the head piece to the proper thickness.
This should also bring our neck ankle cut back into square.
My target on the neck thickness was 875 thousandths.
Unfortunately the neck was still not completely flat
so it's necessary to take the neck a bit thinner.
However there should still be plenty
of stock remaining on the neck plank.
Now we're going to take the neck and
we're going to cut off this piece here.
That piece will become the heel block.
(bright strummed acoustic guitar)
I'm going to divide this into three pieces.
We'll go with four and a quarter.
Here's one.
Here's two.
And that should be one, two, three, four and about a quarter.
(driving jazz clarinet)
We have the heel block in the clamps gluing up.
When all the glue is dry on that, before we put it
on the neck, we're going to glue the lamination
for the head piece, which is this part here.
The kit came with just these two pieces here.
This piece of east Indian rosewood and this is,
I don't know, some kind of maple.
Although my wife loves rosewood I think this is one
of the most boring pieces of wood I've ever seen.
There's really no figure to it, there's nothing exciting,
and it's going to go on the head of the guitar.
I would have much preferred to see something
that's a little bit more pleasing to the eye,
a little bit more something fun to look at.
I just happened to have this piece of curly maple
sitting around. This has a really neat figure to it.
It's got some really cool depth to it.
I'm going to sandwich this on top of
that piece of east Indian rosewood.
That way we'll get this light, dark, light lamination.
I think this will contrast really
well with the ebony fingerboard.
While this dries we're going to grab the
vacuum bag and throw these in the vacuum press.
Got my two cauls here, my vacuum bag is back here.
And my three veneer pieces. Hurray!
Let's get some glue.
(driving jazz clarinet)
Normally I would use some more cauls but this stuff is
pretty thin to begin with and I think the little amount of
flexing in the boards that we're going to get from the press
is going to be minimal so I'm not too worried about it.
Everything is clamped and gluing up
and should be dry and ready to go.
In the meantime I modelled up a
little template for the head piece.
I didn't want to originally do the traditional look of
a classical guitar so I started playing around with
some ideas and nothing really looked good.
The best idea I had was to put a heart on top of
the head piece and it ended up looking like a butt,
so I'm going to stick with the original classic guitar and
maybe on guitar number two we'll go a little bit crazy.
Classical piece is what we're stuck with.
(sawing)
(lounge music)
(bright strummed acoustic guitar)
Now that the final shape of the headpiece is finished we can
cut the slots and drill the holes for the tuning machines.
I made a template out of MDF so I could accurately route
the slots as well as locate the tuning machine holes.
Now that the neck is mostly roughed out we're
going to move on and start forming the sides.
These two pieces of east Indian rosewood
will become the sides of the guitar.
This is the part I've been most looking
forward to because it has to do with
forming them and I'm looking forward to that.
First we've got to get them down to the right length
and the right width so that's what we're going to do.
Now that we have the side pieces milled to the proper
width we're going to deviate a little bit from
[unintelligible] guitar and build a jig that
will be in the shape of the guitar body.
That way we can easily put the guitar
together when we get to that point.
That's something I kept putting off and now I don't
have an option so that's what we're going to do next.
(jazz trumpet music)
Now that the jig body is roughed out we can cut a notch to
fit the heel block, trim down the sides and add the two
bolts that will hold the top and bottom of the jig together.
Now that the jig is finished I carefully line
the inside wall with a piece of masking tape.
This tape will be my template for locating the
center of the waist in relation to the sides.
After careful consideration I decided to
try my hand at building my own bending iron.
Originally I had found some video of the
propane torch and the aluminium tube method but
frankly this method made me a bit nervous.
After scouring the Internet I came upon a
discussion thread in one of the guitar building
forums about a light-bulb-based bending iron.
After doing some research it seemed possible to build
this type of bending iron for about 20 dollars.
The bending iron is simple, easy to make and easy to use.
At the heart of the bending iron is a source
of heat which is a 200 watt light bulb.
I was unable to find this bulb at my local home center but
was able to find one online for about a $1.55 plus shipping.
The bulb is placed inside a six inch long,
three inch outer diameter piece of aluminium round
tubing with a quarter inch wall thickness.
My jig originally had a 3/16ths inch wall
but the bulb just barely fit so I had to
turn the [id] of the tube ever so slightly.
The bulb screws into a porcelain base
which you can't see in the photo.
Attached to the bulb is a 1000 watt dimmer switch.
I sacrificed an old extension cord to hook up the bulb
base and mounted everything in a little MDF jig.
I must say that I'm very pleased with the results.
Now on to the bending.
I've found that at about half power the bulb heats the
aluminium tube up to the proper temperature, which is
around 350 degrees Fahrenheit for this type of wood.
That being said I could have probably gotten away with using
a standard 100 watt bulb, but I stuck with the 200 watt just
in case the tube started to cool as I worked the sides.
(bouncing acoustic guitar music)