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Some more,
1. I was going to drill 3 holes with the spade bit but ended up just drilling the two and using the coping saw and chisel to cut away the waste between the outer holes.
2. Here are the three rough cut pieces that will make up the body. You can see that only the top layer has the neck pocket and pup cavity. By using this method I don’t actually have to route anything. Very handy when not using power tools, and you can’t afford about $300 for a good quality Router Plane.
Looking excellent Rob. Can believe you aren't using any power tools. Great effort mate
Managed to get some more work done over the last couple of days.
I found out the hard way that trying to glue and clamp 3 sheets of timber in one go is a bit like herding cats. Each piece has a mind of its own and wants to squirm around. In the end I just gave up and just clamped them tight and hoped for the best. “Today’s Lesson” – only glue 2 sheets at a time!!
The result is that none of the pieces are aligned properly. I tried to plane them but it’s all end grain and awkward curves so it was back to the trusty rasp. It took over 5 hours to get the body even close to where I could start sanding. I have rough sanded with 80 grit but I think I’ll leave the rest of the sanding for another day.
The body is about 2 or 3 mm too thick so I will do an assembly and see how she feels and then decide what to do about that.
Pic 1. A forest of clamps. I scrounged every clamp I could find.
Pic 2 and 3. Before and after shots of how bad my gluing job was and what several hours with a rasp can accomplish.
Some more before and after shots. Still only rough sanded but I’m getting there.
With a rasp? Wow, Robin, I admire your dedication. Great progress!
Loving your work Robin!
Being too thick my mind sprang to thoughts of a thickness planer, but you're building this off-grid...so I can only suggest a very sharp jack-plane...and a lot of patience.
Looks great!
Thanks Pabs, Gav and Moose, but I think that the praise might have been a wee bit premature.
I have hit my first problem.
As none of the layers matched up I just went into a mad "rasp mode" and trimmed everything back to the smallest piece. The problem is that I didn't take into account the neck pocket. It appears that either I didn't measure correctly or I have shortened the body by about 10mm, which means that the neck pocket, instead of being approx 75mm long is now only about 65mm.
Using a standard size neck plate puts the screws at the heel of the neck dangerously close to the end and I am worried about splitting the heel.
The 2 options I can see is to make the neck pocket a bit longer, but still using the neck plate, but because I have already cut out the pickup routes I can only extend the pocket by about 5mm which may OR may not be enough.
The second option will be to still extend the pocket but use neck ferrules instead of the plate and space the screws slightly closer together. That will protect the end of the heel but may not give enough support to the neck. I've never used neck ferrules before so not sure how secure they are.
Each option is a compromise, just wondering if anybody has any suggestions?
Cheers guys
rob
Here is the neck plate inside the pocket to give some idea of the space I've got to work with.
Totally agree, I wouldn't want to try to put the screws in that close to the heel, extending the pocket by 5mm and keeping the plate where it is should be enough to give you some piece of mind.
Hey Rob, build coming along really well. Maybe next time start with 45mm thick pine and glue the blank together so you avoid the problems of gluing 3 pieces together. I normally get 2 pieces of 45 x 90 x 1200mm long pine pieces (costs $25 from the big green shed) cut them to 4 x 600mm long pieces and glue them together and you have a 360 wide x 600mm blank is big enough for most body shapes - other than Flying V and Explorer shapes.
If you have space with the neck pup in I'd extend the neck pocket about 5mm to fit the neck plate on or use neck bush's do look nice and you can close in the spacing a bit.