Tuesday, May 27, 2025

Cornhole

 

Not quite guitar, but most certainly hacking.... We have a neighborhood block party coming up and my assignment was to build a couple simple Cornhole boards. What is simpler than figured cherry?


I found these lovely pieces in the el cheapo cutoff section at Mr Plywood. Frame is mostly left over pine from building new front porch columns.

Mostly constructed with hand tools: pull saw, chisel, and my shiny new #5 jack plane. Best homework assignment ever.



Friday, May 16, 2025

I'm a lumberjack and I'm ok

 

So my friend Dave's cousin Greg had a big maple tree cut down in his front yard.  Rather than all if it going up in smoke as firewood, they invited me over, broke out the chainsaw, and filled my SUV with as much as could fit.

I bought an extension for my bandsaw, milled 'em up, stacked 'em up, and let them air dry. Once the moisture levels dropped sufficiently, down into the humidity controlled basement they went for a year.





I started with a couple of the smaller pieces that dried quicker and had interesting figure.  First pass I got three backs that were large enough for a L-OO sized guitar.  Thinned them down to 1/4" and stored them for many more months.




Once I was sure they were dry and stable.... I picked the one on the left to start building the first guitar.

For the sides, there was one particular board I liked -- it had a long narrow strip of flame and darkened by the rot in the core.   I took a piece of pine from a tree I cut down in my own yard to build sides, neck, and tail block.  I then cut the flamed maple strip into tiles and epoxied them to the pine.   Neck joints are among the most critical in building a guitar, as such I find it a great deal of fun to come up with a completely different design each time -- this one is an internal tongue-and-grove, with a raised neck held in with two furniture bolts.  Neck angle is adjusted by rotating it in the pocket and using shims to hold it at the desired angle - worked like a charm.




For the neck, I took strips of relatively straight grained piece of the maple and laminated them together.

I didn't have anything from a tree I cut up myself that I thought would be a good fit for the finger board and bridge, so I ended up getting an off-cut from Goby Walnut who specializes in local trees. I figured that was close enough. Speaking of figure, I also really liked the live edge on the piece I picked out of the "cheap bin" - I believe it cost me $1.

The top is stika spruce from Alaska Specialty Woods.  Not exactly local, but it fits the theme.... When I put in an order for the "clam" guitar top and a random selection of other stuff - one very inexpensive item was not in stock. They asked if I wanted a refund or a higher grade top for the same price?  I said either a refund.... or if they are up for the challenge send me a top that they thought would make a good sounding guitar but was so wonky looking they would be embarrassed to sell it & was destined to be firewood. They included two different tops of this caliber, this is one of them.  I love it.


And now.... we have great sounding little guitar made out of a couple-dollar's worth of wood (and several years of work!)





Eventually I'll get around to making a few more....



Monday, April 28, 2025

Sharp

 

I upgraded to a Lie-Nielson #5 jack plane.


Well worth it.


0.001" / 25 micron shaving.




Saturday, January 25, 2025

Clams

 

Recently I was perusing the Alaska Specialty Woods website, which is rarely a good thing for my credit card.  This time I did a little damage to the credit card buying damaged wood, damaged in a very cool way.

The Teredo / shipworm clam excels at boring through wood.  If a log, Stikka Spruce in this case, is floated down the river and sits/sinks in brackish water, it might get attacked by Teredo clams.  Later that log might get pulled out of the water, quartersawn, put on a web site, and finally do a little damage someone's credit card.

I've always wanted a Teredo top since I first saw Yasmin William's guitar

Yasmin's is symmetric / book matched.  

I'm mulling over how I am going to do mine...

book match:



Asymmetric:


 




Wednesday, December 11, 2024

Voiding the Warranty



There are some decent beginners guitars, held back in part by trying to be as indestructible as possible -- tops that are too thick, over braced, and encased in way too much finish. I always wondered how they would sound if the finish was stripped, scrape down the top,  and thin the braces.

Let's find out.

My test mule will be an Orangewood Oliver, which I picked up for $170.  Solid mahogany top & neck, rosewood fingerboard/bridge, bone nut/saddle, the tuners tune, and well pretty much everything else doesn't matter.

With a couple thousand dollars worth of labor, we *might* be able to make this sound as good as a $500 guitar!

Initial thoughts on Oliver before getting to work:  the fundamentals are good. My only real complaint as a "beginner" guitar is that the frets are very rough / not polished - otherwise the setup/playability is solid.  It is not very loud, which is probably a positive for a beginners guitar, and I like the fundamental tone.  The overtones are lacking-to-non-existent, which isn't much of an issue for a beginner.

And it is really pretty nice looking, very dark. 

Sunday, May 26, 2024

Slide guitar / now to hack or not to hack? (hack for the win)

 


A while back I mentioned that the Mytlewood guitar's top was damaged and I was working on replacing it.  The new top is made out of Alaskan Yellow Cedar, with an offset sound hole, and the hybrid X-brace/fan bracing I have been using recently. 

It sounds quite lovely.

And then the trust rod broke. Sigh.  At the moment it is great for slide guitar and cowboy cords.

I figure I should bother to take a photograph of it in its current state before I pull off the neck and decide what to do with it.



Update:  I pulled the neck and yanked out the truss rod.   Same exact truss rod as the one in this video, I used basically the same technique to get it out.  And pretty much the same problem, the 4mm nut had broken.   Unfortunately the light at the end of tunnel was not as much of a happy ending.





Holding the neck just right in the setting sun, you can see the shadow of fibers that have split under the stress.


 


This is a thin neck....  the right thing to do would be to remove the fingerboard, fill in the channel, cut a new one for a low-profile truss rod, and reinstall the fingerboard.

I think I will mull over doing the wrong (easy) thing first.  What is the worst thing that can happen?  If it goes bad, I would have to remove the finger board, fill in the channel, cut a new one for a low-profile truss rod, and reinstall the fingerboard....



Update 6/13/24:   Replacement truss rod was delivered.  I noticed that the diameter of the nut was just slightly larger than the block and I had not accounted for that - the neck was pushing on the nut. Over the years as adjustments were made pressure was put on different sides of the nut until it eventually weakened and broke. So the root cause was a manufacturing defect (mine), not a fault of the original truss rod.  I fixed that before tapping in the new truss rod.

I then mixed up a batch of thin hot hide glue, injected it into the cracks, wrapped it in parchment paper, then wrapped the whole neck tightly with rubber bands.   The cracks are now gone....  score one for the lazy method of repair.










Hacking

 

Here is a fun one I put down in the basement and forgotten about....   One lovely spring/summer day I had just read an article about someone who was developing plans for musical instruments requiring minimalist tools, materials, and expertise. The idea being to help bring music to developing economies and the like where expensive instruments are unlikely to be feasible.

Dan Young and David Pierce stopped by the house and we chatted about how interesting this concept was. So we decided to take a crack at it.   We made an electric guitar using a pine board for the body, held together with screws; tuners made from eye bolts and wing nuts; pickup made from the magnet in an old broken hardrive and the coil from an old-fashion "wall wort" power supply & held together with duct tape; and wrapped the whole thing in nylon string (fishing line, weed wacker string? I don't really remember) to make frets.

 Plugged it into an amp and it worked (for rather generous interpretation of the word "worked").  The tuners are perhaps not the finest I have ever used.  The frets are a suggestion of where a note may be, and they easily move.   But it does indeed make a rather glorious noise.  Dave and I were not particularly successful at "making music" with it, but Dan managed a rather excellent gritty blues riff (I.e something that was recognizable as music)

Looks like I swiped one of the eye bolts, possibly for whatever project I had actually bought them for.  The duct tape needs to be refreshed as well, it is now hitting the strings.