Orange (soon to be brown)

 

An experiment that has been in queue for a couple of years....   a mostly Osage Orange guitar.  

I found some inexpensive Osage Orange lumber, enough to make the back, sides, neck, fingerboard, and bridge.  Paired it up with an inexpensive western red cedar top. Cheap bronze colored tuners to finish it off. This was not a spare-all-expenses experiment.

The goal here was to hear what Osage Orange sounds like, I didn't take much care to make it pretty. Eventually it will oxidize into a 100% uniform dark brown w/o much features. 

Rumor has it that from a tone perspective Osage Orange is in the ballpark of Brazilian rosewood.  I don't know what Brazilian sounds like, so I can't comment on that, but I can say this stuff rings like a bell -- tap tone is off the charts. Sustain for days, sparkly overtones abound. 

To quote Han Solo, "She may not look like much, but she's got it where it counts, kid."   I have been playing this one a lot.

You can read about Osange Orange on the Tonewood Data Source database, click here and scroll down to the Osage Orange entry,  and the Wood Database for all of its physical properties.

What I learned is that it is easy to burn when bending, and did get one tear out on the upper bout. If I use it again I'll thin down the sides a bit more. It would have been non-trivial to hide the crime, if I would have been concerned about aesthetics.   Tear out + a bit of burning for your amusement:

Speaking of crimes, empirical evidence is that I didn't do a sufficient job gluing the bridge on the first try.  Nothing a little sanding, more glue, and more clamps couldn't fix.  This shot also shows what the neck attachment looks like. Neck angle is adjusted using shims, held together with barrel nuts and furniture screws...  similar to a "normal" bolt-on neck, but shifted 90 degrees.

Oh, and it is heavy - 5.8 pounds. Hardwood neck and double laminated sides adds some mass.

Out of the basement

 

So this build was quite long and rocky.  It spent many years partially assembled in the basement, had to be forced back into shape, and then was promptly dropped and broke the neck.

Long, long ago I was at a  big box hardware store and as I wondered through the lumber section I spotted a rather nicely figured poplar board.  Into the shopping cart it went, and then promptly was placed into the basement and ignored for quite some time.

Later, merely long ago, I sliced the poplar board up to yield a set of back and sides.  I bent the sides using the mid-sized mold taken off my classical guitar, with a venetian'ish style cut-away.  I vaguely remember being annoyed with it for some reason, took it out of the mold temporarily to work on something else.  About this time I injured myself and took a couple years off building guitars.  There it sat in a dark basement corner, partially done, out of the mold, for many years.

Flash forward to recent times - I was cleaning out the basement and thought to myself that I should see if I could finish that one....   I also had a prototype "Somogyi style" braced top that I had long ago made out of a scrap piece of spruce I picked up on the cheap. Note that the top is one big piece flanked by two smaller pieces. Here is what they looked like at the time they were liberated from the basement:

It took quite a bit of effort to get the body to more-or-less line back up. Over the years it had relaxed, unevenly, into a shape that was no longer possible to fit back into the mold and the neck alignment was not even in the ballpark.  I used my dreadnought mold with a bunch of shims and clamps to at least get the neck to point in the approximate correct direction, gluing pieces of scrap wood to the sides as I went in an attempt to prevent it from relaxing back into the seriously out of whack shape.

After successfully gluing on the top and back,  I promptly dropped it from a decent height onto a concrete floor and broke the neck.  This was one of my first attempts at building a hybrid electric/acoustic style neck mount - I am building them much more beefy these days.  It was a clean break, easy to just glue back together.

I need to finish setting the action up and get it fully broken in.  Out of the gate it sounds good, will probably sound great once it is fully completed. 

In the end it also looks good, certainly unique. I "went with the flow" on the sound hole, fingerboard end, etc to make the asymmetric shape look a little more intentional.   I really like how the color "flows" from the top/sides/back.

Neck, fingerboard, and bridge are all big-box-store oak.  For pore filling on the oak....  Harbor Freight had pack-of-10 superglue bottles on sale for ~$2.  Worked great.   For tuning machines, I tested C.B. Gitty open tuners which work, are very inexpensive, but I can't say at this point I would recommend them -- their sealed gear tuners are much better and about the same price if you are in the market for inexpensive tuners.

 

Hot

Moral of the story:  too hot or too cold is bad,  too high or too low of humidity is bad.

 

Most hand-crafted guitars are made with hide glue or titebond.  Should there need to be a repair, both glues can be un-done by applying heat and moisture. This is a highly desirable trait.

So what happens to a guitar when it rains (high humidity) followed by several days of ~100F temperatures (hot).... and you don't have air conditioning?   This is highly undesirable.

A good idea would have been to de-tune them all to remove stress.

No major trama to report, just a little bit of glue separation on one guitar....

A quick bit of sanding (slide in a piece of sandpaper, push down softly, pull out sandpaper. Flip over and repeat), wick in some fresh glue, clamp.  Back to good-as-new.

Better idea:  bought a small window air-conditioner for those rare extra-hot days.

We already have humidifiers for the much-more-common-around-here cold and low humidity days that help prevent soundboard cracks.  

Interesting note:  one other thing that can happen in the hot-and-humid case is that joints can "slide".  I.e. the bridge might move forward slightly throwing off the tuning, or the fingerboard might move slightly throwing off the action. 

Count to ten

 

Ok. All ten fingers are accounted for and still attached to the same places they were moments before.

Take a deep breath, count to ten again, turn off the band saw, and start to pick up the pieces.

I wanted to trim down the head block to line up closer to the sides.  I normally use a hand plane or a sander, but I needed to trim it down a fair amount and this is edge grain that is a bit of a PITA.  So no problem, I'll just take a quick rough pass on the band saw (which has an aggressive resaw blade on it at the moment)

To get it to fit, I had to retract the safety guard all the way up,  which is a bit scary so I held the guitar sides by the back.....  all of this was not a great idea and the last part especially so.

At this point in the build the sides are pretty flexible.... it bound up on the blade and "spun" out of my hands.   Initially a big chunk broke off, and the whole thing spun right there on the table, striking the blade in at least four different places before it completely shattered and threw pieces in all directions.

It was nearly instant and quite impressive.

Band saws are "relatively" safe compared to table saws, but they can still be pretty damned scary.

It pays off to be prudently paranoid of such tools, better to chew up a piece of wood than a body part.  Even better to not be lazy and get some extra exercise with the hand plane or hand saw.

And in the end there will be a guitar with a story and some scars to prove it.

Back story:  whenever I need to buy any luthiery supplies, I often reverse sort by price and see if there is anything interesting.   What we have here is the least expensive black walnut back-and-sides set I have run across, if I remember correctly it was $15.

The size was a bit too small, but if I was careful I could get a L-00 out of it.  The website noted that it wasn't perfectly book matched, had a crack or two, some insect damage, etc, etc.

But as I was working on it.... I think it is (or at least was) going to be quite lovely and was strongly considering using this for a "good" standard build guitar vs an inexpensive experimental one.    I'm now strongly considering "experimental" ;-)

I've already steamed apart the remnants and glued the bigger chucks back together as much as was feasible. The Plan B will be to bend a new set of sides, probably using 1/8" plywood, and laminate it with the walnut on the outside.  That will ensure it is nice and strong, compensating for structural damage to the walnut in several places (up to and including one side being torn completely in two).

Plan C will be to toss these sides and find some new wood that will match up with the quite lovely (and undamaged) back.

I was debating on what to use for top wood.  Now I'm thinking Douglas Fir, I have a nice piece that I don't otherwise know what to do with.

For the neck, I have a sap wood black walnut board that has some character, and the left over walnut from the previous guitar for fret board and bridge.

We'll see after Sides Version 2.0 is done.

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.

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....

Sharp

 

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

Well worth it.

0.001" / 25 micron shaving.