Hot deals on Black Friday

 

Hot hide glue is great, but requires a reliable way to heat it to 135-145F.  There are many ways to do this on the cheap, with baby bottle warmers, wax warmers, and small hot pots frequently being mentioned.

Macy's Black Friday sale had small hot pots for $10 and the "low" setting is 140F.

They come in many colors, with the one I selected being the obvious choice: 

Yes, that is pink with gnomes.

Even more holes

 

Round 2 -- this one with Black Limba body,  mis-matched Stika Spruce top, left-over maple neck, and the fretboard & bridge is from a random recycled floorboard from the Rebuild It Center.

Holes

 

As you may have noticed, I really like putting the sound hole in the upper bout rather than the center.  It makes a big difference to the play, you get a much better idea of what others are hearing.  Plus it increases the active area of the soundboard and so on.

I also think it looks great when matched up with a cut-away or the like.  It looks kinda odd if you don't have a cut-away.... more on that to come.

So what if you take this to the extreme and move the sound hole to the side of the guitar?  There are many examples of this if you search hard enough,  here is one example.

I had most of the pieces and parts to crank out a new experimental guitar, and really wanted to test this out before I built my next non-experimental guitar....

Top is reclaimed cedar siding + braces are reclaimed fir, both from the Rebuild-It Center.  Back and sides are my favorite cheap + has a good tap-tone Luan from Mr Plywood (< $10 for enough to do a guitar.... this particular one with an interesting gray/yellow splotchiness). The neck is the original one from the Cherry guitar that was dropped and damaged - I whacked off the bad bits and grafted in a ~$0.50 cherry board mill end I found in the mill-end-bin at woodcrafters.   Topped off with whatever spare, mismatched tuners I had laying around.

You will also note that this one has the hybrid X bracing with fan braces rather than tone bars in the lower bout.  As you can easily see via the big hole in the side.

Results?  Sounds great for the player - it is loud, well balanced, and crystal clear.   It is muted on the bass for someone who is sitting right in front of the player. The bass / mid / treble balance smooths back out as the listener moves back. Presumably it doesn't project as far, but we were too busy playing it to be bothered to test that.

Rich Wehring immediately bonded with this one and took it home.

A tale of two Ukes and a Monkey Tail tree

 

The 1905 World's Fair was in Portland, Oregon.  The Chilean government was handing out seedlings of their national tree, often nicknamed the Monkey Tail tree.   One of these is planted across the street from me.

My neighbor, Darren Kammerer, had cut up a fallen branch and left them on his porch for years.  One day he tossed me one of the logs and asked if I could make a Ukulele out of it....  this is that story.

I had not made a Uke, but I do have one and had previously made a little "novelty" guitar out of scraps using the Uke as a template.   So I took this novelty, removed two of the tuners,  and built a new top.  This prototype worked well, so I started work on one based on the Monkey Tail log.

The wood is not very stable, so I sliced it up and laminated a couple pieces together for the sites + a portion of the neck. The core of the neck + fingerboard + bridge is walnut.  Top and bracing is spruce.

For the back, I made a thick veneer and glued it on spruce for stability.  

The Monkey Tail Uke went to Dad, the prototype went to the kids,  Cash and Ray

Two failed tops, fans, and a road trip

 

This is a story of failures, road trips, and hybrid X / fan bracing.

The first fail was the rather pretty englemann spruce / flamed myrtlewood guitar.  I built that one as light as I could, which eventually turned out to be too light. Over time the top started to distort to the point of no return.  Before it self destructed I removed the top & started work on a new one (still in progress, coming soon).  I hung the original top  on the shop wall as a reference / reminder of what not to do.    For the new top, I decided to do a hybrid X brace with fan braces on the lower bout and was quite happy with the results.

Second fail was the top on the Table Legs guitar. This one started to sound a bit odd, then just went dead. All of the magic was gone.   So I also tried to pull the top... and it just disintegrated, a collection of splinters held together by the braces. That fir had two great careers, ~100 years hanging out on the side of someone's house and a decade playing music, but it was clearly time for it to be put out to pasture.

I figured I might as well build a new top for the second one as well.  While I was in shop, I was staring at the englemann spruce top hanging on the wall and found myself wondering.... if I removed the lower bout tone bars and replaced them with fan braces, I bet it would also sound great and resolve the structural integrity issues.  A couple hours later it was done, next morning strung up and back in business.

Flash forward months later and I was planning to trip to Maine to hang out with good friends I haven't seen in quite a while.  On that last trip, I took a guitar with me, I'm pretty sure it was this one, and it ended up going home with Simon Poirier.

So for this trip, I thought it would be fun to bring another guitar and this one was perfect. It has a bolt-on neck, which makes it easy to collapse down to carry-on size, and had already been beat to hell and back -- no worries about scuffing it up, etc.

This one was last seen in the back of Jim McQullian's SUV.   Perhaps Simon figured out a way to convince Catherine that he should take this one home, too.