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.
