Day 1

Everybody needs a hobby, after all what will you do when you retire if you havent got a hobby ?  Sit around watching TV all day.  I've been telling myself this for years and always claimed to be to busy to do anything - now its time to do something and after looking at all sorts of different hobbies etc now I have plumped for guitar building not any old guitar but an accoustic guitar- it looks interesting and could be quite satisfying.  Found a book by Jonathan Kinkead (who makes Kinkade accoustic guitars near Bristol) which explains step by step how to go about building an accoustic guitar and I dropped loads of hints letting people know thats what I would like for Christmas.

Well here we go, I got the accoustic guitar building book for Christmas and have been getting my garage ready to use as a workshop ever since (reading the book at every available opportunity in between sorting the workshop out ) now it is April the 16th and time to get started.

It seems that one of the most important things is the making of the accoustic guitar mould which forms the body of the guitar.  The book comes with full plans (conveniently at a scale of 1:1)

Accoustic guitar plans

so the first thing I decided to do was make a plastic template of the guitar body which would represent half of the plan area of the guitar.  Managed to get hold of some plastic which is covered with an opaque film to protect it, placed this on top of the drawing and traced the outline of the guitar.



Accoustic guitar plastic template



The next thing to do was cut out the shape of the guitar which proved to be trickier than it looks even triming it back with sand paper it was difficult to form the shape of the guitar because of the thickness of the line I had drawn to form the shape of the guitar.

Sanding plastic accoustic guitar template

Time for a rethink. Stole some baking paper from the kitchen and traced the outline of the guitar template.

Tracing template onto baking paper

This line was drawn with pencil and was therefore not as thick as the line on the plastic.  This made it easy to cut out the guitar template in baking paper and stick it to the plastic guitar body template.  I stuck it to the removable plastic film using PVA glue.



Baking paper guitar template stuck on plastic


It was easy now to trim the plastic back to the line of the baking paper but not with sandpaper but with a cabinet scraper. 

This is the first time I used a variation of a cabinet scraper to shave the edges of the template.

A cabinet scraper is basically a thin piece of metal wich is filed on its edge which creates a bur on the edge of the metal.  A honing tool (put simply a screwdriver shank) is drawn across the burr folding it over to point towards the top of the metal thus creating a cutting edge.  This tool is then drawn across the item being worked which takes very thin shavings off the piece giving great control. 0 (I tried to take photos of the whole process of forming a burr but it was impossible to show the burr with the camera I have so you will just have to believe me for now, here's me creating the burr)

Creating a burr

Thats the end of day 1 about 8 hours work and a long way to go in my guitar build.