Week 14

Hi everyone,

This is going to be a short post, even though it took a day to get all these things done; some of what i did are areas that I’ve already covered in past posts, so I'll direct you to those when we get there.

For the sake of consistency in introduction I’ll let you know what this blog is all about! I’m taking a one-on-one Guitar Building Course with Brian Hawkins of Hawkins Guitars located in Va Beach, Va. (*Click on the underlined words for clickable links to his site!) and this blog is all about where I am in the process of building my first acoustic guitar!

*Final sanding

Last time I ended by talking about taking the guitar home to scrape the binding and do finale sanding (*Click HERE to read the last post). I took it home, and scraped/sanded as far as I was comfortable with, which was great, because when I took the Guitar to Brian he said I did just as much as he wanted me to sand. So, the first thing that happened was Brian began finishing the sanding, while I helped keep the body steady, and watched and felt what the guitar should feel like after final sanding. He also showed me what to do to sand when you run into hiccups, such as wormholes and knots in the wood. We finished sanding the back, top, and sides, and then rounded off the binding.

*Pickguard template

After everything was sanded we began to start making the pickguard. We had used lacewood for the end graft (*Click here to check out that post), and had already planned to make the pickguard from the same board. Lacewood is a really cool wood, though brittle, it has beautiful curl and figure, and is even an excellent tonewood, giving a nice “vintage” sounding guitar. I took the board over to the thickness sander to sand it to a thickness of about .085 Then, using a template, we traced out the shape. After that, I used the band saw to roughly cut it out, and then took it over to the belt sander for some final shaving/shaping. Brian did some final work, such as sloping the ends and edges of it. Lastly, I took some loose sand paper and smoothed out the edges.

Here’s what it will look like when we glue it to the guitar…

*New Bridge

*Making the new bridge

Brians been working on a beautiful parlor guitar, and for this new guitar he came up with a really cool bridge design! The shape made me think of the old west! I really liked it, and although we has already made a bridge, he asked me if I wanted to make a new one with this design. Of course I said, “I want to do it!” and we got started. We decided to use Madagascar rosewood this time instead of ebony, which was great, because I’m a big fan of rosewood bridges and fretboards. The process was the same as the last time I made the bridge, so you can click HERE to read the steps on how I made that.

Just so you can see how great the parlor is turning out here’s a pic…

Click HERE to read the story and get all the details of this beautiful parlor!

I love building and I am so excited to see how this guitar will turn out. We will be working on the fretboard next week and hopeful the neck! Stay tuned…

If you want to find out more about Brian and Hawkins Guitars click HERE for his website, or click HERE to “Like” his FaceBook page.

If you liked this post and want to receive future updates of where I am in this process, then please enter your email in the subscription box below.

Thanks again for reading,

~Daniel