Howdy. When I make a guitar, I make a photographic record of my progress, and when I reach the end, I pile them all together and make a slide show, video style. The customer likes to have a record of how his or her guitar was put together. It takes a bit of remembering to take the shots, but it is well worth the effort. Having good lighting is not always possible, but usually it works out ok. I often take a few extra snaps to have a selection. Sometimes one forgets how a certain task was done. Well, now all you have to do is breeze through the video to jog your memory.
Once I have cut out the soundhole , I quickly grab the template and place it on the soundboard and trace around the outline. Flip it over and do the opposite side. Now it is time to mark out the braces and the bridge plate. You need to mark where the bridge and saddle sit on the other side of the board. It is not necessary to draw a great big full size plan of the guitar, but just a single line on a long piece of cardboard. Measure along from where the nut would be at one end the scale length of the guitar. If your scale length is 25.25″, then place a mark at that point. Measure the halfway point and that will be the 12th fret position. As we are building a 14 fret to the body guitar, then we need to know the distance from the 12th fret to the 14th fret. A little bit of maths is required here. If you divide the scale length of 25.25″ by 17.817, then your answer will be the first fret measurement. Take the first fret measurement away from 25.25″ to get the new distance that you have to divide by 17.817. Your distances will keep getting smaller and you will keep going until you get 21 or 22 fret spacings. You really only need to mark out frets 12,13,14, so that you can determine where the body join is. A little bit of string compensation will be required to get the saddle in the right place, so add 3mm to the string length on the single line drawing you are doing. When you have a fret template at your disposal, it is easy to mark out the 14th fret position in one go on your single line drawing. Take your single line drawing and place the 14th fret position over the body join area, and then mark off where the saddle position falls on your soundboard. Transfer this point to the opposite side of the board (the bracing side). Now you can see where the bridge plate will sit, and how the 2 main soundboard braces will sit. A really nice bracing template can be bought from Stewmac, where it is a piece of cake to transfer all these bracing locations to your blank. Well, I’m still dreaming about the day I will get one. You have the chance here in your design to play with the angle that the main braces subtend at the X intersection. You don’t want the braces to be too close to the soundhole edge or too far from the soundhole edge. When you learn to build a guitar, these are factors that will keep cropping up.
Now that the two soundboard halves are joined, run the board through the drum thickness sander, but only take off enough to flatten out the board. If one half was sitting up a tad, then work to sand that half down to the level of the other. I use 120 grade sandpaper on the drum, then switch to 240 grade. The soundboard is thicker than it needs to be still, as the next step is to mark out the soundboard rings, carefully scribe the circles, either with a handheld circle cutter, or a dremel tool with a circle cutter attachment. The handheld cutter does a great job, but a little skill is required to pear out the narrow wood channel. The dremel tool practically lets you do it with your eyes closed. The adjustments on the dremel let you very accurately set the radii for the soundhole rings.Cut the ring depth to the same size as the pearl or abalone you are inlaying, or half the depth of the soundboard, if you are using purfling.
I inlay the soundhole pieces bit by bit. If I am using abalone for the center ring, surrounded by a plastic border, then I anchor one end at the centerline starting point, and allow the two plastic border pieces to flow ahead, and the abalone is squeezed between them. I used to glue it all in with Franklin Titebond glue, but I would rather use superglue, as I can quickly do a short length at a time. The white glue doesn’t hold things down too well, whereas the superglue anchors everything almost immediately, and as well it disguises the abalone edge joins really well. As you learn to build a guitar, you will try all these things out for yourself. The other benefit of using quick drying glues, is that the entire soundring area can be sanded level twenty minutes later. The nice thing about using a drum sander when you do this, is that any black decoration in the ring is nicely smoothed, and no residue is left in the surrounding white spruce. If you sand by hand, it is difficult to stop the residue being ground into the spruce, and hand sanding tends to wear away too much of the softer spruce, leaving the harder abalone sitting proud.
Use the 240 grit paper on the drum to final thickness the soundboard. I leave my soundboards 2mm thick. This thickness will make a responsive top. The handheld cutter is now used to cut out the soundhole, with a radius of 50mm. Hand sand the soundhole edge to make it smooth with a rolled over edge.
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