This Week in Wood » Chisels

Guitar Building

glennth — Mon, 31 May 2010 17:32:05 +0000

I mentioned in a past post that I was going to take a class in guitar building through my local Woodcraft store. The guitar kits they use are from US Guitar Kits. The kits are partially assembled. They have the sides bent and the back attached. They have the bracing attached (though in the 2 kits used in the class, they needed some re-glueing of the braces – minor). The sides and the back are a laminated wood (ours was a light colored outer veneer, the site says is Sapele). The top is solid spruce. The other parts look adequate but are probably not the highest quality. All in all a decent value for a $260 kit (price through the class at Woodcraft).

My hopes are to learn a few of the basics of luthier. With this kit, I get to learn about attaching tops (and bottoms though indirectly since the skills are similar); attaching the binding a purfling (which may give a hint at how to do the sound hold and other decorative elements on the back and heal side); working and shaping the braces; building a fret board including fret wires, nut; attaching the bridge; setup and tuning the guitar. With this class and kit, I DON”T expect to learn bending and shaping the sides; attaching the binding around the sound hole; shaping the neck; applying finish to the guitar.

In our class, the first step was to find the position of the top onto the assembled lower body. This required finding centers on the top and body. Once this is done, we can mark the positions of the braces and the rough outline of the body on the top. Next comes shaping/scaloping the bracing. The 4 points of the x-braces and the 2 points of the top brace will have an equivalent notch in the support/bent bracing the goes around the tops of the sides. The remaining points of the other braces get pared down to the top before they touch the sides. The scaloping of the the braces have hills and valleys and the kits come with a template to do these. In scaloping, I found it a little challenging with the grain changes. I believe that I got a pretty smooth result but it took quite a while (you can see some bad pictures at the bottom).

The next step was to rough cut the body using a band saw. I learned 2 things. First, I need to replace my band saw blade. Second, WOW! it is sure easy to cut softer woods. I eventually want to build a guitar using only hand tools (for this step, it might be a bow saw).

Next was cutting the matching notches for the x-brace and top brace points (6 in all). The teacher recommended a double sided skew chisel and this did make things easier than standard flat/single sided paring chisels. With a few attempts at dry fitting, I needed to make a few adjustments with the notches and the end points of the bracing.

Last for this class was glueing the top down. This required 25 or so clamps (see the picture for the style of clamps). It was important to focus on a few key points including the waist, the widest point on both top and bottom and both the heal and neck locations. One last point was using a straight board to clamp just above the sound hole (see picture). This ensures that the location above the sound hole will be flat so it can receive the fret board.

Overall, I learned a lot and had a lot of fun (good instructor).

Ultimately, I hope to build a guitar from the ground up (maybe not quite so far as harvesting my own wood) and doing it with only hand tools. There are suppliers of luthier grade parts that should make this a challenging but fund experience.

Post from: This Week in Wood (c)2009 Glenn Thompson. For Downloads, Pictures, and other great content go to This Week in Wood. See This Week in Wood Legal Information Page for specific usage rights.

Guitar Building

Frame Glue Up

glennth — Thu, 27 May 2010 17:55:28 +0000

I finished the frame pieces and dry fitted them. I’m pretty happy with the results though similar to most woodworkers, I can see every error and blemish in the project and that frustrates me. I believe that I can fix a few of them after the glue up so that is the plan that I’m going with.

Overall the frame is square and stable which in a desk frame is what you need.

I still need to work on the drawer rails and the drawer itself. I’m going with wooden slider rails with a groove in the slide that matches up to them. Also I’m going to push the fates and try a half blind dovetail for the drawer front. This should be real challenging.

For the top, I’m planning to reflect a coffee and side table in the same room. The coffee and side table have moulding pieces around the field of the top. The moulding is simply angled on the bottom (thick at the field and thin on the edge). I’m going to do this by angling the outer edges and do it without moulding. I’ll use hand planes to get the angle that I want. I’ve already glued the top up but still need to square it up and smooth/flatten the top.

Notice that from the dry fit, that I’ve added the front lower drawer rail and the lower middle support cross member. I was thinking about adding another member going from the lower middle to the lower back but the frame already seemed very stable and strong so I didn’t feel it needed it.

Frame is dry fitted

glennth — Mon, 24 May 2010 21:58:50 +0000

I’ve hit a big milestone. I’ve got the majority of the frame dry fitted. I still have a piece under the drawer on the front and then 2 lower/inner cross members for additional stability. As most woodworkers can do for their projects, I can find a ton of issues with it but over all I’m quite pleased with the way it is turning out.

My only real issue is that I have all these sharp blades and keep letting myself touch the ends. This means that on any given day, I have a few bandaids on. I need to learn that one should not touch the sharp end of a blade. This will eventually be a hard learned lesson.

Here is a shot of the dry fitted frame!

Brace and bit

glennth — Mon, 24 May 2010 02:40:24 +0000

I think that I mentioned when I was practicing mortise and tenon joints a few months back that I tried both the 100% chisel route and the method that first uses bit and brace followed by chisels. This early experience was very sloppy. At the time, I wasn’t exactly sure of the cause of the sloppiness.

Today I figured it out.

I once again tried the brace and bit. I first marked the mortise location including size and length. After that, I marked a centerline with a knife and was careful to get it exactly centered. I missed this step in my earlier tries and believe this was the source of my failure. In the earlier tries, I guess I was just trying to get centered by eye and feel. This clearly isn’t accurate and gets the walls varied in their position and such.

With the knife mark for the center line I was able to place the point of the screw on the bit exactly on the line (tilting so you can feel the point catch on the knife mark). This made every bore attempt to be exactly on for the width. The only areas that could be messed up are the length walls but it’s fairly easy to stay just within the marks. Using this bit and brace method makes the chisel work simple and easy and the results were very precise.

I’m very pleased with this technique.

Double Mortises

glennth — Thu, 20 May 2010 05:09:27 +0000

OK, as a newb to hand cut mortises and tenons I’m pushing the envelope by doing double mortises. I know, it’s crazy.

All in all though, I’m pretty happy with the results.

Standing Laptop Desk – First Mortise and Tenons

glennth — Tue, 18 May 2010 02:55:01 +0000

OK, today I finished my first mortise and tenons on the Standing Laptop Desk. Only 20,000 more to go. OK, maybe not that many but looking at it from the beginning makes it seem that way.

I’ve shown some practice mortise and tenons in previous posts but I was still kind of frustrated with them. Between then and now though I saw in a video podcast somewhere (sorry I can’t remember to give proper attribution) that pointed out that small mallet blows on the chisel is the way to go – don’t power through the process. This has caused me to be more satisifed with the process and the results. Yes, it takes a bit more time but it ensures that I get a better fit.

I inadvertently (think before you start!) cut tenons first on the apron. I did the mortise first for the support struts. I will definitely go with the mortise first from now on. The reason is that I can make the hole fit the width of the chisel and then cut the tenon to fit the resulting hole. Doing it where you have to cut a hole to fit a tenon means that you have to use a too small chisel to cut the hole – much more challenging and more prone to errors.

Here are a few shots.

Project Wood

glennth — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 03:06:05 +0000

OK, I’ve finally gotten the wood (actually I got it last week). I got, hopefully, the right number of board feet of maple for a Standing Laptop Desk with drawer. The entire desk will be maple except for the drawer. The inside of the drawer will be pine and the front face (with half blind dovetails – never done those before so should be fun) will be maple. The top of the desk will be 41″ high for standing or sitting on a stool. The primary purpose for the laptop is to work with me playing my guitar and learning songs.

See my previous post on the Standing Laptop Desk for a general idea of what it should look like.

Here is a shot of most of the wood stickered waiting to be prepped.

Small Epiphany – Dovetails

glennth — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 03:33:57 +0000

In my daily (ok, not daily but nearly so) practice of hand cut dovetails, I came together with a finished practice joint that was very tight. I still had one small gap (I’ll talk about that in a bit) but the sides were very tight.

In the cutting of the sides of the tails and pins, I’ve been struggling with keeping the cuts parallel and plum. I’ve also struggled with how close to the marking line to cut. I think that I’m starting to understand the required technique. I feel like placing the blade so that one side touches the edge of the marking line (from the inside of the material to be removed) is the best place. Also, I’ve found that using a square to make sure the marked line for the sides is perpendicular to the bench top works best. I’ve done this several times now and have got increasingly tight sides where it’s not too tight (too tight splits out the dovetails). I’m very pleased.

Now as to the gap, this is from the chisel line. I’m still struggling with how to chisel out the wood to the marked line. I haven’t found a similar epiphany for this. I’ll keep at it and hope to find the thing that gets me the tight and great looking joint. I’m open to any suggestions from any readers.

New Tools

glennth — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 18:53:21 +0000

I suppose that a woodworker may never have enough tools so it’s never really news when a woodworker gets some new tool. I feel like I’m approaching a place where I can get increasingly choosy about which tools I get and when. I have a nice selection of saws, chisels, hand planes, measuring and marking tools. As I move through my practicing of various hand tool techniques I do find a small tool here and there that would be useful in simplifying the task. My observation in these tools, unlike my previous power tool life, I am finding that these tools are simpler and more basic.

Here is a shot of my new tools:

On the top left is a divider. In practicing my dovetails, I am getting increasingly happy with my cuts and fits of the joint but have noticed that my rough guesses at where to make pins/tails and how wide to make them is looking non-uniform. While I feel that hand cut parts should have some non-uniformity to them, I would like a closer sense of symmetry just from an artistic point of view. In watching various dovetail experts, I noticed that Rob Cosman uses dividers to get symmetry in his joints so that was my motivation.

Far right is a new crosscut carcass saw. All my shorter carcass/dovetail saws are rip so I needed a crosscut for things like tenons.

In the middle is a goose neck chisel for cleaning out the bottom of mortises.

Lastly on the left/bottom are some Veritas bench pups which give me another bench tool for keeping material in place while working that material.

If I head towards making guitars as I fantasized in a previous post, I expect that I will need a few additional tools but hopefully not many. Everytime I make a tool purchase means that I don’t have the funds to purchase wood for actual projects.

Mortise and Tenon

glennth — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 01:13:56 +0000

I decided that I should mix some Mortise and Tenon practice amidst my dovetail practice. The real reason, is that I have done machine cut mortise and tenon but not very well. Since this was a different technique given that I’m cutting them by hand, I was hopeful that I could do much better.

I used my new sharpened mortise chisels along with my new hand brace. I’ve read that some people do the mortise entirely by chisels and I’ve also read that some folks use brace and auger bits to get the bulk of material out. My first attempt at using the brace was a fail. I had a center line to center the bit on but my first attempt was off. It’s not really possible to put it back on center once a hole is started. My second attempt with the brace was better but still off. I used an awl to mark the center line and was only barely outside of the center. I suspect this second time was not keeping the brace level and plumb.

So after these two fails, I used just the chisel. WOW, that was the way to go. I was able to keep with in the lines and it didn’t take much effort to cut the mortise out. Of course, I’m getting really good at sharpening so I can attest that the chisel was very sharp. I followed the technique to ease up on the shoulder marks. Using this, the walls of the mortise were nice and square. I was very pleased. I did learn that a goose neck chisel would be very useful. I had a tough time cleaning out the bottom. I know the bottom doesn’t have to be as nice as the walls but I still wanted the mortise to it’s finished depth.

On to the tenon. I used the mortise to mark the tenon. I did my rip and crosscut cuts. I found though that I didn’t make one of my rip cuts deep enough and it caused me to go way to deep on a crosscut cut. Even with this, I tried the mortise and found it was fat (whew!) so I was able to pear it down to fit nice and snug. Though with the too deep of cut, the tenon broke off on the final fitting.

I will try and do this again and see if I can take some pictures for the next posting.

More dovetail practice – oak

glennth — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 06:20:15 +0000

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I have taken a path to practice hand cut dovetails. In the first round, I worked with poplar.

Now, I’m down the path of using oak. My first attempt (back before Thanksgiving) was a disaster. I had forgotten how easy it is to split oak and I did split the oak when I tried to force together joints that were too tight (by quite a bit).

Today, I took the lessons of my previous attempt and to it slow and didn’t use force on either cutting the dovetails or fitting the dovetails. Getting the joints tight enough to not have gaps seems harder with oak but after a little patience, I succeeded in a decent first attempt.

I’m using a Lee Valley/Veritas dovetail saw. I think my biggest issue is cutting a square/straight cut. I am having to adjust them by parring them down and that does not give me the best fit. I will keep working with the oak and hopefully, this practice will be able to be applied to other hard woods as well.

Any readers who have had more experience and success that have any advice, I would love to hear from you.

Back to practicing dovetails

glennth — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 18:19:23 +0000

I’ve mentioned in the past that I am practicing hand cut dovetails (see Practice Update). Our family had a run with the flew so it’s taken a few weeks to get back into a normal groove. I haven’t been to the shop in almost 3 weeks – not good. I’ve cut up some blanks. This time I’m doing OAK instead of POPLAR.

I’ve tried one attempt and it was a disaster. I’m apparently using too much force/muscle (which I tend to do since I have some). OAK is very hard but it seems a bit brittle compared to the poplar too. I managed to split the blank I was working with. This is due to force and maybe I need to sharpen my chisels (though I’m sure they are pretty sharp). I’m going to do some sharpening and try a more gentle approach and see if I can get this done. Wish me luck.