Over the last few days, I decided to build another saw bench. I have already built 2 in the Christopher Schwarz style. I’ve found these saw benches to be absolutely great…except for ripping. The flared legs get in the way when ripping, especially a narrow board. So I needed something that didn’t have flared legs [...]
Posts Tagged ‘Saws’
Panel for doors
After my last post, I had a nice fail and didn’t correctly determine the length of the rails for the doors. The old adage of measure twice and mark once only works if you have decided the length of a particular item correctly. For this project, I’m not using a plan so my determination was [...]
Rail and Stiles
The panel glue up went well. Now it’s on to the Rails and Stiles for the door. As you can see, this is a very common door construction. Some details you can’t tell from that image include a groove on the interior of both the Stiles and the Rails. I have seen 2 common options [...]
Basic Glue up
A basic glue up is a skill every woodworker needs to master. The first step is to get the rough material to the rough size. For hand tool users, this means hand crosscuts and hand ripping. For power tool users, this means table saw work. The next step is to joint the edges to be [...]
Now That’s Hung!
When using hand tools, you’ll probably find that crosscutting is pretty simple. The main reason is that when you crosscut, you are making a relatively short cut. On the other hand, ripping is a manually intensive job. Unlike the crosscut, this cut is along the length of the board. For instance, I need to make [...]
Guitar 4′s Neck
I’ve been sick for a few days so haven’t been to the shop. No worries though, it was just a cold. Today, I started working on Guitar 4′s neck. Starting a neck, you start with a simple blank and then trim off a small piece on one end at about a 15 degree angle. You [...]
Guitar 4 – Alignment looks good
Today, I took the back with the braces and joined it to the sides. I first had to finish shaping the braces and then create the slots in the kerfing for the braces. All this was exactly the same for guitars 2 and 3. I spent a great deal of time during glue up getting [...]
Guitar #3 gets Sides joined to Back
Today, I worked on attaching the sides and back together. The first step is to shape the braces on the back. About 550mm from the edge of the guitar, the braces are pared down to about 2-4mm thickness. Once that is done, you determine where to cut the cross braces and the center brace so [...]
Guitar body 3 – the back get’s braces
I showed all the little bits of progress that I made over the weekend in my last post. Today, I worked on taking the braces I made and applying them to the back which will be part of the guitar body 3. The first step is to mark/verify the location of each of the braces, [...]
Back on Sides!
I had a crown done on Monday and surprisingly it made working on my guitar challenging. Today (Thursday) is the first day I’ve gotten back into my shop. Today I had several small things to do and thought they would fill up my time. First, I had to trim the ebony accents on the wedge [...]
Sticking out 2 Necks
OK, I’ve moved from issues to being in good shape. The glue-ups of both necks turned out great. My next step was to thickness the headstock. I used hand planes to do this. Given that both necks are maple, it took awhile and I had to monitor grain direction to make sure we had smooth [...]
Scarf Joint – Attempts 2 & 3
In an update to my last post I told you all how the joint of my first attempt did not turn out. Fortunately, I ordered an additional Birdseye Maple Neck Blank so I could try it again having learned that I need to verify the joint on both sides of the neck. I also ordered [...]
Guitar 2 – Scarf Joint
OK, I’ve begun the 2nd guitar in ernest. I started with the neck. When building a guitar neck you need 3 basic elements. The neck body. This is where the fret is on up to the 14th fret. The headstock. This is angled down from the neck body by about 15 degrees and is where [...]
Wood Prep Shots
Here is a shot of all the hand processed maple boards that I have for my standing laptop desk. As you can see, I have the top glued together (still need size but I want to wait till the desk frame is together). I also have the legs with taper and now they are marked [...]
Progress on my standing laptop desk
The next post should have some pictures. Having never built a project entirely by hand, I had no accurate idea of how long any particular step was going to take. Once I got started I realized that any guess I had was far off (by orders of magnitude). I think I compounded the time problem [...]
