Started on the neck and cut some strips for the linings.

Had to drop the exposure, even then it is hard to see how I cut the kerfs in the linings. I use a piece of wood with a slot cut in it to limit the depth of the cut. You have to have all the pieces the same thickness to get the same depth of cut. I dimension them…

Clamped up the ends.







A quick rosette.…

Bent up a sides today. Did it by hand on a pipe being paranoid from breaking it yesterday. Seems Tightbond Original did not like the amount of heat or steam I had to use in bending the side.







Once I had it clamped this much I was not going to give it a chance to spring back on me. Put a wet rag on it and…

Thought I would post this before I bend them. No plan B if I mess up.



Managed to get the pieces all joined without too much stress. Being that I had many joins to make and I did not have much in the way of extra to sand out if they were not close to perfect I modified my process. They turned out fine so now the next stressful operation, bending the sides. Softwoods do not like to bend much and will crease and crush on the inside turns. SuperSoft II really helps out from the one…

Had to use a right angle jig and sandpaper to joint the sides, the jig I usually use was not long enough.

Doing the top and back pieces with my router. I but the joint edges against the bit and run the router along a straight edge. A bit of fiddling to get it set but I usually come away with a good glue…

The 2x4 was a little damp and gummed up my blade. Have a fan on them trying to dry them out. Cut the 2x4 in half and resawed one for backs, tops and linings. Cut two lengths for the sides and that left about a 1" board to make the neck, braces and stuff. Think I am going to make an 00 sized guitar, aprox. 19" body length, 14.5" lower bout.…

I saw the post on making a ukulele and I thought I would like to do it, a simple build that won't take too much time. I was suppose to make one at a uke forum when they had a thread on building them. One thing lead to another, I glued a couple of pieces of wood together for the neck, put it aside for a different project, will have to show you guys that one when it gets going. Looked through my stash of 2 x 4's, I have kept my eye out for any that would be half useful to build an instrument.…

I left everybody with an unsightly mess on the guitar. But there was a method to my madness.

Here are some of the last bits and pieces, the bridge and the tailpiece.…

I am just catching up on posting although the pace is crazy. Not much time for reflection and determining if my next action will work or not. Speaking of.

I had the painters give me some raw tint to put int paint, was suppose to be good for water based and oil paint. It didn't seem to like the wipe on poly and instead of mixing stayed as mini globules as I mixed it. I went with it anyway , first doing a yellow coat and then when dry doing an halo orange coat. I could see it wasn't going…

Routed out the binding ledge. Decided to use some flamed maple I have, never bent it before.







Messy bench, I'll get to it later. I have my masking tape ready to hold down the binding, using fish glue, another first. I have a bending iron in the vice to touch up the maple binding. It sprung back as shown…

I'll keep the mushroom posts in mind although I doubt I will get much movement on such a small instrument with how I built it.

So I had the idea to hammer form the resonator cover out of the aluminum. Seemed like a good idea, would have been easier with thinner aluminum. Had a piece of fir plywood that I carved the dome shape out of, used a hand plane and worked up a sweat. That was premium old growth fir ply. It was easy enough figuring out if I needed to take off more from one side…

A few more pictures. Don't know how to brace the top, it's not like a normal acoustic with the sound hole. With the well the hole portion of the top is fairly stiff. So the points above and below are the flexible parts. Basically you want to limit the movement of the top trying to fold in on itself requiring a neck reset. Tied the neck block to the well which stiffened the top up. Not a heck of a lot of stress from four strings with a short scale length but I am building this so you can swap…

Not sure how this forum works, but this will be my build sequence of building my entry.

Great! Two weeks into the contest and I decide to give it a try. Played around with some door skins thinking to build out of it, finally decided to use some parts where I took a wrong turn on and doubt I would build from them but can't seem to toss them out. Some baked maple sides and a neck glued up from sugar pine I salvaged from a pallet.…