Scott Sullivan's "Katrina" Guitar #2
Day 2
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Well, I woke up this morning....da-da-da-DU (<- famous blues riff)...pulled on my sweats and bleary-eyed my way to the shop area. I decided to go ahead and shave the back braces down while I had the top off. Here, I'm about 1/2 way done. The one brace is done and I've started on the rearmost. However, it's 7:30 am and I haven't even had any coffee or anything yet. I started getting a little shaky after the 1st brace, so I took a break to get some Joe and maybe even get dressed. I bet Frank Ford never goes to work half-dressed. |
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Here's the fully glued top just kind of hanging around. |
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There...that's much better. Fresh ground French Roast mixed
with some pinon-nut beans. 1994 North American Ornithological
Conference- I gave a paper on "Estimating accuracy of remote radio triangulation
fixes on free-ranging prairie falcons"
at that meeting. 12 years ago! Time flies. Okay, time to
shower and get dressed. I'm still padding around in my slippers
and Lynn Dudenbostel warned me to NEVER work with chisels in anything
less than full boots/shoes. Drop that puppy on your foot and you
will be visiting the emergency room! I've already lived
dangerously enough this morning. Time to get with it. P.S.- look at that wart of a cleat just north of the coffee cup. Scott, did YOU put that thing in there?? For shame, man.... |
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9:00 am. The back braces are shaved and cleaned up, the guitar is vacuumed out. |
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I'm dressed and have my boots on. |
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Time to clean up my secondary bench. I'll glue the top to the body over here and it'll be out of the way while I work on something else. If you've ever seen my setup at Kaufman Kamp, my home setup really isn't much different! |
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9:30 am- just a few last loose pieces to glue down. These are the wimpy little "tone bars" that Martin uses on the 15 series. |
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10 am- here's the body on the clean bench. Just waiting on those braces to dry and then I'll start re-attaching the top to the body. While I'm waiting, there's nothing much to do but drink more coffee and answer e-mail. Maybe I'll plug in that Strat in the background.... |
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11 am- here we go! The top is glued on (and it took every clamp I have!). I had to do a bit of pushing and pulling to get everything lined up. |
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We got it all lined up except this corner. I'll let the rest
of the guitar dry and then come back and loosen a little in this areay
and work on getting this pushed back in. The correct way to do
this, of course, would be with a mold, but this'll work alright for this
guitar.
It'll sit now for the rest of the day and sometime this afternoon or evening I'll work on this little section. |
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3 pm. After a short break during which I went down to the barn and greased the swingarm bushings on my KDX and shot my bow a little bit, I came back up and started working on the little overhangs on this guitar. Once again, I just used a hot spatula and a little water to loosen the top in an area around the ledge. Then I pushed the side in and clamped small sections of top down. I ran a 3' long clamp across the top to help pull the last little chunk in (this is a lot like changing tires....). Looks to me like it's fit pretty well now. I'll leave these clamps on until 6 pm or so. Gotta go pack up 20 copies of "Falconry Equipment" to be ready for shipping the next UPS comes by. |
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9:30 pm- We went to hear the Mennonite's annual Christmas singing program (this is where the Mennonites sing to the Baptists in a Catholic church...) and got back about 8:30 pm. I pulled the clamps off the guitar and here's what we've got. Sides are still a little off, but they're glued down solid and I don't know that I can do better w/out a jig. |
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I've got these little mis-matches on both sides, too. Other than these, everything looks good. I might fuss with these a little more, I might let 'em go. My main goal here is to get the guitar playable not to get cosmetic perfection. Still, I'd like to get it as good as I can. |
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I'm going to glue the bridge down before I quit for the day. As we can see here, the lacquer extends for quite a ways under the bridge outline. I'm going to scrape this off to get a clean fit. The 15 has a pretty thin finish and it's not a lot of work to clean it off. |
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With that done, I glued the bridge and clamped it down. I'll
put the neck on tomorrow and then work with the large top crack. I
already test fit a couple of strips of mahogany shavings and I think I
can do something there. In any case, the top is fine under the
bridge, so we'll get this step done at least. 10 pm- done for the day. |