Just some minor adjustments

Category: Guitar building

2017-01-13 17:25:57

Not much progress on the guitar the last week, for a few reasons:

  1. We're having a heatwave here, which means it's about 40 degrees in the garage by 9:30am. Too hot to do lots of physical work - e.g. sanding
  2. I've got the dreaded Man Flu. Nose running like a tap while wearing a face mask is not a good thing.
A few minor adjustments have happened though. I strung the bass up, and checked the height of the strings from the frets - about 5mm. That's waaaay high. The only way to fix that is to route a pocket into the face of the bass, for the bridge to sit down into. Spend a few hours making a template and fence, and testing it three times on scrap wood, before spending about 5 minutes doing the actual cut. Seems to have done the job.

Next minor modification is to fix a large nick in the bottom of the guitar. This happened way back when I did the first routing around the edge. I was hoping that once it was sanded and curved, the hole might go away. Unfortunately it was too deep, so I have to fix it. Tried wood filler, but it looked really obvious, as the hole is on the end grain of the wood.

So what I've done is square up the edges of the hole a bit more, and then cut a piece of wood to fit in the gap. Glued it in, and then I'll sand it down flush. Hopefully that will be less of a obvious router mistake than the wood filler. Update: added photo of sanded and oiled - it doesn't look horrible.

I've done a few hours of sanding so far, and have the front and sides of the body done with 120 grit. Still have the back edges, neck and head to go. Here's a shot with some water on it to show the grain: