Penny Guitars

Just fitted to the Suzuki classical guitar a new set of machine heads. I got the machine heads from eBay user www-musiclo-com-ukshop for £9.90 with Free postage. Okay they are not the best classical machine heads but the quality is pretty good and they are definately worth the price. A set of equivelent looking Rubner machine heads will cost you about £33.00. In fact I have just bought 2 more sets for future guitars.

The old machine heads were just about seized up. Being as this guitar cost just 50 pence at a boot fair the machine heads cost 20 times the price of the guitar. It is certainly a lot easier to tune up now and looks much prettier.

I have completed the bracing on the soundboard. I have used the available spruce from the leftovers of build 2 & 3. I have put the bracing in the common fan layout, making a few deviations from the standard model. No, I do not have any idea about what it will do or how it will change the sound, this is just an experiment, it may sound great, okay or crap, whatever happens I will learn something.

It looks nice enough, notice the twin cross braces just below the sound hole, I did that just because I can. If it sounds fantastic then I can claim that I knew what I was doing, ha ha. I have done the back bracing as well but can’t be bothered taking any more pictures today, I will do more later.

I have made myself quite a number of sanding sticks of various shapes and sizes, like these in the picture.

I have found that these sanders are very useful you just have to let the sandpaper do its job, in other words do not press too hard, and the sanding sticks will last an amazingly long time, some of the various sticks I have made are still on the original sandpaper after 3 months. It is easy enough to tear it off when it is worn out and fit a new piece. I just glue the sandpaper on with standard wood glue, it dries enough for use in about 5 minutes.

I have bent the Macassar Ebony sides. My new bending iron is a great success and functioned perfectly. I can actually feel the wood go soft as it gets hot, it has made side bending an absolute pleasure. If anyone wants to make something similar then I am happy to supply the source assembly code for the PIC16F876 or PIC16C63, the only other item required to build the bending iron is a 10amp 240vac solid state relay. Just ask and I will post the code on this blog.
The sides were quite a challenge as there was four splits in the wood and it was a bit warped, but I like a challenge. You can imagine the look of horror on my face when I broke one of the sides. I have repaired it okay and the proof of success will be in the final pictures, it should look fine. I only have a few pints of my home brew bitter left and I have started drinking the 40 pints of stout I made. I do have a fresh 40 pints of bitter fermenting and will be putting that in the barrel in another 4 days time. Beer has become an important ingredient to guitar making.As you can see in the picture it is a pretty good snap. I didn’t know how far you can push this wood, but I do now.

It does make the side a bit difficult to bend when I have glued the break, because any heat and water is going to break the repair. By being very careful and using a clamped on metal block to take the heat away from the break I did finally manage it.

As can be seen the bracing has been cut. It seems a bit strange to me that the sizes stated for each bracing piece is quite large as compared to what remains after carving, it appears that you carve away about 75% of the wood. So I decided to cut the bracing a lot less than suggested, I will only be carving about 25% away.

I have used a small piece of rosewood from a previous back for the bridge patch. I am basically making a copy of the old Suzuki, the big difference is that my copy is about 15mm bigger, the Suzuki does not have a bridge patch and I couldn’t decide whether to use one or not. As the picture shows I made my decision.

So as the picture above shows, this is where I am up to, I probably will not get any more done today but at least the blog is up to date.