Penny Guitars

I glued the bridge on to the sound board today.

The glue on the bridge needs 24 hours to fully dry, so while waiting I cut the saddle and the nut from a slab of Corian generously given to me by a friend.

I am making a stand for the guitar from a poplar tree that was felled in my garden.

It has been an easy day today and that is just as well because I haven’t felt up to doing much. I am already thinking about the next two guitars I am going to make. They will both be steel string guitars but one of them will be a left hander. I learned a lot more while making these last two guitars and I didn’t do as good a job as I expected to, but they are good guitars none the less.

I have managed to complete the steel string neck. When I designed the headstock I didn’t really like it but slowly it grew on me and I cut it. After a day of seeing it I really like it now and I am glad I stuck with it. So here is what it looks like.

This guitar now has an official name, it is called ‘The Whale’ keeping us all aware that whales are intelligent mammals, just like us but probably smarter.

Here is what ‘The Whale’ looks like so far. The bridge is not glued on yet and the machine heads need to come back off so I can enamel the headstock.

It is starting to take shape now.
I am giving an animal name to each guitar I make. The first one I made is ‘The Neanderthal’ and the classical guitar is called ‘The Dolphin’.

I have fitted the holly binding to the steel string, there is no bindings for the back, the back and sides look really nice as is and I think bindings for the back would spoil it. I have rubbed down the sound board and back right up to a 1200 grit, still got to rub the sides down yet.

I still need to come up with a design for the headstock but outside of that the neck is roughly complete. I still need to put the fret wire into the fingerboard yet. There is probably only a few days work left to do on the steel string but I am not in a hurry so it will probably take me a week.

Once the steel string is complete I am going to need to take some time to clean and sharpen various tools, I also need to make a few new tools. I will cover that on the blog when I get to it.