Penny Guitars

I have done the dovetail joint now, the socket on the soundbox was done with the router, using the cutting template in the picture below. The neck was carved by chisel once the large waste area was cut away with the saw. The small steel plate in the picture is screwed to the neck end and used as a guide for carving the joint.

The dovetail joint was much easier to do than I thought it would be. As I got closer to a neat fit it was a case of sliding the neck into the joint to check how well it fitted, a case of remove little and check often. It comes out at about 2 to 3 hours work, not counting making the cutting templates.

The next job now is to carve and shape the heel, the heel on this guitar is not going to be the standard shape heel for a classical guitar but instead is inspired from the heel on a selmer maccaferri guitar.
I am becoming a lot more experimental now and will be trying various other ideas on future guitar builds.

I have rough cut the shape of the fingerboard and cut the fret slots. Jobs like that used to take me much longer to do but now I have some experience I can just get on with the job without all the constant checking.

I have also veneered the headstock, I just need to draw the design and cut it to shape, not too sure exactly what I want the headstock to look like but I want to make it less bulky looking like my last classical does.

I think I am going to make a jig to assist in cutting the neck dovetail joint and that may take me a day or so. So may not be a post on here for a day or so.

I have sanded/scraped the fingerboard down to the final thickness now. I have also set the ramp on the fingerboard to be 7mm thick at fret 1 and  6.2mm at fret 12.
I have reduced the thickness of the headstock down to 19mm. I will be adding a 2.5mm walnut veneer onto the headstock and then a 1.2mm tulip wood veneer on top of that. I think it will look quite good, well we will see when it is done.

I am getting close to doing the dovetail joint, gonna have a chat with my local expert first, get as many pointers as I can before I start.

Nothing new to take a picture of really but there will be when I start shaping and cutting the headstock.