More Cromwell back braces, and a red herring for the pickguard.

I'm covering a few days of work here.

This brace looks really good, unlike the other two. 

But, looks are deceiving. This brace is loose through the middle, which is an odd place for a brace to be loose. Regardless, it needs to be glued. 

I covered up the label, and put tape down on both sides. 

I used my cutters to make craft sticks with a notched end so that they would stay on the brace. 

A quick test shows that they fit snugly. I didn't get any shots of gluing the brace, but I basically put glue on the tape and worked it in with my bent palette knife. 

The soundhole was right where I need the sticks, so I made a bridge out of one stick to push the brace 

A cotton swap in a needlenose plier cleaned up the mess. 

The next day, it looked pretty good, and it was solid again. 

Now for that last brace, way in the back. That fracture at the end of the brace needed to be glued in the split and glued to the back as well. Luckily, the soundhole on the Cromwell is big enough that I can stick my arm in all the way, and touch this area.  

I started putting down tape. That hole in the bottom of the guitar sure lets in a lot of light! 

As always, I had to cover up the label. 

I made several braces, and test fit them. There is a top brace above the bottom brace, so I notched both ends of the sticks. 

Getting glue back there was going to be a major chore. I started filling pipettes with glue. 

I made six. It wasn't enough. 

This is before I did the cleanup. As you can see, it took a lot of clue, and a lot of mess, to really get things taken care of. This is so deep in the guitar that the mess isn't really a problem, but I wasn't too happy about it. The good news is that I got glue everywhere it needed to be, and the end is really well glued now. 

I decided to start work on regluing the pickguard. 

I traced the pickguard onto blank paper. 

Using a magnet and a pencil, I traced the braces from underneath the pickguard. 

I also used a contour gauge to show how deep the braces and the bridge patch are. 

The next day, the inside of the guitar is messy, but everything is solid. 

I made copies of my tracing, and cut one out. 

I glued the cutout to a stiff piece of particle board. 

Then I looked at the guitar again. 

Do you see the problem? The area the pickguard is going to sit is curved, due to the belly in the top. I can't clamp this flat, it would, at best, distort the guitar, and more likely it would cause some damage. So I stopped making the clamping caul, and I will instead order some adhesive film to reattach the pickguard. I didn't lose too much time to this, and I'm glad I figured this out before going any further.

Gluing back braces

Not a whole lot to talk about in this post.

I want to try to get this parth to match the rest of the guitar a bit. 

Perhaps a suntan? I left it in the sun for about two hours, with an alarm going off every ten minutes so that I would move it around. There was no difference, so that was a wash. 

I spent some time adjusting the dovetail on the Guild D35. 

I did some tinting on the new patch on the Cromwell. 

This is looking really good. 

Last, I glued up one back brace on the Cromwell. This is really fiddly stuff, and I decided to use Titebond, because there was no way I could get it glued and braced quickly enough for hide glue. Maybe I could if the back was off, but I'm not going there. The braces are craft sticks that I cut off to be the correct length. I think this will work nicely.

Back to the Cromwell, and a few other tidbits

So, a couple months ago we made a spruce patch for a dig in the top of the Cromwell. We carved out a small bowl shape, supported the heck out of the underside of the top, then pressed a wet piece of spruce wood into the hole with a LOT of pressure.

Later on, and completely undocumented, we unclamped the thing, and glued that press-fit and now dry piece of spruce into the hole.

Last week, it was chisel time.

This is after we started carving. Basically, we took a nice, flat chisel with a bent handle, and started bringing the patch down. 

This is the final product. 

The patch is a nice fit, fills the space perfectly, and even has grain that is a good match to the surrounding grain. It is also very light. 

The plan is to expose the patch to a lot of sunlight, and then add some tint and shellac to blend it in. It looks better than a big divot in the top, and it's a lot stronger.  

The patch looks great, and it is very well fit. This beats sitting down and carving a patch for hours while chalk fitting. It was pretty terrifying to squish a chunk of spruce on the top of a vintage instrument with tremendous pressure, but, thanks to careful placement of cauls under the top, there is no damage at all.

A violin project came over to me from a cousin, who want to be able to play this family heirloom. It had spent most of its life strung left handed, even though it was built right handed. Someone added mechanical tuners some time in the past, and there was a terrible reglue of the fingerboard at some time in the past, using really gooey epoxy that failed to harden.

I've already stripped most of the hardware. 

I did a quick glue job on this crack. 

But when I removed the tuners - oh my goodness. That is a real mess. 

That is a LOT of damage, and the neck is badly warped as well. It may be time to think of just replacing the neck. 

It was a hide glue day, so I glued up several projects. Just separated backs and sides. 

Ray is also working on a banjo, a nice Bacon FF banjo with a pretty poorly set neck. He was building up the end of the dowel stick to reset the angle, and had to also fill the screw hole. Fun stuff!

Small Kamaka and Guild work

Okay, I got a little bit of work done yesterday. Mostly, I cleaned the garage, made a new sanding board, played electric guitar for the first time in ages, and did a little work on the Kamaka and the Guild. 

I started carving away the new piece to make it look right. The big problem was that the grain was slightly diagonal, so I had to carve in the direction from the nut to the body on one side, and from the body to the nut on the other side, otherwise I would take out a huge chunk of wood following the grain, and that would probably be bad. I used a knife for most of the carving. 

Carve, sand and carve some more, then level the thing with the current fretboard. 

From the back, all looks well. This uke, like most Kamaka ukes of this period, is remarkably asymmetrical, I assume the neck was quickly formed on a belt sander. 

From the front, pretty good, although the grain is not as good a match as I might have hoped. That's enough for now - this is about 40 minutes of work to get to this point. 

I pulled the Guild D35 out, and decided to get the neck to actually sit in the pocket. I sanded, chiseled, and worked for about 45 minutes, and got it pretty close. 

Sanding revealed some significant cracks in the neck block that I could not see before. 

Pretty bad stuff. I wicked in some thin CA glue and clamped it good and tight. 

A block inside, and one outside, and LOTS of pressure. I want that crack closed, otherwise there could be some nasty trouble in the future. The neck could move around, and that would defeat all this work. 

This morning, I took of the clamp, and put the neck in the pocket. It's pretty sloppy right now. 

The glued up area. 

It's really hard to get a picture of this, but I want the top of the fingerboard to be in a plane that intersects the top of the bridge. I'm a little low now, it was better yesterday before I fixed the block. That tells me that I am on the right track, though, because if I hadn't fixed the block, I would have falsely assumed that everything was fine. 

Oh man, this is going to look so nice when it is done. That fretboard is a little gaudy, but what the heck - this poor guitar deserves it after all it has been through!

Not much work will happen for the next few days - I'll be very busy with family coming over, and shuttling the kids around from event to event.

More Kamaka

Okay, not a whole lot got done today, but what got done was good.

I sanded some more. 

And more.

And more! I'm not going to be able to eliminate that gouge on the side, that would simply be too risky. 

This was an amazingly thin neck to start with, and now I'm on the cusp of breaking the thing altogether. 

I made a piece to fit, but it ended up too thin. Time to make a second one. 

I needed the ends to be perfectly square to the bottom, so I got out a level and used it as a kind of shooting board, holding the piece against it while sanding on my sanding board. 

I had to round the edges slightly, as there was no way I could get the inside corners of the cutout area perfectly square. And after all this, we decided that the piece was a terrible mismatch in looks, so I made a third. 

I had other Kamaka ukes out for comparison. I'm getting to know a lot more about the Gold label era Kamakas. 

After making the third piece, it was time for some glue and an overnight stint in a clamp. 

Looking at this Kamaka and the others, I'm guessing that it is a late 50's, early 60s uke. It has a "W" written on the neck block, exactly the same as the "W" written on the neck block of another uke I have that is known to have been made in 1961, so that would be a good guess for the year. These don't have serial numbers, so that is about as close as I'm going to get for a guess.