So having joined the London Hackspace in the hope of using the faciities to build guitars and other cool things I somehow wound up first as a maintainer organizing the woodshop and then as a Trustee (director) and have spent the past few years dealing with organizing, making gear work, moving out of our old premises, finding new premises, moving in, building walls and ceilings, inducting new members, etc etc.
This is volunteer work, I don't get paid, I am obviously insane... or perhaps just stupid?
So anyway, a few weeks ago I FINALLY got to start on something for myself, a guitar build, with materials I bought about two and a half years ago (I've got materials for other guitars I've had even longer)
That night I literally got two bandsaw cuts done, but it had gone from being a project I was planning to do, to being a project I am actually doing.
Slowly...
Unfortunately it seems like most times I go in I get caught up dealing with Hackspace things rather than me things. It seems there are always things that need to be sorted, or people with questions, and so on. So I'm lucky if I get one guitar bit done.
Anyway, the build is an almost-Bandsman, with a couple of slight variations that will become clear as I go along, I'm using one of David Dyke's blanks kits , which is great value for money but has caused me some hassles because the neck bank comes precut with a headstock angle that's a bit greater than I wanted.
So a couple of pics to follow
I think you may recognize the jig.
This was the first day of the London Craft Festival, and I had spent the whole day talking to people trying to convince them to join the hackspace. I needed those beers!
So, in the Hackspace we have a large format laser cutter, so I used that to cut some templates.
We also have a Denford CNC converted to LinuxCNC (guess which muggins got roped into getting that to work) which I used to make the radiusing block in the picture (the text on it was the laser cutter).
For a couple of reasons I took a slice off the top of the neck blank, then flattened it again using the planer. When it came to routing the headstock angle Mark's Jig wouldn't work because the reference face was the top of the neck (the david dyke blanks are not planed on the back), so I devised the one in the photo. Handy thing about having a laser cutter is that it's easy to cut a 15 degree and accurately. I would have like to have less of an angle, but I was constrained by the shape of the original blank
So now we get to the night I'm starting these posts, I went in to the hackspace thinking I would have a whole evening to myself to work on the guitar, no shop projects, no hackspace system admin, no inductions, just my guitar. I imagined myself getting as far as installing the truss rod, real progress would finally be made!
Yeah, about that...
I went to the guitarbuilding website to check the videos and... it was down.
So I emailed mark to let him know, and got on with trying to fix some niggles with the CNC (shop project)
Carol responded, she did try to get me access to the videos some other way, but apparently that wasn't working either
Then after a while, the website started working again, yay!!
But then the video kept freezing, I thought it must be the website not working correctly still. But then after a while I thought about how ropey the building internet has been since the landlord paid some idiots money to "improve" it, so in desparation I tried hotspotting on my phone
It worked! Finally... but a lot of time lost
So I just got the "Cut Out The Neck" stage done
But at least now it's starting to look and feel like a guitar neck, rather than a rather oddly shaped lump of wood!
