Some pictures of the creation process of the bridge.
We start off by shaping the piece of pearwood to the profile of this little part of the plan. Notice the small indent on the left side. We will need to chisel that out
I have made a little holding jig/shooting board for this bridge as it is tiny.
I made the mistake of placing the fence a bit too far away from the edge, so I needed some spacer to do most of the work.
A piece of leftover spruce bracing material is good enough for the purpose.
I am eyeballing the angle and matching it up to the drawing as close as I can
Here I am using a special jig to hold the shaped bridge , using small little angled wedges, so we can precisely drill the string holes.
Then into the patterns makers vice and chisel out the slight indent, slowly creep up to the right angle with a chisel, towards the line of the string holes from one side, then repeating the process from the other side to match up to the depth of the removed portion.
At this stage, we end up with the bridge part in the middle. Now we have to take away the ends and give the bridge its final shape
We first mark out where the little flower motive will be located, and remove all the material passed that.
We also mark out where the top of the bridge will start to slope downwards , towards the flowers
Then, we carefully slice away , layer by layer, the material with a carving knife and/or a scalpel knife.
When that is done, we mark out the wings and remove the back portion of the flowers and saw off the top of the flower sections, to their final height
Rounding out the flowers with a chisel, drawing cut lines for the flowers and making little cuts with a carving knife to separate the flower leaves and the heart of the flower.
With a leathercarving gouge, we make little indents into the flower leaves, to give them more depth , dimension and reality.
I only dent with it, then accentuate that dent by pushing it towards the heart of the flower, cutting away a very, very small amount of material.
Next, we shape the wings by cutting away material from the back and front of the wings. This is a very tedious process, because as you cut away more and more material, the more fragile it becomes and you can easily snap off the wings on the section that is in the palm of your hand, while working on the other side. This is also done with a carving knife. But it ends up looking like it does now...
The only thing left is to tidy things up with a sanding block, and maybe a toothpick or some sanding wire, or fine needle files.
Even experienced makers still find there are new things to learn
Some people call me a tool, others are less complimentary. Tools being useful things.
After some cleaning up on the heel and end blocks and adding an inwards curve ( approx 3 mm max depth ) towards the waist from the upper and lower bouts, to clear some space for the players hand and strings to vibrate, I carefully marked out some points on the bottom of the top to be able to place it in exactly the same place when we glue it up to the body.
Since we don't have an access to the back of the top, once it is glued to the body, because the rosette prevents us to use clamps to hold the bridge in place, we will need to place the bridge before the top is glued on. The scale length is 54 cm ( well , it is 53,8 cm really, or 21 3/16" )
So I marked out the front and back edge with masking tape, put the bridge on to verify it s position, measure and measure some more
Then I took the top off, and used a simple holding jig and a few lightweight clamps to hold the top to the jig and use isinglass glue to glue the bridge on.
Isinglass glue is pretty expensive and is made from fish blatter. It was the superglue of old times. It needs to be heated, just like hide glue, but it is much stronger then hide glue and you use it whenever you want to make sure it does not come off.
I also lightly heated up the top in the area between the two pieces of masking tape , where the bridge will be placed.
After putting the end graft in ( ebony ) and adding a label on the inside ( unlike these days, the label was orientated in such a way the player just had to tilt the instrument towards him/her to be able to read the label ), I closed the lid and glued the top on the body, using hide glue. The advantage of hide glue , is that you can reactivate it with heat, so you work in small portions, heating up an area of the top, then clamp the top to the body , using masking tape. The top lip in front has a function, it allows you to control the angle of the neck. If you take a straight edge from the front of the bridge and lay it on the top, the clearance at the nut should be 2 mm. If you need to correct this, you can do so by pushing or pulling the neck and make a mark at the edge of the lip and make sure the lip and line match up when glueing that lip, measure again, reheat and retry if needed.
The label is kinda hard to see underneath that rosette, but with enough light, it is possible to take a picture 🙂
Last week, I trimmed the edges of the top and back, with a chisel
I am really pleased with how that end graft turned out.
And this week, I made the little ebony pins that will become the extensions of the fretboard.
I also glued the ebony fretboard on and starting to turn the tuning pegs on the lathe
Yesterday , I continued my build of the renaissance guitar… Shaping the tuning pegs handles , using a little holding jig and an improvised, temporary fence on the spindle sander. With a violin pegshaper, I brought the pins of the pegs to thickness ( tapered ) and coated them with Aleppo soap. With a reamer, I enlarged the pegholes, making sure the pegs are seated at a precise 90 degrees to the headstock back.
Yesterday , I finished the tuning pegs by cutting them to length and adding the string hole. This is done with a little jig. Basically a block of wood with a tapered hole to accept the pin and a 1.2mm hole drill guide for the string hole.
Then buffed the end of the pin and the head with a paste wax to a shiny finish.
The rest of the day I spent on finishing the body and neck with shellac, while the top is finished with Carnauba paste wax .
The fretboard gets a few drops of oil , which is applied with a 400 grid sandpaper. The resulting ebony dust paste gets pushed in the pores and left to cure after whipping off the excess.
Next week I ll cut the nut and put on frets and strings and it should be finished!
@koendb It’s stunning work, I’m so impressed. It’s definitely a whole different ball game to making electric guitars. Sure a lot of fundamental skills are the same but the tools and skill set required for making traditional acoustic instruments is off the scale compared to modern, machine assisted electric guitar builds. We are all skilled when we make our creations but using hand tools and manual labour to make these wonderful instruments is so so impressive. It makes me want to learn and create something for myself. It’s not the right time for me though and it looks like I will need a lot more tools and materials I don’t have. Money is a little tight right now and so is my time, but I will take the plunge one day.
I will definitely be looking back through these processes and anyone else who has produced instruments like this, such as @russ (finally 😉).
Make guitars, not war 🌍✌️🎸
That's an incredible piece of workmanship Koen, proper old-school skills, and it looks like a beautiful instrument at the end of it.
You'll have fun playing that in the local bars ...
😉
Big, BIG WOW.
Online guitar making courses – guitarmaking.co.uk