We tried another piece of joined veneer, this time using the back mould. It happened again. Attachment : IMG_8873.JPG On the plus side, look how closely the veneer has followed the mould. Even ...

Moulds made. Veneers book-matched and joined. it’s time to get sooking no blawing. But first, a test press.As I’ve only got enough veneer for the actual build, Mr Bailey volunteered a piece of book ma...

@tv101 Ah yes... the other minor hiccups.

First hiccup. It’s useful to think of a mould for a vacuum press more like a wrap, which is why my extensive copy routing for the sides fell at the last hurdle. Your lamination will wrap round everyth...

@tv101 But weirdly, much less forgiving. If you cut out the various layers assuming that you’re going to be shaving them back, you cut them oversized. You can also cut them out quickly and roughly, be...

Right, off to make a new mould for the guitar back. More posts when I’m finished with that.

So soon I have a big pile of joined veneers. Attachment : IMG_8866.JPG

Now I need something to go onto the moulds. I’m kinda sorta following Making a Laminated Hollowbody Electric Guitar by Jim English, so I’m laminating 3 layers of 0.6mm veneer and one 1.5mm veneer. The...

And then an awful lot of copy-routing ensued. Attachment : IMG_8857.JPG

This time we took the thickness of the lamination into account, and used a bearing router bit to reduce the first layer of the side mould by around 4mm (oh look, is that a top template I failed to men...

Woosh! Didn’t even touch the sides! Oh no, here they are. Crudely cut lumps of MDF and plywood were copy-routed using the top template I failed to mention earlier. Attachment : 20230129_114408.jpg

Tiny little planes don’t tend to carve out long smooth curves, and paper-thin MDF can tear, so car body filler is used to smooth out the dips. Mark says that’s what all the professionals do. Attach...

It should have been obvious to me that, if each concentric lofting contour was equidistant, the rise would just be in a straight line. But no, so out came the scrapers to try and realise an elegant ar...

The unanswered question at this stage was just how smooth that mould would need to be. We’re not using a huge steaming press, just a little vacuum pump. Will a 4-5mm lamination follow every bump or ju...

Why 3mm layers? Why six of them? Because 5 x 3 plus baseboard gives a height of 15mm and, according to Mr Bagpress (of whom more anon), if Gibson never bent their laminations more than 15mm, then neit...

According to Mr Bagpress (of whom more anon) a concave mould will be more effective than a convex one. This also means that you don’t have to compensate for the thickness of your lamination when build...

@tv101 You’re always right.

I originally planned to draw the moulds in a 3D program and then get them cut on a CNC machine. The technique for making this sort of complex shape in 3D is called lofting - from pre-computer aeronaut...

I started this project over two years ago (I know) here: I didn’t even know a laminated semi-hollowbody wasn’t an archtop. After all this time building the workshop, accumulating tools, buying parts,...

Bargain!