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...

Do you then smooth the layers together? I'm guessing so, else you'd end up with a bit of a ridged top? Is it right that you'd have an arch that'd be 12mm-15mm from highest to lowest point? So, if yo...

What about when I think I'm wrong @jamesbisset?

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...

Having (relatively) successfully made two sides, a front and a back, I carted the whole lot home to rest in this old, cold, damp house. Mr Bailey was surprisingly insistent that I keep the sides bound...

Exactly what I was beginning to think. However, the advantage of the concave mould is twofold: Darren (Bagpress) said it was better that way You can make the mould the same size as the front or back,...

@tv101 With poor state of my fingers at the moment, calling anything after them is sure to end in failure. For your carve top I would rough out the carving with a cnc but do the final finishing with ...

@jamesbisset So, the back went into the vacuum press, this time glued with a slow cure urea resin, and you heard me say on the video there were a couple of creaks. Sure enough, the next morning reve...

Congratulations! This has proved to be a more troublesome task than I’d anticipated. Watching Darren’s videos, it all seemed fairly straightforward and error-proof. But I guess experts make things l...

Come on Jim, this is serious, not one of your songs … 🤣 🤣

@jamesbisset Pleased you are getting somewhere at last, however you still need a foolproof method that works for teaching beginners.Ive thought about this since we chatted last week. I would be incli...

With some anxiety, I tackled the front lamination. I was so concerned about the way the back had split that I cut apart the book-matched front face veneer and planed the edges again before joining (ag...