Both pressings were aborted. I now had two slightly bent veneers with cracks. To continue the testing, we took the two cracked veneers and put a leaf of cross-grain poplar in between. Then we glued th...

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 ...

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...

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...

Looking good @nsj. 👍 🎸🙂🎶🙏

It's very effective @nsj - works well 👍 I did some experimenting with the CNC with a similar idea - except I was just cutting the channel in the material and avoiding the step of having to f...

Yup No 5 for a fretboard for me. Thickness it, Make it straight, cut the fretslots. Then, setup the hand plane for smoothing, and take a pass on both outer edges of the fretboard, repeat, and take a p...

I'm having second thoughts on the recap & carve it approach. Takes an hour or two to assemble a guitar, and maybe 10mins to strip it all back - and only that long because I desoldered everything...

That's a clever little carve - not seen that before @nsj. My mad plan, as far as it's got, is to use my old-favourite surfacing bit to take the top off (by turning it into sawdust), and a few mm off...

Nice idea, and it’d certainly be simpler than what I have in mind. But the current cap is quite thin (6mm ish), so not a lot of thickness for carving, and I’d have to sand it back quite a bit to get...

I found this video in the depths of my computer. Our second public appearance ever. I play the bass that I made in the spring of 2005 in the Bailey workshop. Not only about 18 years ago, but in my cas...

I've never really bonded with the guitar. It's not that old - the last 2-3 years probably - but it didn't turn out as well as I'd envisaged, so it's been left in a corner pretty much. The specs shoul...

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,...

Mr Bailey makes exceedingly good tools. 👍

And here it is - finished. Attachment : 20230129_124152sml.jpg Attachment : 20230129_124220sml.jpg Attachment : 20230129_124233sml.jpg Attachment : 20230129_124245sml.jpg ...

Attachment : 20230128_153728.jpg Attachment : 20230128_130137.jpg CAN YOU SEE WHAT IT IS YET ? * SHHHH! it's a bit exciting... [ and everyone will want one] This weekend we are in the work...