Last seen: Mar 3, 2025
We tried another piece of joined veneer, this time using the back mould. It happened again. On the plus side, look how closely the veneer has foll...
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 ac...
@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 ...
@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 oversize...
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.
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 ...
And then an awful lot of copy-routing ensued.
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 4m...
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 m...
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 sa...
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 ...
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 pum...
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 neve...
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 compensa...
@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...