Page 4
I'm sawing off the awkward bit on the lump of mahogany.
Not an urgent task, but I wanted to stop my wife saying "You'll put
somebody's eye out with that.
The two pieces.
I think I could make a fine wood sculpture out of the off-cut. It could gather
dust on the sideboard with my previous wood sculpture.
How about a fine Junoesque figure of a woman? An opera singer maybe.
A drum sander
I don't have a drum sander, so I made this from stuff sitting around in the
garage.
The sandpaper is cut from a roll of P180 grit paper that I bought some time
ago from Homebase, stuck on with double-sided tape. The table is made from a
drawer-side (you can see the dovetail joint on the back there.) It sits on two
strips of wood to raise it an inch or so from the press drill table. I cut a
hole in it with my hole saw kit and the drum sits inside it nicely.
You used to be able to get nice big dense foam drums, about five inches in
diameter, but I haven't been able to find one in any of the DIY supermarkets.
Threraputic work
This is not at all difficult. Slow going, but quite pleasant work to do.
There's not much chance of making a mistake; it's just a case of passing it
backwards and forwards as the edge gets gradually closer to the trace line.
I have done half. The rest will be done later. And I have left the straight
part of the neck joint as I want to do some final checking to make sure it
matches whichever neck I choose. The cut-out for the neck slot will not be on
this template but on a subsequent one which will also include the pickup routs
and the one for the trem. Probably the body cavities and control cavities too.
In fact the body cavities will most likely house the controls.
We suffer for our art
This is not new, it's just that my hand was near the camera when I was doing
some close-up work yesterday.
I was fitting the router onto its bracket (you can see a router bracket on
page 2, weighting down my paper while I was pasting it) and it stuck on
the top of the posts. I wiggled and pushed with my right hand, and
unfortunately the fingers of the left hand were resting on the base when it
decided to crash down.
On the bright side, I didn't cry, much, and the excruciating agony subsided to
severe pain inside around an hour.
Progress report
This just about sums it up.
We've had rather a lot on our minds for the last few months, but now we can
see the light at the end of the tunnel and feel the spring warmth that is just
around the corner.
My apologies for the hiatus
I'm sure we all spent the summer of 2012 watching, and then
talking about the London Olympics.
I spent the summer of 2013 re-building the workshop roof,
and the following summer making the workshop fit for use
again. I made a nice new 10 ft saw bench, moved the (very
heavy) router stand from the back to the front, and did
quite a bit of renovation work on it. It's now as good as
it was 20-odd years ago, if not as smart. The final job
was re-wiring—I now have sockets wherever I need
them.
And now it's getting warmer for a wonderful 2015 summer and
the Firecaster is back at the front of the priority list.
Keep your eye on that piece of mahogany sitting on the
chipboard of the old roof. It's a drawer-front from an
Edwardian Waring & Gillow chest of drawers. It, or one
like it, is going to pop up soon in a new guise.
It turns my stomach to look at that picture; it really was
heavy work to do single-handed. 4x2s are fairly easy to
sling around, but 4x3s are another story. (The mathematically-minded
will by saying, "They're half as heavy again.")
It's hard to work out an order for doing jobs, and often
unnecessary. One of the first tasks will be to cut and
re-join the mahogany slab. This is what the edges look like.
They will certainly need to be planed.
I have an incredibly true eye. I can tell if a picture is
crooked by half an RCH at 25 paces, but unfortunately my
hands are not correspondingly true. If I try to straighten
the picture, I shall be there all day.
There is an angle-guide available for my planer, but it's a
crappy little thing that only has about an inch of fence, and
I'm sure it would just frustrate me.
But the device has screw-holes on both sides for the guide, and
it occurred to me that I could make a better, bigger guide.
This is a piece of drawer-front from the Waring & Gillow
chest of drawers. It is very solid and completely flat on both
sides.
It might look a bit tatty, but under that polish is beautiful, clean
mahogany that looks exactly like my Honduras mahogany. I guess it was
imported from the same place at around the same time and could even
have come from the same tree. But that's an aside.
