Planing the back side

Planing the back side took longer than I thought it would, probably 4-6 hours. Of course I've never done it before, so I was taking my time. I would think there should be a better way, but using a plane is what the O'brien DVD suggests, so I followed that. Now that I've done it and am getting more comfortable with a plane, I think I could lower the iron a bit.

I'm still not DONE planing, but as you can see the sides are down to the blocks on either end. So now I can use the 15' dish to guide me as I plane, showing me where material has to be removed. I left it high around the waist area on purpose. It shouldn't take long now to plane it down so the entire surface almost touches the dish when placed with the back side down on it. Then I can start sanding.

As a side note, I had to take the assembly out of the form to sand the form down a bit... it was too thick at the top. While it was out, I gazed at it for a while. It actually kinda looks like a guitar; the side profile I mean. It has that "thicker at the bottom, thinner at the top" look. It's pretty cool, I'm excited.

Making a 15' Sanding Dish

I figured making a 15' dish would take longer than the 30' dish, but I had no idea. The 15' dish has twice the depth, and thus twice the material to remove (integration shows slightly less than twice, although my method for routing is more of a Riemann sum). I knew I wanted to move the radii closer together: 1" between radii a r<6", 3/4" from 6-9", and 1/2" from 9-12".
But doubling the material to remove added a lot of time because I couldn't route it at once like I could with the 30' dish... I had to make multiple paths with increasing depth for r<9".
Once the routing was done, I used a chisel to remove the left over ring slivers. The extra time it took to route because of the smaller increment between radii paid off in the end because the sanding only took about 20 minutes. Total job took about 4 hours.

Top side profiled

I finished profiling the top side a few days ago, just didn't snap a picture until now.

Making a 30' Sanding Dish

I know that most people say you don't need a sanding dish, but I can see the advantages of having one since it can be used for both truing up the sides and bracing the top/back. So I thought I'd give it a try for the 30 foot radius dish used for the top. After thinking about it for a few days, I came up with what I thought was the quickest and easiest way to do it. I didn't want to have to make any special jigs, I thought I could route it free hand. I calculated the depth based on the formula for a circle: x**2 + y**2 = r**2, solve for x given r = 30*12 and y being the radius from the center of the dish. I then printed this out in 1/4" increments.
First step was to draw concentric radii of the 2 foot diameter disk in 1 inch increments. Then route out each ring to the appropriate depth with a 3/8" router bit. The trick though is to not route the WHOLE ring, but to leave a small sliver each time so the router base has the original surface to ride on for subsequent rings.
Once this was done, I came back and routed out the slivers and then used a chisel to take out any rough spots. Since this board is MDF, a chisel goes through it like butter. Then I got my $20 random orbit sander (from Harbor Freight) and began to sand.
At first, it didn't seem like I was getting anywhere. But all of a sudden, the lines just started to smooth out and disappear.
It was easier and turned out better than I anticipated, the whole thing took about 2.5 hours. Now I can get back to working on the sides.
A 30' dish has a max depth of 0.200", the difference in depth between any of the rings was only a few mils on the inner part, and grew to about 1/32" over the last inch. Therefore 1" increments worked fine. But this difference will double when I make the 15' dish for the back. I probably will want to space the rings closer together on the outer part of the 15' dish to lessen the sanding required.

Blocks glued

Last night I first glued the end block...


... and two hours later I glued the heel block:

I'll pop it out of the mold tonight and see how it turned out.

Sides cut

Last night I cut the sides to length, I then put the sides back in the mold.

I fitted the neck and neck block together. The top of the neck block is about 1/32" below the top of the neck. This gap needs to be the same as my top thickness... which isn't finalized yet. It will probably be in the 0.100" area, so a 1/16" or more will have to come off the top of the neck block prior to gluing it to the sides.

Neck and other pieces

Top-Bottom: Macassar Ebony fretboard, macassar ebony bridge blank, macassar ebony headplate, extra macassar ebony bridge blank for tuning knobs, madagascar rosewood bridge plate.
Left-Right on the side: figured maple end wedge, plain maple headplate veneer.

The top three macassar ebony pieces all have similar color/figure, which is good. The bridge plate has very interesting color/figure... I didn't expect that.

I measured the neck and heel block for fit. The neck is 1-2 mils oversides and currently won't fit in the healblock. I will sand down the neck part when fitting it later. For now, the heel block is good to go for gluing to the sides after I put a slight radius on it.