Official Luthiers Forum!

[QUOTE=amcfarlen]The wife would kill me if I started to make saw dust and shavings in the house.[/QUOTE]

Haha, well I have the same problem...
My wife will kill me...
So I am working in my mum's place.
She is more tolerant of my guitar adventure :)
Hmm... I might be able to coax my mum into giving up a room for that purpose.
But the dehumidifier could be a problem.
Not sure where I can get one in Singapore.

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Sen CL Goh
http://senguitar.blogspot.com

When I built my first guitar, I didn't have humidity control.  I glued braces to a back, and a day later, the humidity dropped.  My back turned inside out, arching in the opposite direction, and I learned my lesson and now have humidification and dehumidification....no more problems.  You also have to let wood acclimatize to your shop after you get it.  I think swings in humidity is what gets you.  I know a guy who built a guitar here in Georgia and sent it to Arizona...with bad results.

Regading those braces coming off so easily, did you scrub off the back with naptha before gluing the braces?  It seems to help get a better glue joint, especially with rosewood, which is rather oily.

Welcome to the forum !

Dont be discouraged, we all had to start somewhere and learn alot as we went along too. That is what makes this such fun!

One suggestion about the humidity would be to get yourself a small window air conditioner. They do a great job of removing the humidity from the air and for a small workshop they are economical to run too. I use one for my entire workshop and it does a GREAT job of controlling both the humidity and the temperature. I also have a backup dehumidifier in case the a/c goes out, but so far I havent had to use it. I'm sure you can find a small window a/c there in singapore.

By the way, Singapore is the second largest country to visit my web site according to my web statistics (USA=#1 country). Seems like there are a lot of guitar players over there and I'm sure you could find plenty of customers if you get good at building.

I would also like to suggest that you look at one of our sponsor's jig's for making braces. You will find it HERE. They are really inexpensive and work beautifully too.

I will chime in on the glue situation also. You really need some better form of clamping in order to make a guitar. If you dont do something better than what you have, the entire guitar stands a really good chance of falling apart when you string it up. The gluing steps will get more critical as you continue with your current build.

Keep us posted on how you are doing as you go?

Ken

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Reguards,

Ken H

I forgot to mention this before, but wanted you to know that there is an inexpensive way to build your own cam clamps. I built most of mine out of scraps of 1x2 oak, and I roughly have about $2(US) in each one. It only took me about 2 days to build the last 40 of them that I built. Here is a picture of one of them. It isnt really pretty, but it sure does do the job of doing secure clamping!

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Reguards,

Ken H

Thanks for the encouragement and advice, Brad and Ken.
I will keep you posted.

As for the cam clamp.
I have thought of making it, because most of my F-clamp's throat isn't deep enough to reach the center part of the brace.
My only problem is getting that flat piece of metal.
Still trying to source for that metal and hopefully cheap.
I could only find cylindrical shape metal rod which doesnt make a good support as the cam might rotate around the rod.
One of the ways I could think of is using 2 cylindrical rod to control the rotation problem.

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Sen CL Goh
http://senguitar.blogspot.com

I bought my aluminum bar on ebay for about $1/ft. It was the most expensive part of the project.

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Reguards,

Ken H

[QUOTE=senunkan] Hi grumpy,



I attached a pic of how I clamp.
I will improve upon the process as I am thinking of using wedge much like the way we do a back joint or top joint.


[/QUOTE]

Sen - I agree with what others have said above about the effectiveness of dishes, but I'd also point out that they are not needed and that it is OK to clamp an arched brace directly to a top or back. However, you need uniformly distributed and sufficient clamping pressure - what you have in the picture won't do it.

If you can put together some cam clamps or buy some, that's enough to go with. You need at least a few clamps
with throats deep enough to reach to the plate centerlines from the sides. Then, you should be thinking in terms of using 6 or 7 clamps on each brace - really as many as you can maneuver into place. In your pattern, you have a lot of places where there is no clamping pressure at all - can't do this.

So, clamps are fine, but you need a lot of them. (Standard woodworking adage - there are never enough clamps).

Jim

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Jim Kirby
kirby@udel.edu

Thanks Jim for the tip.
I plan to build some cam clamp once I managed to source the Aluminium bar.
Looking through Singapore's yellow pages (business directory listing) for anyone having the Aluminium bar.

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Sen CL Goh
http://senguitar.blogspot.com

Sen, if you can't find any aluminum bar and your F clamps are easily had and are reasonable, you might want to think about cannibalizing them.

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Aoibeann

That's a feasible and good idea.
The F-clamps are cheap, about SGD 2
But sawing through the metal arm might need some hard work
I try to see if I can get the aluminium bar first.
Thanks for the suggestion Lilian

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Sen CL Goh
http://senguitar.blogspot.com