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Wanting to get away from sanding dishes and just plane the side and linings to dimension. I'm a woodworker that hates sawdust, go figure. I image I would need solid or reverse kerfed linings. Does anyone do this?

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Hutch

Get the heck off the couch and go build a guitar!!!!

I do 85-95% of the shaping with a combination of carefully profiling the unbend sides a bandsaw and with a plane after the sides are glued to the blocks. I have planed kerfed and solid linings. On kerfed linings I take a bit of care skewing the plane to avoid knocking the tip of a kerf. With care you can use the radius dish for marking the radius on the rims and planing to the line. Also use a dish in process as a check to see where to sand, either visually or as I do marking the top of the linings with pencil, doing a quick sand (really a rub) of the rims with the dish and then planing the areas that have the pencil sanded off. I repeat until the rims fit in the dish.

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http://www.Harvestmoonguitars.com

I plane and spokeshave the rims after marking them in a radius dish, then finish by sanding in the dish.
I always use reverse kerf linings, but if you'r careful it could work with normal kerfs.

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The name catgut is confusing. There are two explanations for the mix up.

Catgut is an abbreviation of the word cattle gut. Gut strings are made from sheep or goat intestines, in the past even from horse, mule or donkey intestines.

Otherwise it could be from the word kitgut or kitstring. Kit meant fiddle, not kitten.

I use standard linings and a plane all the time. No worries. Just make sure the blade is sharp.

I suspect the biggest challenge you'll find is ending up with the sides matching what ever clamping plate you are using at glue-up time. I use a solara for the top of my jumbo model so I can get a flat upper bought and curved lower. In order to get that all right, I can't use a radius dish on the sides, so I do essentially what you are wanting to try.

The final rim surface for the top is very close to flat all the way around, so if my sides are flat when I start (which they are) I use a block plane on the sides to get them really close to hitting the solara all the way around without any light showing between them. Then I glue on standard reverse kerfings just a hair proud of the sides, and once those are dry I go back to the block plane to get a "perfect" fit all the way around before gluing it on and using the solara as a clamping caul. I've found that sliding a piece of paper between the sides and the solara is a very convenient way to find gaps without constantly putting a light in the body and squatting to try and see gaps.

My backs, however, are done with a radius dish. My solution to avoid a lot of sanding (I can't describing how much I dislike sanding) is to make my body molds a specific height, and radius the back side of the mold to match my radius dish. When I trim off the excess for the back of the sides, I use a small dremmel circular saw that I can lay on it's side and trim the back at it's final radius 1/2" above the surface of the mold... which is why the mold height is critical. Then I glue standard perflings on the back slightly proud fo the sides and do just a bit of sanding on the radius dish to get those perflings angled to match the dish. Then I use the dish as the clamping caul to glue on the back.

This isn't a completely sanding-free approach, but I'm also one who tries hard to avoid dusty sanding operations and this has gotten me very close to no sanding and still gets very tight glue-ups.

Regardless of your truing method, remember that the binding channel is going to cut into the side, which makes any meticulous work to get the sides true totally wasted time. You only need to get the linings true--not the side. Leave enough lining protruding for your truing efforts. Also, once your are really close, you could give in and just sand the last smidgen on the dish.

I would like to eventually sell the dish and stop using them altogether. I remember reading in the SM kit guitar instructions, they just shaped the braces to the desired radius and clamped them in. I did that on my top and that seemed to work pretty well.

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Hutch

Get the heck off the couch and go build a guitar!!!!

I would never part with my dishes. I could never get the kind of joint a dish makes with just a plane. I recently made a mahogany body without bindings and my joints virtually disappeared. Planing the linings would be like making a top or back center joint with a tiny finger plane. You will end up with small irregularities that compromise the joint.

You don't have the hate relationship that I have with saw dust. I'm also trying to mothball my TS and only use the BS. I can control the dust better on the bandsaw. All crosscuts with handsaws and most of the dust just falls to the floor. It's only a basement hobby after all and I don't know how many guitars I'll build before jumping back into carved mandolins. After seeing some of the problems building my first guitar, I really want to just get one guitar that I'm somewhat satisfied with and then move on. Nice thing about mandolins is the sides have parallel edges, much easier.

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Hutch

Get the heck off the couch and go build a guitar!!!!

+1. though I approach the process in order to minimize their use as much as possible. 2-3 minutes using them at most.

If you use tentalones for lining the soundboard half the battle is won. The bindings will fill in any small gaps between the sides and top. The back is more problematic, but I suppose with patience and a well tuned plane you could get it close enough. The back/side joint has a lot of surface area for the amount of stress it is under, so a less than completely perfect joint will work - the binding will hide some imperfections and add some strength. Still, it's nice to have it "tight".
I use powered radius dishes and it only takes a couple of minutes in the dust storm to sand the edges.

I used to plane the whole way, but never could get it as good as I'd like. Especially the headblock would often end up causing a bit of a dimple in the back due to not following the body taper perfectly. Nowadays I do the last bit by dragging it on a long piece of sandpaper, tilting back and forth to create a roughly cylindrical radius. It is indeed a horrible dusty mess. You could use some variant of the chalk fitting technique to mark the high spots and hit those with a plane until it's smooth enough. But I just wait until I'm planning to take a bath anyway, put on a mask, and have at it.

Fingerboard radius is another task where I use that approach (plane close and then sand). And thicknessing backs and sides produces a lot of fine powder dust even when done with plane and scraper, so I also save those for bath time, especially if it's an allergenic wood like cocobolo.

I am not in love with sawdust either. However, my motorized dish runs fairly slow and the sawdust mostly falls off the dish onto my workbench without getting airborne. I vacuum it up (along with the dish) about once per minute until I am done.

Same here, except I have a fitting for my dust collector on my motorized dish cabinet. It doesn’t get everything, but there’s no cloud, and I can clean up the rest after the work is done. It’s pretty low mess.

Holy crap, now I need a motorized dish cabinet. I'm going to need a bigger shop. Maybe some rubber gloves through plexi like sandblasting. That would work.

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Hutch

Get the heck off the couch and go build a guitar!!!!

Get a shop assistant while you are at it and let them do all the dirty work...
I have been learning to make bread. I do the initial mixing using a couple of large spoons because I don't like getting the sticky dough all over my hands. But after the first "rise" and when it is time to knead it there is no substitute for using my hands.

The motorised dish cabinet does sound like a worthy construction. If you can devise a way to hold the rim set in the proper alignment, and hook up a vacuum to the box you might make the process almost dust free. Even a three sided box with a plexi top and curtains across the forth side might work O.K.

I don’t have a ton of room, but I absolutely hate “driving the bus”, and I’m not crazy about chasing my tail trying to hand plane the rims to match the complex profile of the dish, so a motorized drive system earns its keep here. Plus, I get to use it as a downdraft table (of a sort).

Alignment is a matter of checking progress frequently and not letting things tilt out of whack. Self correction isn’t that hard, if I pay attention.

The trick to dust collection was putting an octagonal wall around the rotating dish, leaving enough room for the molds I use. One of the 8 walls is a rectangular-to-round HVAC fitting that mates with my dust collector hose, pipe, and blast gate (all 6”). To use it as a downdraft table, I have a piece of plywood that fits on top of the octagon, and I put a bunch of holes in the plywood. It works pretty well. Take off the plywood top, and there’s the dish rotation platform.

If you build a powered dish system, a nice addition is a flat rotating plate, to have along with the dished plates. There are times when you want (or need to re-establish) a flat rim. The flat plate is a quick way to get there, if you are building the motorized system.

I have an extra motor, now what? Plans please.
I found https://fb.watch/2IhkeHbSwD/ and it looks pretty easy to build.

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Hutch

Get the heck off the couch and go build a guitar!!!!

How did we get here?

We started with getting rid of the dishes because of dust and ended with making a motorized version. This is starting to feel like one of my projects where Tim the toolman Taylor is ringing in my head.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro

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Hutch

Get the heck off the couch and go build a guitar!!!!

I don't have any plans, but if you search the OLF for my user name and the term motorized dish (or something similar), there are a few threads. The most recent one has a fair amount of photos. Somewhere I talk about the pulley ratios to get the speed down to where it is useful and not dangerous.

I led you here sir, for I am Spartacus.

Actually, I thought we were going to start talking about making bread.

Seriously, though, I agree with trying to minimize exposure to fine sanding dust, but I don't think I would sacrifice my use of dished workboards in pursuit of that worthy goal. I would figure out a way to stay safe but still use the tools that I like to use. But that's just my take on it.

I have never used radius dishes and build top down on an open work board. But in the last year or so I found it convenient to use a radiused sanding stick just to get that angle right on the linings to meet the arched back. I can get it close just using a spoke shave but the stick is a nice final prep.

As for gluing braces, it takes 5 minutes to mark the arch on the side of the brace with an arched template and plane it to the arch. Once you get close to the pencil line you try and take one continuous curl of wood with one plane stroke and you are done. Glue it up with clamps and a flat slat caul on the back side and it holds the arch. Some use a sander to get the arch but if you don't like dust it's really easy to hand plane them.