Summer 2012

My last post was way back in April. Well, summer is finally here and with summer comes a welcome break from my day job as a Design Educator. For the past twenty plus years I have taught at least one class during summer school. This year the class that I was scheduled to teach didn't have enough enrollment to make, so, I guess I get the summer off. My plan was to finish the guitar and spend some time doing some things that I want to do. I am sure there will be plenty of things to keep me more than busy all summer long.

Back to the guitar and my progress. It is now late June and I have been working fairly steady on the guitar. I started by gluing the head veneer on the head and working on the decorative inlay. I decided to use a piece of the flamed maple that I used for the sides as the head veneer. The entire neck, including the head is maple. The back of the guitar is also maple with a small strip of rosewood down the center. The sides are also maple but they are curly/flamed. This gives the sides an extremely interesting grain pattern. I want the entire guitar to be light in color including the head so I chose a piece of curly maple for the head veneer. To add just a touch of color and to help tie the rosewood strip on the back and the rosewood fingerboard to the guitar color scheme, I also sandwiched a very thin piece of mahogany veneer between the head stock and the curly maple head veneer. This left a hairline stripe around the guitar head edge. I decided to use a version of my graphic design company logo (The Hefner Group) as the head inlay.

The Hefner Group logo.

 The first step was to cut the head veneers and glue them in place.

Clamping the head veneers in position using a clamping caul.

A variety of c-clamps were used to give even pressure.

Six clamps and a caul on the top and the bottom were used.

After the glue set up, I removed the clamps and trimmed and sanded the veneers flush with the head stock. My original idea was to inlay the logo using small squares of mahogany veneer leaving a hairline gap between each square that I would fill with black epoxy to create an outline effect. Nice plan but my inexperience with this kind of detail proved to be to big of an obstacle for me to overcome.

As you can see, I had trouble getting consistent gaps between the shapes.

After several tries I decided to try something a little different. I had worked with laser engraving on other projects and I knew I could get a beautiful engraving of the logo on the mahogany. It should then be much easier inlaying one piece. First I had to rout out all of the pieces from previous attempts. I created a simple template using the edges of my Dremel precision router base as guides.

Thin strips of oak were tacked down to act as guides.

Depth of cut was set to the thickness of the veneer.

Veneer was carefully removed leaving a square recess for the laser engraved logo.

A little attention to the corners with a small chisel and I was ready to cut and insert the engraved logo.

The final inlay.

The engraved logo looked great and the mahogany was the right color but the grain was to pronounced. I ended up using thick CA (super) glue as a grain filler. Several coats were applied and scraped off until I got a smooth surface texture that matched the maple.