'Nother DC carved top Semi

[howie123]

Its been a while so I thought I'd post some pics of this DC carved top thingy inspired by Colins 339 build. I had a one piece sapele DC I decided to hollow out and stick some maple on as the Sapele was very heavy! Also decided to try out the Liberon oil finsh on this build also before ruining something else with it... So it started out a bit like this Lots of firebricks and bobbin clamps attatch the top to the back...... better safe than sorry I think Much blood Sweat and Swearing later the black spirit stain is applied with a rag. As the top was only about 11mm thick at the start of the carving process it left the sides very thin and this required binding rather than leaving the natural bound look I normally use.... This lead me to the first use of plastic binding ever, on anything.... its so easy compared to using wood it was like cheating!! some oil finish was then added and thats about where I'm at for now with this build.. waiting for the hardware to turn up in the post ... the neck is also finished but the pics went missing, I'll post more once its strung up !

[macadee]

Howie that looks pretty smart, love the contoured shape, do you do it simply by hand? Or eye or do you have some jig or other?

[howie123]

Thanks Macaddee.... I use a combination of either router with a straight cut bit or my safe t planer in the drill press to machine a series of steps in the top which loosely correspond to the contour I'm aiming for before moving on to round bottomed hand planes and cabinet scrapers to properly carve out the shape thats in my head. I always draw out the contour lines on the top initially by eye and work from the outside in creating the steps. If I were to make a run of the same guitar I would maybe make up a bunch of contour templates before the machining process to get them all closer to being the same prior to the hand carving. If you check out some of my earlier posts on building PRS style guitars you'll see more pics of this process and it'll hopefully make more sense.
Of course I could always get around to fine tuning the 3D copy carver I started making 3 yrs ago and just make a plywood or mdf carved guitar to act as the template and machine all the curves that way before refining them by hand..... So many Ideas and so little time !