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Thats the bracing finished nice and simple.

That bracing is sure pretty.

Tom

Well now I reach the point of bending the sides and oh dear me. This was a battle indeed, I have never found wood like this, thinned to 2mm I could not persuade this wood to bend at all, I got it so hot it was scorching and even after a soaking all I got was a lot of creaks followed by this!



Luckily I had a spare side so I sanded the pair down until they started to feel floppy but this was now only 1.5mm thick. Although I managed to bend them with a lot of resistance and struggle they are horribly flexible across the grain so I will have to add lots of cross grain stiffeners. I have never experienced this before even the Padauk I used was not as reluctant as this stuff and that was difficult enough.



I'm not going to be beaten this is one hundred percent a compromise build and I want to overcome these odds and return something presentable. The battle continues.

Bad luck with the side bending mate, I have to say for years I couldn't get sapele or mahogany to bend without it cracking like that untill I started using a backing strap and my new home made electric bending iron. Now it bends like butter as does Padauk, another wood I had struggled to bend previously. Sipo Mahogany ( utile)is the easiest of the mahoganies to bend that I have come across and it's sold locally at a reasonable price. Its lighter than Sapele in both colour and weight and often has flamey figure running through the boards too.
Well I'm goint to be joining you in a backdoor build too , going to collect some old mahogany doors and window frames later today and fron the small area I've seen where the paint was flaking it looks suspiciously like honduras.....fingers crossed

Howie if that were the case then it would be the mother lode, very old doors (the older the better) would seem to provide the best material. Dennis Scannel of True North guitars uses a lot of old furniture etc. in his builds, then charges about $7000 for them. They are quite good though in his defence.
We must meet up sometime and have a chin wag about this guitar making caper, see if we can be of use to one another.

Neil great build

I have some old Honduran doors that came from a library which I'm going to get round to sometime

I think its great to recycle old stuff which otherwise would get discarded or even worse burnt!

All the best
Dave

Well picked up the doors , the frames all went missing before I got there to collect, but the 2 doors should provide enough wood to keep me busy for a while, one of the doors is much heavier than the other so maybe I have one sapele and one honduras, as its the larger /thicker one which is the lighter of the two and also the one with paint missing that looks like honduras. I'll get them disasembled sometime this week and see what they look like in bits and cleaned up. Either way it was free so that always helps!
Your right Mac we should get together sometime, but as is usually the case work is getting me snowed under and getting time to myself is getting harder and harder, It seems to be either all or nothing , and at the moment its all full of busy.

Made a bit of progress got the sides kerfed and braced, all door wood. Feels a bit more stable now.


Then in a fit of yellow glue got the top and back profiled and glued the top on, I may close up the box tomorrow after work we'll see how things go. When I get stuck in I can make good progress. I love these little spool clamps I must make some more.