For some reason my resonator sides tend to get a bit hairy during bending and glueing. It's most likely because they're so fiddly to get a good and snug fit - maybe I should build a bending form based on a skeleton. Or who am I kidding with "maybe", of course that's what I should do. If I ever listened to reason.
On these three I tried brown paper tape across the butt joint to hold the sides together during glueing, it worked but man did that tape stick to the wood. I didn't want to soak it through to get the residue off because I was afraid it might affect the wood or the glue so I went for mechanical removal.
So the outcome was they required some scraping and sanding. Thanks to the rolling pin sander I got from Dominator it wasn't too hard, but I had to do it on the balcony since it has no dust collection.
Now that they're done up to this stage it's time to choose fretboards and start on the inlay that a couple of them will get. The one with the bird holes will have a strict and simple job with fret markers (don't want to overload it with shapes) but the others will get their embellishments as inlays of some kind.
In the pic are boards of ebony, rosewood and bubinga. Maybe they'll each get different as in the pic, or I'll choose one or two to work with. It'll depend on the inlay plans I come up with.
But what of Chris's koa soprano? Well it's not been fast has it, but the level of humidity in the workshop has dropped to levels where I'm more comfortable with larger glue-ups so the sides went on (or the top went on depending on how you see it). And I picked out a neck blank too so I have some carving to look forward to!
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