Getting ready for surgery

Having stumbled onto some plywood I set out to make a neck removal jig for the ancient guitar. As with all jig ideas of mine - at least the ones expected to work - I based the design on a readily available product from Stewmac. But mine will have fewer moving parts, and it might not fit other guitars. 

The main idea is to apply an increasing pressure to the heel, while heating the neck joint to loosen the glue securing the dovetail. Stewmac solves this with a screw going through a threaded hole in a metal bar, but as I make this with a minimum of tools in the kitchen I’ll go for a plywood cradle being pulled up. 

The screws visible in the pic is only clamping the parts, they’re connected to a bit from a Zyliss vise system. 

And even though I don’t have the full stash from the workshop at hand, I managed to find two large screws with square nuts. You can guess the rest, can’t you. The nuts won’t spin because they’re square, so turning the screws will lift the cradle and press the heel upwards. The top plate has felt cushions and will be secured to the guitar with a strap or a couple of clamps. 



Now we await the foam cutter. And re-watch some of twoodfords vids on youtube. 

Resawing shelves, continued

Back at the cottage with some time to spare, so I soldiered on with the kerfing plane. In this pic you can see the mini bench or table vise from Sjöbergs, makers of the fantastic workbenches. I have it mounted on the veranda with machine screw inserts so it fairly rigid, at least as rigid as the quite rickety house. 

One more pic to show you the surroundings. Even in bleak November weather, there is no place as beautiful as this archipelago. 



To make the kerfs in the ends of the board I needed a bigger vise so I relocated to the workshop where my bench and shopmade wooden vise resides. 



Once the board was slotted all around I enlisted my wife Ann to help me wrangle the humongous frame saw. It rips like crazy, and works especially well in dry mahogany. Walnut and cherry tend to steer the blade with the longer fibers but today the blade followed the kerfs just as intended. 



And the first slice is off the board. It took us around 40 minutes and we are still married so I count that as a total success. Maybe we’ll attack the next slice tomorrow, after hunting seafowl in the morning. 

Old guitar in for repair

My friend bought this ancient guitar at an auction, and I’ll have a look at it to try to fix some more or less obvious issues. It’s at least 100 years old so I will tread carefully. 

The brand is ”Nya Musikinstrumentfabriken Göteborg” and the instrument is very similar to the parlour guitars from Levin. 



Issue 1. A crack in the top with the accompanying loose brace. The top is on the thicker side and the crack is fairly tight so pretty easy [in theory].



Issue 2. The bridge. Not only is it lifting, it has the fret wire saddle and the peg holes are worn. Plus it might be in the wrong place, I haven’t measured it yet. Maybe it can be fixed, maybe I’ll make a new bridge. 



Issue 3. A crack in the headstock, plus the tuners are wonky and mismatched. Might need to change them. 



Issue 4. The neck most likely needs to be reset. I’ve done this to a couple of cheapos but need to stock up on better equipment to do a clean job. 



Issue 5. The back of the neck has been… run over by a lawnmower? Used to parry sword blows? We’ll becer know but it will have to be at least sanded but probably carved. Then stained and lacquered. 



This’ll be fun. I will use it as an excuse to learn how to work with hide glue, and I will rewatch all Woodford’s vids on youtube. 

I’m alive, and the Apa is Arg!

Hell-o my friendly readers. Please forgive me for being absent for four months. As you may remember the workshop is packed in crates (and heaps) and other stuff is going on. We’ve moved to a new apartment, one of those bog standard ones with no workshop, and we’re building a new house nay an entire homestead. 

But when packing stuff away earlier this summer I stumbled upon that fine mahogany bookcase I got from a friend, and I’ve been longing to start working on it. So I chose two pieces with fine grain and cut the edges and ends square. Then I set the kerfing plane and started. 

First pic. Remember the frame saws? I built the wee one myself with a blade from Badaxe Toolworks. The huge one I bought at a flea market. 

Here you can see the grain. The length of the boards makes it possible to make one piece rims for sopranos, that is my preference these days. Tops and backs will of cöurse be one piece. 



Slicing off the bead at the front edge…



… and cutting the ends square. 



My shopmade kerfing plane takes a while to set up. I want to slice these into three pieces. 



The outer pieces will be 4 mm, the middle piece slightly thicker. This will give me some wiggle room. 



The cuts will go around all four edges to steer the frame saw blade, I will continue next time I’m at the cottage. 



And the homestead project then:

Travel uke completed, while travelling

A few coats of shellac on the fretboard, and I noticed the shellac I brought is tinted red since the bass I made. Grr. It makes the alder look a bit like cherry. But let’s keep moving on. Holding the fret slotting jig with the styrene rod fret markers, I saw the slots. 

Then I press the frets in. Cut to length at with the ends rounded, because it would be impossible to shape them in situ like I would on a uke with a glued on fretboard. 

Ok. Not my proudest moment. Normally I’m quite good at securing the workpiece but this worked. 

Continuing with a chisel and planes to get the profile. These bridges are tiny. 

And compensating for the C-string. 

I put on masking tape in several layers to get some support that stops the bridge from sliding around. 

Drilling for the strings, the holes are angled the opposite way from the regular acoustic ukes where I want the strings to turn up in the soundhole. On these they must go around the carbon fibre tube below. 

Then I shaped the pegs in the Juzek peg shaper. 

The pegs are in place, cut to length and get holes for the strings. Note the wooden rod at the back, I forgot to bring the carbon tube so I made a rod of birch. I thought it would be strong enough. 

And here it is, after some more shellac. It turned out a bit rustic because of the limited selection of tools, but it is done. 

But the birch rod was a disgrace, look at it bending. I will change it to carbon as soon as I get back home. 

Prögress as prömised

Before noon the front porch lies in shadow, which is perfect for me. I can’t stand the sun. 

I started out by planing the sides with my Veritas apron plane. When it’s sharp and well set up it’s a remarkable tool. 

The same plane handles the endgrain nicely. The clamping method was ok but the available bit of railing was a bit rickety. 

Taking down the edges of the neck with a sharp Mora carving knife…

… and smoothing out the back of the neck with an Ibex thumb plane. 

I check the width and taper with the fret slotting jig, in the pic it’s more or less ready for the next step which will be a few coats of shellac on the neck before slotting. 

I hope you catch the scenic backgrounds even though I try to keep my less industrious relatives out of focus. 

The improbable resurrection of the Argapanator

Well Hell-o and welcöme back to the twitching corpse that is the Argapa blogspot! All avid readers know of my predicament with the packed and stored workshop and the family moving to a new apartment. We actually managed to sell the old place and have spent a furious week painting and assembling wardrobes and shelves at the new place, but this week we’re at the second cottage - the wee one in Småland. 

As I was packing stuff yesterday my eyes fell upon the alder traveller blank from earlier this year, and I thought to myself… what a wonderful (and size-wise appropriate) project to bring along. 

So I quickly chose the handtools I deemed necessary and chucked them in a bag. 

Hopefully I remembered all that I’ll need, and most likely I won’t even use all of them. I laid them all out on an old baking tray to keep them off of the dinner table. Have a look. 

I’ll keep you posted on the progress, sorry I mean prögress. Mustn’t skip on the evil heavy metal-esque Viking letters. 

Good news / bad news

Well. Not a glimpse from me in over a month, what happened I suppose you ask. The truth is I’ve packed the greater part of my workshop in boxes and shipped them to the cottage. Most likely we’re moving to a smaller apartment to raise some much needed cash for the construction of a wee house. In time there’ll be a workshop there but in the meantime prögress will be slow here. 

But amidst the boxes and the chores of packning... I did build a bass guitar. Let’s look at some pics because I’m awfully pleased with the result. I was going to build the neck from scratch but before I could score som maple I found a decent 2nd hand neck so I used that one. 

The sketch I made:

I had this really hairy piece of mahogany, severly damaged from the logging process but dry as bone. I figured I could extract the needed material, avoid the crushed part. 



And it worked, even though there wasn’t much extra material in the resulting blank. 



Glueing it up, I turned the pieces to get the grain direction balancing out possible movement. 



My wee Proxxon bandsaw did a sterling job, but not without complaints. 



Carving bevels, or an extended German carve. With the gouge sharpened to a ridiculous level it was quite easy. 



Fitting the pickup directly into the body. I allowed myself a millimeter or so around the edges, but it was a tight fit. After chiselling out the cavity I realized I swapped the position of the coils, compared to a P-bass. But Yamaha made some cool models in the 70’s with this layout so I’m with them. Apparently. 



The body turned out to bee too thin for a side mounted jack plate so I got a strat jack and mounted it inside out. 

And you are correct, there are no pots. So no volume, no tone control. 



Then I managed to mix red and brown stain to get almost the colour I wanted. I’m very pleased, as I already blurted. What’s more, I had a set of strings lying around so I used them. They were flat wound! What a peculiar feeling, but I actually like them a lot. 



AISLE B, BACH... as they say in the record store.