Soundboard Braces

The soundboard braces have been shaped to a 25 foot radius and attached to the top, again using hot hide glue. I look forward now to profiling and carving them to their final dimensions, my goal being a light and lively soundboard. This is surely the most tactile and intuitive stage of the entire building process, when machinery and power tools lay temporarily silent, and finger planes, chisels and sandpaper take over.

A useful pointer to where I'm at on my quest to build a high quality instrument is that the soundboard bracing on each new guitar still seems to be lighter than that of the last. In many respects, I'm sure it's a good thing that my evolution as a guitar builder has been such a gradual process, with small incremental improvements marking what has been a long journey. Where soundboard bracing is concerned, I acknowledge that a bolder individual willing to take risks would equal my progress after far fewer guitars, but I'm happy nevertheless to plod along at my own cautious pace, learning as I go, improving my skills and gaining satisfaction from the improvements I see and hear after each guitar is completed.

With my weekends still dominated by household chores, my resolve to chip away at this guitar in spare moments through the week is certainly yielding results, as evidenced by my latest posts. Lurking in the background, however, is the need to construct bending forms and an outside mold to accommodate the modified body shape I've recently devised. Unfortunately, at some point soon, this necessity will act as a barrier to further progress and I'll be unable to avoid the task any longer! 

Cheers

Pete