Right! We're off! I'm taking some time off from the balustrade, the steps, replacing the long term temporary doors and all that, and going to start on this kit!
I snuck out yesterday and bought some mdf and ply to start making the mould and jigs. I traced half the guitar body shape supplied in the kit onto some pdf from a pattern supplied with the kit, cut it on the bandsaw and sanded the edge smooth. This will now be the template for all the other pieces, the negative template, the mould, the sides the guitar, its top and its back.
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It was at this point that I became a little disappointed with the supplier. The kit comes with a half body shape drawing onto one of the cardboard protections sheets for the soundboard. This shape was not the same shape as that which was marked out on the half back of the guitar, and then the supplied pre-bent sides would not fit either the front or the back. it would seem that the back, sides and front template came from three different size models.
Several emails back and forward to America didn't really resolve the issue, except to say that the materials supplied were all of sufficient size for me to be able to complete the build. This cost me quite a bit and with import duty and other tax on top, but I was not going to try and send it back and demand what was supposed to be supplied. That was just going to be too much hassle. So I just had to think about how to get the best out of this situation and got on with it.
The only things that couldn't be changed were the overall length around the two bouts and the waist of the sides and the length of the body. So, carefully, I encouraged the springy sides onto the top of the positive template and had Mission Control pencil round where they came inboard of the edge. I re-sawed and re-sanded a couple of times until they matched, and marked out the negative template from that.
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I cut out and sanded the negative to the pencil line, fitted the side into it, adjusted by sanding some more here and there till it fitted perfectly.
I was then able to mark from the negative on to six pieces of ply to form each side of the mould, the piece in each.
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Unfortunately our forum doesn't support video format, but if you pop over to my FB or Instagram pages you can see a nice little time lapse/stop frame video of me cutting one of plies on the bandsaw. I ended up with these six.
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And when you lay them out three a side in mirror image, you've almost got a guitar mould.
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As you can see, my freehand bandsaw cutting isn't terribly accurate, so tomorrow, I'll fix each ply to the negative template and run them on the router table with a bearing guided straight cutter fitted to replicate the exact shape of the template on them before fixing them together.