Monday, April 29, 2013

Gardening (aka why I haven't been working on the guitar)

So, you may have noticed tha I have not updated my blog in a few weeks. That is because I have been preoccupied with a few other projects, one of which was the yard/garden. A few years ago, we had to remove some trees in our backyard, and, as a result, our full shade backyard turned into a full sun one. Much of the growth back there died off, and Kati and I needed to spruce it up a bit. We prepped the beds back there and planted more sun loving plants where the old, dead ones were. We also put some more shade plants in some of the still shady areas. One of our favorite choices was our pink double knock-out roses. Kati likes to go out and count the blooms everyday and get excited about new flowers, and it is quite entertaining. Here are some pictures from various stages of the project.




I also planted what I am going to call a "garden that has plants that attract butterflies to it" in our front yard (apparently "butterfly garden" isn't a particularly masculine term). Here are some pictures when I was working on it:







We have just a little bit more work to do, and I think we will be at a good stopping point for the yard for this season. I have another project to post as well, when I get some better pictures documenting it.

Tuesday, April 2, 2013

Guitar build, spanish heel

This past week I worked on getting the spanish heel cut in the guitar. Unlike steel-string guitars (or what most perceive as the standard acoustic guitar) that have dovetail joints (again, most have dovetail joints where the neck meets the body), classical guitars join to the body at what is called the spanish heel. I employed the assistance of Dave, the father-in-law, and several of his tools to complete this task.

In order to cut the slots in the heel for the sides, Dave and I first had to square up the heel block. We did that on the disc sander.


Looks pretty good to me!


Then we had to mark the center of the neck, and the depth mark for the slots we were going to cut.


After all that, we spent a whopping amount of time truing up and squaring up the table saw. I am not ready to admit how long it took us, but needless to say we got it as close as we possibly could.


To keep the spacing the same for both cuts, we used a piece of scrap wood to act as a sort of spacer between the fence and the neck. It may be hard to visualize how that all works together, but these images should give you some idea.





And here is the result.