I had a lovely block of fiddle back blackwood- big enough to make two one-piece necks, but the grain orientation wouldn't have been ideal and there would have been a lot of unusable waste....so I decided to split it up. The result is enough to make three necks including pretty headstock veneers.
The stack is shown above, with the scarf already cut on the head. Below the pieces of one neck are aligned roughly as they will be glued. This headstock angle meant that the grafted head piece could be thinner than the neck piece (which will eventually taper towards that end).
The pic below is of my ancient thicknessing sander. It has done the ribs on nearly every instrument that I've made over the years. It is a bit crude and slow, but I can produce wooden pieces as thin as tissue paper with it. It has an iron tube/roller inside with spiral wound abrasive paper adhered to it. The bottom plate is hinged at the back and adjusted with a screw at the front. A vacuum hose goes in the hole at the top to keep the dust at bay.
The headstock graft has been glued (below) and the neck piece will be routed for the truss rod before I glue the rest of the stack. I did a bit of side bending between clients to-day, but was covered in black tannins from the timber, and everything was wet, and the phone kept going off, so I didn't photograph the process.
Beautiful timbers...again. Did you make the drum sander yourself and does it have any feed mechanism or do you just push the stock through?
ReplyDeleteYes I made it in the early 1990's. The drum rotates into the stock so that the timber is repulsed and pressure is required to push it through. It means you push it then pull from the back when it peeps through.Thickness is taken down fairly gradually. As I said, it's a bit crude, but only cost me a pair of bearings. I scrounged the motor from somewhere- maybe an old washing machine or similar.
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