Brace yourselves...

Haha, get the catchy title analogy??  You know, because we're talking about soundboard bracing next?!?  Yaarrrr... I know my jokes are bad so I'll just stick with the guitar building.  Having finished the rosette, my next step was to brace the top, coming one step closer to the point where I could finally assemble the body.  The first step to bracing is, as with anything, preparation, and the largest part of preparation for bracing is, of course, making your braces.

Braces are typically made out of a soft wood and may or may not be matched with your soundboard material.  It so happens that, more often than not, top braces are made out of Adirondack Spruce.  While it's hard to find Adirondack billets large enough and clean enough to use for larger guitar tops, it's extremely easy to find suitable Adirondack stock ideal for braces.  The stock doesn't need to be extremely even grained or especially large; it's fairly common to find pieces of adequate size to then reduce for your large and small braces.

All my braces came from one solid block; it's pretty simple to do, you just need to measure many times so you only have to cut once for each individual brace.  I started with the easiest cuts and the largest on the soundboard, the x-braces.  One important rule you need to remember, however, when cutting your braces is be sure to cut each brace with the grain in the proper orientation.  I forget now exactly which direction is correct (I think you want the grain to run vertically but double check first).  I made sure I cut the width of each brace as close to exact as possible, but I allowed a little extra height on them because I'd be carving them down to the proper size later.  I also made sure I left plenty of length so that the tips would extend beyond the edge of the soundboard.

Once the x-braces were ripped with the table saw (watch your fingers), I proceeded to rip the rest of the braces to include the tall upper face brace, the sound hole braces, and all the remaining fan braces.  Once they were are sized properly, I separated and labeled each brace.  You can group braces into two broad categories - flat and curved.  The flat braces are the easiest to glue, so all the books say to begin with them.  I'm not one to trump age old wisdom so I reiterate, start with the flat braces first!

As far as creating curved braces goes, it's an art and not a science.  There are a million ways to do it, but here's how I ended up doing it -- I marked the general outline of  the desired curve on the side of the brace by drawing a curve from the center to a mark on each tip.  Your plan will tell you what kind of curve you need - it's typically a difference of anywhere from 1/16th to an 1/8th from the center to the ends (I'm not sure how that relates to curve radii...).  Once I had my lines I simply sanded the gluing faces to those curved lines as best as I could using a 6-inch belt sander (thanks Mom, Dad, Brother, and Sister for the awesome Christmas present!).  I then hand sanded the curved braces to finish them off with a 150 grit block sander.

As I alluded to in the previous paragraph, the final step to preparation is to sand the gluing faces with 150 grit sand paper; this makes sure you have a good bonding surface.  Well that's it for prep.  Next time I'll go through the gluing and shaping process for flat and curved braces, and yes! I will make sure I include pictures.  I apologize for the scarcity of photos; I know personally I'd have trouble maintaining interest were there few to no pictures included...  Shame on me for being lazy.