So recently I let my ADD get the better of me, and much to my surprise and pleasure, the results were incredible.  Finally able to spend a few unadulterated hours with my arboreal love, I found myself scratching my head trying to figure out where to pick back up and what most needed work.  As I soon discovered, I had no desire to spend my few precious hours sanding away on the soundbox trying to get the sides prepped for gluing the back purfling.  Instead I decided to work on a key, yet hidden, aesthetic of the guitar - the soundbox label.

The soundbox label is generally very simplistic and utilitarian.  Its most basic function is to denote the manufacturer, model, serial number, and country of origin.  Some higher end manufacturers and home-spun luthiers, however, use the soundbox label as another means to distinguish themselves and their creations.  For me, it's the icing on the cake - A chance to make an otherwise ubiquitous musical instrument truly one of a kind.  As such, I did not want to rush headlong into such a meaningful and delicate operation.  Time to call in the big guns - and I do mean BIG!

Meet Sarah - artist, professional student, missionary, wood sprite, adventurer, boater extraordinaire, amazonian giantess...  And fortunately (or unfortunately [jk]) for me - sister-in-law.  Yes folks, that is a fully mature 400-lb bighorn sheep, dwarfed as it were by Sarah's 8'2" height;-).  Ok so maybe I exaggerate a smidgen, but only just!

Anyway, getting back to the point - Sarah, here, is an incredible visual artist and it was her input that birthed the inspiration for my first guitar's soundbox label.  So if you don't like it, you can blame her!  One day I was painfully trying to pull together the various tailored aspects of the guitar in addition to my father's personality and preferences in an effort to design a suitable label.  To be honest, I was spinning in circles getting nowhere.  Gigantor, uh I mean Sarah was looking over my shoulder shaking her head when I finally threw my hands up and asked her for help.  She immediately jumped at the opportunity to keep me from a fate worse than death - aesthetic ignominy!

To me it was an equation, something to solve.  Mix together all the inputs and adjust the variables until you reach the correct solution.  To Sarah,     hmmm, to Sarah.....  well, to Sarah it was anything but an equation. I cannot begin to understand how the mind of a woman works, let alone that of a female artist - so suffice it to say she did her magic and so a masterpiece was born.

Question:  Of what principle material is a guitar made?

Answer:  Wood, and in my case, bloody, gory wood...  (sharp implements and an impatient, distractible nature do not mix well!)

Question:  What primarily produces each guitar's unique tonal quality?

Answer:  The unique combination and grades of the woods used in its construction.

Question:  What is most central to a guitar's identity and overall quality?

Answer:  The wood!

So it all boils down to the wood, and what is wood?  Dead and seasoned trees.  And what defines my dad the most, apart from his servants heart and identity in Christ?  His passion for the wild spaces of our earth, the deep forest sanctuaries, the quiet alpine glades, the timeless Appalachian expanses.  So what better to bind the musician and the instrument together than an element fundamental to them both.  Just as a seed falls to the ground with the hope of springing forth into life, finding fertile soil and plentiful sun and water, it will venture into being and only the Lord know the plans He has for the seedling - so too my dad's guitar.

Without further ado, I give you my falling seed - Verdani Guitars Model 14-000+, No. 001.

And yes, she was a willing victim...

Closing the Soundbox

I've started the long and laborious process to close the soundbox (ie. attach the back).  Actually compared to the bracing or the rosette, it's not that bad.  Before you can close the soundbox though, there a few very important steps you can't forget - namely bracing the back.  I'm missing some good pictures, so I will update this post later.

You saw me route and glue the back strip in a previous post, now it's time to work on the inside surface of the back.  First you start with the center seam reinforcement brace.  This brace is thin but wide and you want to make sure that the grain runs vertically in the cross-section.  Once you've cut the brace (remember to watch your fingers! I had a few close calls and it pays to invest in a Saw Stop table saw...) it's time to glue it and clamp it like any other brace.  The back should be braced in a radius dish so a go-bar clamping system works best for this step.

Once the seam brace is secured, you'll want to round out the profile.  I found a micro chisel (I use Flexcut hand chisels) and sanding blocks do the job most effeciently.  Once it's rounded and smoothed you can mark the places for the back cross braces (typically three) and use a modeler's saw and more micro chisels to remove sections of the seam brace for the cross braces.  Similar to how the soundboard braces were prepared, cut and and then shape the cross braces using sandpaper attached to your radius dish.  Then you can glue and clamp them into place.  Now it's time to finish shaping the profile of the cross braces to prepare it for attaching to the soundbox.  One final step for the back is to trim off the excess seam brace from the top and bottom so that it will fit snuggly between the head and tail blocks already on the soundbox.  You can see me doing this below.

It's alive, it's ALIVE!!! Well not quite...

Pop quiz hot shot - what do you do with a finished soundboard and shaped sides?  No it's not a bomb on the bus...  You join them!  And what happens when you join them?  It's almost like you're creating Frankenstein's creature.  I've tasted just a hint of the ecstasy Gene Wilder so convincingly portrayed as he succeeded in raising to life that which was inanimate.  And trust me, it's altogether dizzying and excruciatingly exhilarating.  So without further ado, I present to you two-thirds of a sound box!

So the question remains - how'd you do that???  Answer: it was a miracle like manna from heaven;)  Ok, fine, I guess I'll tell you.  It all begins with kerfing.  I started out with reverse rounded kerfing - bad idea...  I ordered the reverse rounded kerfing at the beginning of the project along with the soundboard, back, sides, neck, fretboard, and saddle stock.  At that early stage I had no idea what I was doing nor what would work best.  As it turns out, the reverse kerfing is not the best type to use on smaller bodied guitars.

Kerfing as it turns out is used to provide a better (larger) gluing surface for the back and soundboard.  It basically makes a wide ledge allowing more contact surface area for gluing at this critical structural joint.  The acoustic guitar is in essence an incredible engineering problem because it epitomizes all the classic trade-offs of weight to strength, form to function, and on and on and on.  Traditional kerfing simply means that the cuts in the strip face outward when fastened in the guitar (meaning the slits are exposed to the soundbox).  Reverse kerfing, on the other hand, is designed so that the cuts in the strip face the side they are being glued to (meaning the slits are against the side and are not exposed to the soundbox.

My suspicion is that reverse kerfing may provide minutely better sound quality or projection because the sound waves generated by the guitar are not broken up by the small kerfing slits since the smooth backing is what's exposed. But, as I soon found out, reverse kerfing requires larger turn radii - when you try to use it on smaller guitars it snaps far too easily.  So bottom line is, I had to reorder traditional kerfing which worked a lot better.

Gluing the kerfing initially was a little disconcerting but as I became familiar with it, I found that there's really not much to it.  I started with one side, trimmed a length of kerfing to the proper length, put a long bead of glue along the surface to be glued to the side, smeared it so that the amount of glue was uniform, and then started from the heal block and worked along the sloping curves toward the head block.  You need to make sure you have a lot of stiff spring clamps on hand so you can clamp the kerfing along the side as you work your way along it.  Don't worry about squeeze out, you just want to make sure the kerfing is a little proud of the edge and that there are no gaps with the side along it's length.  If you don't have enough clamps or if it happens to break, it's ok to do it in sections.  I found it easiest to actually break each side in two sections, one from the heal to the apex of the waist and a shorter one from the apex to the head block.  If you want to remove the excess squeeze out once the kerfing is in place, now's the time to do it, otherwise just trim it with a chisel, plane, or sanding block after it's dry.

The next step is to re-plumb the top edge.  I started with a small hand plane and a palm plane, they worked well to get a good clean surface and to knock everything down to the same level.  To finish it off, I used a sanding block to make sure everything was level and consistent.  The final step before gluing the top is chiseling out the notches for the soundboard braces.  To do this I place the soundboard on top, marked the sides, then started carving conservatively with Flexcut micro chisels.  It's a little tedious, but the iterative process of carving some, rechecking with the top, carving some more, etc. makes for a good fit and the least amount of over cutting.  A word of caution, it does take some finesse and a lot of patience.

Once everything fits snuggly and you're good to go, the last step is to apply the glue to the top of the kerfing and sides, smear it good, place your soundboard, then apply uniform pressure along the perimeter with your go-bars.  Once it's dry, you can trim the top flush to the sides with a laminate router and flush bit and voila!  It's ALIVE!  almost...