The first order of business on today's diary is to apologise for the lack of updates over the last few days, various unnewsworthy events have conspired to take me away from work for a while.. I shall have pics of several new nephews in the weeks to come!

I started the day doing what i love best, and that is working on one of my prototype acoustics for a while.. it's almost too fun to be called work!  This guitar is a very small bodied acoustic that is based almost entirely on my PAF guitar shape.  She has a sitka spruce top and a back that has three stripes of the same timber mixed with two stripes of rosewood.. the idea is that since spruce is such a lovely resonant wood having the back built out of the same stuff should greatly enhance the tone.  The rosewood on the back will also provide the neccessary structural integrity and add some brightness to the tone.  The sides, which will be relatively deep will be made out of stripes of mahogany and rosewood, again for strength and tone... we'll see how she turns out...

 Here I'm scalloping the first set of braceing that has been glued in place.. it's also a non-standard braceing pattern.. (if I can't experiment then who the hell can?)

 The soundhole...s .. I love this pattern, pretty but functional..  here I'm useing a very fine file to even out the curves left by the saw..

 And here we're glueing on several more braces, these are made another timber, cedar, which will add a bit more resonance than the standard spruce.. or so I hope..

 the begining...  this is the start of a new template for my X-Symbol model.  This particular guitar is being built out of a solid piece of mahogany with a glued on maple neck.  She will have a single pickup and very simplified controls and is made to be light and very ergonomic with both a 'belly-carve' and heavy contouring on the top.  She will have a tune-o-matic bridge and through-body stringing which is, in my opinion, by far the best combination for tone and resonance.

 The template has been band-sawed to shape and filed down to the exact curves that I want to achieve.. you can see some of the front contours drawn on the template too!

 And here is what the template is for, using a bearing cutter I've routed round the template and achieved an almost perfect finish with very little fuss.  Obviously this is why the template has to be prefect, any small dents or variations will be transfered to the guitar in the routing process if it's not just right!

Here I've used a rather large roundover bit in the router to get the main edge of the guitar, this is done while the top is perfectly flat, it'll look great once the rest of the carving has been achieved.

The neck has been part built and at this stage already has the two-way adjustable truss-rod installed and has had the outline routed out.  I'm glueing on the beautiful birds-eye maple fingerboard in this pic.

The fingerboard has a rough edge from the bandsaw here and this will be routed off using a small jury-rigged router-table.  The first time I saw a furniture-maker friend of mine putting a router in his bench vise like this I shouted at him for being an unsafe idiot!... don't do it at home!!

The edges of the fingerboard are now perfect... but too big.. next comes the binding!

I've used double-sided tape to fix a template to the front of the fingerboard and am now using the same router table to cut a ridge for the binding to be glued into.

You can see the binding channel here, and how pretty the timber is!  Now comes the most important part, I use a very sharp hand-plane to shape the contour of the fingerboard, it's not the fastest method but it does give much more precise results.  In this case we've got a very flat radius but with a compound radius thrown in to make the playing of chords easier at the nut and also to facilitate ripping out solo's in the higher registers..

I've been using this page of fret calculations for the last six years.. I haven't read the rest of the book in the whole of that time!.. as you can see I don't use a machine to cut the fret-slots.. I could but doing it this way gives me much more flexibility..

All marked out and cut using a saw that I've heavily modified over the years.. the last time I ended glueing a file to the side of the blade to keep it perfectly true.. she's also been sharpened many many times!

And here is the sheet of aluminium from which I'm about to cut an inlay.. fittingly an X.

Using a small file I carefully smooth out the edges of the inlay to leave a perfect shape to mark into the fretboard

After scoring around the inlay with a very sharp knife I cut the recess and glue the inlay in using thick super-glue... I'm forever covered in the stuff, and even managed to squirt it in both my eyes on several ocassions!  Not fun!(I use protective glasses now!)  Any gaps are filled with a mixture of glue and maple dust..

And here's the result after filing down..