#1-Back in Bidness — tyson hand-did

Back in Bidness | It has been a while since I have posted - sick with allergies, several set-backs and near catastrophes, etc. But I am back in bidness and getting closer to having a finished guitar. Hoping to get caught up on posts this week. First an update on the end graft.

The end graft is the piece of wood on the lower bout of the guitar where the two sides meet. You can do whatever you want to at this junction and I chose to fill it with some of the cedar from the top. Over the weeks of working, the end graft had just gotten beat to death. I told myself that I was not going to stress over perfection on this first build, but the end graft was really bugging me. So I decided to chisel it out and add a new one.

I wish I had thought to take a picture before I cut it out - it was in really bad shape. It all came out fairly easily. I decided to put another piece of cedar from the top in again, but this time I also added some of the rosewood strips from the binding to create a clean border.

After a lot of fiddly shaving and sanding and fitting it turned out very nice I think. I immediately put some masking tape over this area to protect it from getting dinged up.

In the next couple of days, I will post up about the neck joint and neck carving. That is one of the areas that I was having fever dreams about. Sure enough, it proved to be somewhere on the scale between extremely difficult and almost impossible - for me at least.