First day in La Herradura

The start of the guitar building adventure. A day of rest and exploring before the hard work begins

Back on track

Having had a setback creating the rosette, I have now built a simple jig to make the work easier, plus a few techniques to make the gluing up quicker. I have also determined that the reason the last rosette plank was so much thinner than the other planks is that the yellow veneer is .5mm not .6mm. This may seem like a small difference but when a plank has 11 yellows it adds up to about 1mm overall. To cater for this I have added extra strips of the yellow to make up the difference.

A simple jig made from some wood I found in a skip coming back from the pub last night

Designed to fit in the vice for stability, with simple wedges to adjust  pressure.

Uh oh

I thought that creating a rosette from scratch would be a learning exercise, and have indeed learnt the hard way. I have found that different stacks of different widths, and possibly wood types lead to the glued stack being a different height. This will result in a misaligned pattern when the final strips are glued together so I need to recreate some of the sets. Unfortunately I have also started running out of veneer, so will need to order some more before restarting.
I have also realised that it will work better if I build a jig to glue the strips in - using the workbench vice to glue the strips together is possibly the main reason the stacks are different heights so I need to use something more subtle.

- order more veneer
- build a jig
- start again

Rosette

I have decided to go ahead with the "cubes" rosette design and have started assembling the various strips of veneer into blocks. Several points to note: (1) its a bit boring gluing lots of strips of wood together, (2) I wish I had a bandsaw and (3) I should have bought more veneer because I have already run out of the brown.

Neck complete

I have now finished the neck (at least as much as is needed at this stage) so time to start working on a rosette design. Here comes the procrastination stage.

Julian Bream clip

Just having a YouTube browse and came across an old favourite clip of Julian Bream playing what I am pretty sure is one of the Romanillos guitars that my first build was based on (Julian being an early patron of his guitars and he worked out of a workshop on Julian's land for a period). Not sure I have quite managed to get the same sound out of my one. The clip is fantastic, especially the facial expressions, and well worth a look. His playing is unbelievable!

Click here for the video

The first 2 weeks

Having bought the wood a couple of weeks ago, I have now progressed with the neck and feel I am making good progress - certainly compared to the last time. The neck stage should be complete this weekend and I can start thinking about the rosette (now THAT really could take a long time!).

Click here for pictures and description of the neck build.