Fence Project
We had some work done on our fence this week. Even though I had a bunch of projects pending on the guitar site, a bunch of work to do at my day job, and a bunch of busies around the house, I thought it would be a good idea to make an old fence post into a guitar body. I wanted to see if I could do it.
This first picture shows the raw fence post. The trick on this one is the post is round. I'm used to working with at least somewhat squared off raw wood.
So I took this thing and did a couple rips on the joiner. I'm usually cutting these edges of the jointer with 8/4 rough sawn wood. 8/4 means 8 x .25 = so about 2 inches. This is lumberjack terminology, but I need to use it when talking with these wood guys. So I had to adjust the joiner to handle the wider piece. No big deal, and it seemed to work.
That gave me a little bit of a flat spot to be able to run it through the planer. So these shots show how I got it relatively flat on two edges. One disturbing thing is that the little piece of rotted out wood had some ants in it. So I had to track down some insect killer. Hopefully I won't regret this and have a shop full of ants!
With the two sides relatively flat, I went back to the joiner to cut a nice edge. I need that to be able to glue these together.
These shots show the rough pieces on the left, and how they will look as a wood blank on the right. I kept one piece relatively long, and one shorter. This made it easier to run through the equipment.
I missed taking a shot of the pieces glued together, but that is the same basic idea as sold my other posts. This one shows the blank on the machine. I was really tired when I did this, so I messed it up – twice. I forgot to pull down the blank. So that is the flaw in the top horn. Then when I was cutting the armrest, I put the wrong Z parameter in, and the bit plunged into the body. Since this was sort of a throwaway, it wasn't a big deal. I'm glad this wasn't an expensive top. I guess the takeaway is make sure I'm not tired when I do those.
Bottom line, if you see an old chunk of wood lying around, I could potentially turn into a guitar body. In my not be a great body for a player, but it might have some sentimental value to have one of your old trees turned into a body. I'm open to chat about the stuff.