American Mahogany Guitar Project

I have a Blog discussing the rough cutting of the slab that I discuss here. This Mahogany is grown in Florida. Transplanted from Africa. Great for Mahogany guitar bodies. We had to wait a while for the wood to dry out. It seems stable after a good part of the winter in the basement. The room with the boilers seems to dry them out nicely.

These pictures walk though what I did to get the "live edge" on a cool part of the guitar - the armrest. For some pics of what woodworkers are doing with the live edge, click here. I have not seen many guitar bodies with a live edge.

Working backwards, here is the final cut of the front. I did a close up of the armrest.



On this shot, I wet the armrest to show the gnarly live edge. The overall color looks brown, but it should turn a classic reddish with some aging. Some staining might speed that up. I need to do some tests. I might try to talk Eric into that.



Here are some shots of how I laid out the slab. There was a nasty knot that I wanted to avoid. I used a rough cut body to get the general shape. I wanted to get the live edge on the armrest, but still avoid the knot. The rough cut on the CNC uses a .5 inch diameter bit, so I needed to compensate for that. I've had some "experience" where the .5 skews the placement enough to put a knot in the wrong place.



The first shot shows how I pictured the armrest hitting the live edge. The second shows a bit closer.



The first one shows the path of the cutter just grazing the outside of the blank. The second shows after the rough cut. So far so good!



This is after running the armrest program. There is a bit of rough wood showing, but not much. Easy to sand that out. So I used as much of the live edge as possible. This is a good one!