Tuesday, May 01, 2007

A circle peg for a round hole

I found this interesting. Today I surfed over my favourite luthiers site, Dan Dubowski and I noticed this picture.... which I must of looked at a thousand times.



To me it looks like Dan routes his inlay BEFORE he glues on the covering headplate. I got to thinking that using this method, if one made a few mistakes you could fill them in with expoxy or similar and make a second/smaller cut, and get a really tight fit. Then when the headplate got glued on over the top, as long as you had a template to know where to cut/drill/route, you could 'edge' you way up to the cut underneath and bingo - you'll end up with a neat and near perfect inlay slot.

In other news I received my hard guitar case from Marquez Music today. I won it on an Ebay auction and delivered to my door with insurance it cost AU$74.00 in total. It is a great product, really sturdy with clasps, hinges and stoppers etc that appear to be really good quality. The 41 inch case holds my dreadnought snugly and the OOO well but with a small gap all around. Sure, I won't be travelling the world with it, throwing it on to a different aircraft each night but, it'll more than service my needs until an international record label pick me up.

3 comments:

David said...

That is an interesting idea. I have to say I never thought of doing it that way before. I might just have to give it a test try on something to see if it really would work. My big question though is what kind of bit to use to keep from cutting into the edges of the cutout under the overlay.

Oh, and looking at the picture, I have to wonder if that is really a figured maple overlay. It kind of looks like there is a shadow line at the nut edge which makes me think that there is an overlay already on there. Also, the grain on the peghead is pretty figured looking compared to the rest of the neck.

I have to say though, even if the overlay is already on, you really have me thinking about your idea. I think I will give it a try with some scrap wood.

David said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Anonymous said...

I agree David. I've looked and looked at the picture and sometimes I see that there is a headplate there other times I convince myself that it is merely a pencil line.
Either way, Dan's routing is much neater than mine.
I am going to do some test runs as well, to see if I can't get this new theory of mine to work.