Brace shaping and back bracing

Top braces are now shaped and the rosewood bridge plate glued in 00-model. The J-OM model back received it's center seam reinforcement strip of spruce and bracing. The next thing is thickening the J-OM top down to 3mm, cutting the rosette and laying down the bracing pattern. Then it's side bending time, possibly before this year ends.

Making the internal bracing starts
with splitting the quality, straight grained
spruce brace wood
down to size.
Once the wedge is driven into the slab,
 it pops out with a clappy, happy sound.
The tool laying on the floor is "puukko"
(aka fisherman's/hunter's/carpenter's knife)
 - the thing us  Finns used to utilize for every
 walk of life from food supply to cooking to
 eating to making tools & toys to relating to
 neighbors & family to putting up a fire to warfare
and hunting to law enforcement to whatever you name.
 It's pretty handy to have a few at hand in
case of any need.

The grain must be straight and driving
pace slow, to make straight splits

Here the center seam reinforcement is glued down and
the braces are ROUGH split. Enter the plane!

Back brace bottoms are contour-sanded on my
high-tech contour-sander

The center seam is notched to house the braces

Go-baring again. This is such a handy invetion!

Back to the top. All the braces are there, but only
 part of them shaped. I use a sharp chisel in shaping.
 The largest braces are scalloped - meaning some material
 is removed of the brace to make the top lighter
and more flexible.
The bridge plate (3mm) is made of scrap rosewood.
 It's reinforcing the bridge area, as it has to resist
the pull of the strings for the years to come.
The grain goes intentionally a bit off axis,
 to prevent possible splitting from the
string ball ends.

Gluing the bridge plate with wooden cauls.
Finally all the braces are shaped too.

Go-baring the top and some nice wood

Being a spare time hobby for me, luthiery hasn't caught much attention lately. Here's some latest activities over a pretty long period:

- preparing and gluing the top center seam for Jouni's guitar.
- preparing and gluing, re-preparing and re-gluing the back center seam for the same. The Ultimately Good Looking Cocobolo (UGLC) seems to be a very tricky wood to be glued. It's a very oily wood and seems to be rejecting almost everything I have to offer gluewise. It remains to be seen, if the latest trick'll do the trick.
- preparing top bracing for Jyrki's guitar. This has become a lot easier with the concave discs I made. I'll just simply put some sanding paper on the disc and sand the braces in right shape to fit the curvature of the top. Less guesswork, faster and more precise glue seams.
- Gluing down the bracing using the Go-Bar method, AKA AAWSIBTSP (Awful Amount of Wooden Sticks In Between Two Slabs of Plywood).

German Master Grade "moon spruce" and Mexican Cocobolo

Nice detailing in the wood

The sides have a distinctive pattern too

Laying down the bracing pattern for the 00-sized guitar. For some reason the lowest two braces run the wrong way in this picture 

Go-bar gluing the bracing - first all the rest of them

And then the center x-brace too. It took 26
 bars to get there, I believe.