I’ve already had the plan for the 12-string guitar’s headstock for some time:
… now I’m finally doing it!
I’ve already cleared some minor problems with this plan – on the lower right end, not enough wood remained for the tuner on the backside. A printout was great help here. Well, some printouts – design in Inkscape, print, cut, overlay, try, curse, back to design work, shave off half a millimeter here, add it there … and finally transfer the design onto the headstock:
… which, much to my dismay, isn’t enough. 🙂
So: clamp the neck, look at it nervously for 5 minutes – this is a point of no return! – and then cut off the lower right corner with a pad saw. This is the first time I’m doing anything with maple – my experience until now has been limited to spruce and pine tree boards for shelf systems 🙂 … works astonishingly well. “Astonishing” to me, that is; an expert might laugh out loud now.
Then work out the outline with a Dremel (I haven’t got better tools for that in my flat) – much dust, nearly no problems.
The rest is manual work with a sanding block and sanding paper. Two sweat dripping hours later:
Doesn’t look perfect yet, but it’s already quite nice, I think. The line on the bottom right isn’t completely correct yet. Looks quite good already in total:
The question is: can the imperfection stay? After all, this is a guitar tinkering project, my first one at that, so it’s allowed to look like that, right?
Right?
Hmmm …
I’ll sleep over that.
The next day …
If a perfectionist sleeps over a problem like that, he can only arrive at one answer 😉
So it’s another half hour with the sanding block. The result:
… and I’ll leave it at that. I’m content with it, and presumably it needs a carpenter to notice the small imperfections. Compared to the original paddle – yep, the design’s elegance has made the step into reality! 🙂
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