Preparing the wood

This is the timber that will form the neck, back & sides and soundboard of the guitar. I have in stock spruce for bracing and ebony for the headstock veneer, bridge and fingerboard. The black Walnut here was taken from a tree felled in Kew gardens and planted by Queen Victoria.

The top and back are bookmatched billets of wood and need joining together. For this I use a bench plane and shooting board. to ensure both faces are perfectly flat I put the join up to the light to look for any minute gaps. This method takes a little  perseverance but the resulting join is very strong indeed.

Once the boards are joined, the excess glue is scraped from them then they are passed through the thickness sander. The boards are left a little thick so that they can be planed and scraped to their final thickness depending on the stiffness and strength of the wood.

The black Walnut back and Sitka spruce top after joining

Using a cabinet scraper to achieve the final thickness of the soundboard. Throughout the process I listen to the tap tone of the soundboard band back(the sound produced when the wood is struck at various points), noting how the tone lowers as wood is removed when thicknessing, then rises again when braced.