The Baynhams

I have started the long and laborious task of scraping the back board of the guitar so that its thickness is reduced from 3.9 mm to 3 mm.

Doesn't sound much does it? It feels wrong to scribble all over this beautiful piece of Tasmanian Blackwood with a lead pencil but I have to do this so that I know where I have scraped and where I have to do some more. The idea is to scrape enough wood off so that the pencil marks disappear. I am using a cabinet scraper to do this. It looks like a metal credit card and I use the sides to scrape back and forth over the wood. It is similar to scraping the ice off the windscreen of a car on an icy morning only a lot harder on the hands! Each time I scribbled over the wood and then scraped the surface it took about 20 minutes and each time I measured the thickness afterwards with a digital calipers I had only scraped away 0.1 of a millimeter..... It was going to be a long night.

After a couple of hours I resorted to using a belt sander. Not as purist as I was hoping to be but my hands were screaming out for mercy!

I am hoping to go back to the workshop this coming week while Gareth is at pre school so that by next Thursdays class I am ready to move on to the next stage.

Otherwise I could see this guitar making taking a long, long, long time!