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Posts made in July, 2008

Don’t Try This At Home…

Posted by on Jul 27, 2008 in Articles & Tutorials

Good news and bad news. The good news is that there is a mould! It is far from perfect, but pretty much on par with my expectations for a first try. The bad news is that my “plug”, i.e. the positive mould was all but ruined. For one reason or other, the car wax did not work. At all. Every single bit of filler used on the plug sat in the mould when it was done. I have had to spend several hours sanding it away from the mould. As the images above show, the plug is in pretty bad shape. I do still need it to make the other part of the mould, so I’m working on fixing it again now. I’m not sure what went wrong. Either the car wax didn’t work because I heated everything up, or the filler got messed up from the heat. Pretty sure it is not the latter though, but it could be that I was misinformed about using car wax. I will make sure I do the right thing for the next job. Anyway , looking back, the rest worked pretty much according to plan. The peel-ply came off like a dream and there were no problems on that end. I...

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The Mould Mould…

Posted by on Jul 26, 2008 in Articles & Tutorials

So, it’s under way. I have roughly 15 more very nervous hours to go before I know how it turned out… Since I had made a complete model neck, but I will have to create the final necks in two steps (back and fretboard) I first had to “convert” my model into a mould for the back. The neck will rest on the below seat: To not make the epoxi stick to the mould, I sealed it with latex sealer and then polished the whole thing with… Car wax. I was nervous about this step but I think it might work as you might see in one of the following pictures – the epoxi does not stick at all, just like water on a newly waxed car. I then put double-stick tape around the edges to make the vacuum bag to stick to. And then for the tricky part. I covered the mould in epoxi and as can  be seen, the wax seems to have done its job. Next step way laying on the fiberglass, saturating it with more epoxi. I put on three layers all in all. Then came peel-ply and pillow foam and finally the bag itself. Plenty of duct tape later: With vacuum applied, I could...

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The Neck Mould

Posted by on Jul 22, 2008 in Articles & Tutorials

As advertised previously, I have also created a new MDF mould for the neck. To learn working with carbon fiber, I decided to make it a bolt-on neck mould. Then I realized that this is a perfect component for the Ergonomic Guitar System, so I made the dimensions the “standard” dimensions, which meet the body at the 21st fret. With this, it will be possible to purchase a neck and a bridge to get a truly ergonomic instrument from almost any bolt-on instrument. I started by laminating three 19 mm  pieces of MDF: and then I butchered a (yes, you guessed it) an ironing board to create a routing jig for the neck twist: Once I had completed the passes with the router, I ended up with this: and with plenty more work: The plan is that tomorrow, I will start to create the negative mould (out of fiberglass and epoxi) that I will then do the final carbon fiber neck in. I visited a custom carbon fiber shop yesterday for research purposes, which was interesting. Will report...

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Got Wood?

Posted by on Jul 15, 2008 in Articles & Tutorials

I ordered some swamp ash and had it shipped to a colleague in the US. When I asked him if had “got wood”, he had a good laugh and enlightened me as to the dual meaning of this in English…. For those of you who don’t know what it is, suffice it to say that it involves a certain part of the reproductive system. Anyway – I have started on a new mould made out of MDF. Here are a few pictures: I have since refined them a bit and made a neck as well, but more about that another...

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