Jointing the plates...

My first task is to get the back and soundboard joined together. In Guitar Making: Tradition and Technology, William Cumpiano suggests building a shooting board and using a block plane to get a nice straight edge on the parts. I certainly did this on my first guitar, but it can be difficult to keep the plates from slipping as you make strokes with the plane. He was also targeting an audience working mostly with hand tools.

But I've been building furniture for over 20 years now and have a nice collection of tools. So I thought I'd try something different this time.

The tool to the left is a Festool TS 55 track saw. It is an incredible saw, and has almost completely replaced my table saw for most cutting. The reason is that it rides on a track and is able to produce a splinter free, glue ready joint. The track itself has some kind of sticky "magic strip" (this is what the Germans call it!) that makes it able to stay in place without even being clamped (most of the time). So I thought I'd see if it could cut both plates at the same time and give me a good glue joint. I made a test cut on plywood to insure that it was cutting nice and square. Even it if it wasn't, because the plates are book matched, any error would be cancelled out when I flipped them around.

Sure enough, the joint came out perfect. I did a "candle test" on the plates. Holding them up the sun, I couldn't see any light through the joint at all. That's what we need for a good strong soundboard.

The trick was to tape the plate parts together tightly so they wouldn't move during the cut. Here is the back about to be cut.