2007
05.27
The picture says it all here. My initial idea had been to bolt all the layers together so it could accommodate instruments of different side depths, but it turns out my drill press doesn’t have enough throw to make a straight hole that deep. After several frustrating attempts to drill holes for the bolts, I decided to glue all the inner layers together and screw the last top and bottom slices om. That way I can still access the edges to clamp the kerfing.
2007
04.22
I built this extra-large router table to trim my mold slices flush with the master pattern. It’s basically just a board with a hole in it and a router mounted to the bottom. The whole mess sits on a couple of custom sawhorses that my father-in-law made for me – they fold up flat when not in use but will hold a full 4 x 8 sheet of plywood.
Update: Everything’s routed…
2007
04.21
I got all the new acoustic bass’ mold slices bandsawed out today – it’s finally starting to look like a body! Now to trim them clean on the router table and put them all together.
2007
04.17
The new bass design is really big, and it needs a really big mold. Normally I make acoustic guitar molds out of MDF, but with a body this big I decided to do a plywood one. I got this idea when I visited the Taylor factory a few years ago. I saw that the molds for their basses were plywood, with spacers between the layers to decrease the weight. The resulting structure is still plenty strong, while making it much easier to work with.
I started out my tracing the mold patterns onto a 4 x 8 sheet of plywood, then roughing them out with a sabre saw. Then I trimmed each piece to within 1/8″ of the pattern line on the band saw. Next I’ll screw each one of the rough pieces to the pattern and flush-cut them on the router table. I made 5 of the upper/bass-bout patterns and 7 of the lower/treble bout patterns, since the body has an asymmetrical cross-section that’s deeper on one side than the other.
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