Colin's Photo-Journal in England For a text-based journal, click here. 1/22/05 The joint glued well, and now I have to thickness the top and make both sides flat and smooth, which is proving difficult because the boards were warped a bit. 1/21/05 First thing today was gluing together the two ash pieces. I had to get the edges to match up very well, then we set up this big rig so that the wood would be pushed together while it glued. While the glue was drying, I cut out the cavity hole cover, which is made out of plastic, with the router. Here's what it looks like after all of the holes were drilled and the screws were in. The coating you see over it is just some protective covering, it will come off when my guitar is all done. Next up was painting the two cavities. The larger cavity, which will hold all of the switches, pots, jacks and other electronic stuff, needs to be covered with some sort of metal so that no radio interference can get to the wires. This paint has some metal in it which acts as a metal coating. The other cavity is just covered with some ink. 1/20/05 After all of the routing was done, which proved a bit difficult because the router wasn't quite wide enough to make the gap, here's what the control cavity hole looks like from the back. The ledge is for the cover. My ash top came, and it was figured, so we decided to go with the other one after all... Here I am cutting off the long ends of it. The sides need to meet up aesthetically and physically when they are glued together... here is the setup for planing the edges. 1/19/05 After routing and sanding the cavities to make them look nice, here's what the guitar body looked like: My bridge came today, and just for fun, I put together all of the templates I've made (including the F-hole one I made today) and got a pretty decent idea of what my body would look like. Here are two templates I had to make today for routing out the electronics cavity cover tomorrow. 1/18/05 Today I drilled out the electronics cavities on my guitar. Here is the way it was all set up: And after drilling (Phil says that early rickenbackers were left this way, instead of being cleaned up at all): Now, to clean up... here's the router, all rigged up with a piece of wood I had to cut out so that itwouldn't fall into the cavities. 1/17/05 Today's work was mostly drawing the finishing touches onto the guitar and making some templates and all. First, here is a poorly lighted shot of the "final" drawing of my guitar, with the routings drawn on the transparent sheet: Here I am using a sowing tool (I forgot the name, we call it "the ball with spikes" in the shop) to trace the body's cavities onto my piece of mahogany. Here is the next step, tracing through the dots to give me a good guide. Look carefully at the upper half and you can see untraced dots. Tomorrow I will be making cavities based on these guides with the router. 1/16/05 I walk by 3 of these graffiti'd TVs a day, and I've always thought they were interesting. For the record I haven't watched a second of TV since I got here. Here is the now-smoothed-and-at-the-right-width body surrounded by wood shavings after a hard day and a half of work. 1/14/05 Today's work: "planing" the surface of the joined body. It has to be free of dents and concavity. This weekend will be finishing this up and making the other side fairly flat too. By the end of the day the area around the wood was literally covered with wood shavings. 1/13/05 Heres a view of the town as you walk up the main street, where most of the shops are. Ahh!! Tornado!!!! Todays work: Smoothing the sides of two pieces of mahogany to make a clean surface to glue. It literally took all day, you have to be very very precise. Here are the two pieces glued together: 1/12/05 Lots of pictures today, I tried to take some pictures of my daily things now that I'm falling into a groove. Here is the cat, who slept in my room last night: Here's the inside of the house, viewed from the top of the stairs... the door at the end of the hall with stickers on it is Duncan's, the open door on the side is my room, the other door closest is Alister's. Here's the kitchen, which is just about directly below where I was standing in the last two pictures. The outside of the house... The street in Bridgetown I walk through. Look for the bridge over the dart river... Maybe tomorrow I'll take a picture of the bridge and the main street. The outside of the shop. You can see some guitars on display in the window. And here's the work from today. First picture is the finished wooden template and the drawing on the tracing paper for it... and the second is the actual final design on paper. The "Sonic Starblaster" or "Experimentalists Anonymous Starblaster" or "Spaceblaster" or something like that :) 1/11/05 I brought in my camera today to the shop (as I will likely do daily from now on). These first two pictures are my workstation, as I was drawing my guitar's body and neck. Note the tea... the mp3 player... the hand tools... Here is a picture of the workshop from when everyone but myself and the three englandites: Phil (with the glasses), Adrian (in the background) and Dave (with his back turned, this could be the wrong name) had left for lunch. Today's task was drawing the template for our guitar's body and neck... after a lot of very careful drawing and redrawing I finally came up with this design, which isn't so much like a Starcaster anymore because it is symmetrical at the lower bout. 1/9/05 Some pictures of my room as I have it set up: Note that I have since organized the desk a bit. My room is in the upstairs of a 4 level house (basement, downstairs, upstairs, attic (which can only be accessed through a hole in the roof of my room)).