The sides come from your luthier supply house in the form of two slats, about 5 inches wide by 32 inches long and around 1/8 inch thick. I sand these down to about 0.085 inches with my drum sander before bending. Before I got that marvelous thing I had to reduce every board to useable thickness with a hand plane. Hand planes are great tools in the hands of great craftsmen. In my experience it's a little different; they do the job fine, right up to the point that I think I'm almost done, and then, yep, the blade slips a half-hair and digs into the board and ruins it. One day I thought, "Life's too Read more [...] Bending the sides
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The sides come from your luthier supply house in the form of two slats, about 5 inches wide by 32 inches long and around 1/8 inch thick. I sand these down to about 0.085 inches with my drum sander before bending. Before I got that marvelous thing I had to reduce every board to useable thickness with a hand plane. Hand planes are great tools in the hands of great craftsmen. In my experience it's a little different; they do the job fine, right up to the point that I think I'm almost done, and then, yep, the blade slips a half-hair and digs into the board and ruins it. One day I thought, "Life's too Read more [...] 
The top was glued up almost a year ago in preparation for the second try at Whit's guitar. The back was sanded down to 3/16" a few weeks ago. Here's a gallery of the steps that go into getting a back ready.
First, the edges need to be trued up so that the two book-matched halves meet at a straight line and that the edges are at compatible angles. You want a 90-degree angle and a long edge that runs parallel to the wood grain. This little jig (above) that the padauk back boards are laying on is called a shooting board and is designed to hold the back (and top) so that the plane can put 
This is a step-by-step building log for the guitar I'm building for my old pal Whit. It'll be in reverse order, since that seems to be the way of WordPress, which I've just installed and am learning to use. I'm taking a lot of photos -- maybe the editors will spare you having to scroll through too many. Probably not. For sure there'll be too many words. Sorry.
Okay, this is a C.F. Martin-inspired Orchestra Model steel-string acoustic guitar. I covered the question "What's an OM?" in a post yesterday. The specs weren't covered, so here goes:
25.5-inch scale length, 15-inch wide lower