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 [...]