Opening a Headstock, Closing a Soundbox
I’m now in week 16 of my apprenticeship, and becoming more and more comfortable with being here. Getting to know the flow of things, and settling into a routine.
A typical day for me as an Ervin Somogyi apprentice looks like this:
5:30am get up, have breakfast and a coffee
6:30am - 9:00am work on my own build
9:00am - 5:00pm work on Ervin’s builds
5:00pm - 8:30pm work on my own build
Weekends are spent working on my own build. There’s breaks in there, but I’m basically trying to work as much as I can. Some mornings I’m getting up early to go to Jiu Jitsu training. Having that hobby outside of the workshop has been keeping me more or less sane. Last weekend I had my first day off since I’ve been here. That makes 104 days of work in a row. I’m happy to say that I’ve made some progress on my build.
Here I’ve roughly cut out the headstock on the bandsaw. Next I’ll attach the headstock template, and route the headstock outline to the final shape.
After routing the outline, I drill tuner holes from the side. I made a little jig to help line them up, which you can see clamped to the headstock.
Then I can open the central part of the headstock. I remove most of the wood with a scroll saw, then use the router with a template to get the final shape. There’s a bit of hand work after that, to refine what’s left after routing.
The headstock is bevelled to give enough clearance for the strings going from the nut to the tuner.
Ervin Somogyi writing on the inside of my top. I asked for a joke, but he wrote a riddle instead. It’s written backwards DaVinci style, so if you look inside with a mirror you’ll be able to read it.
The glue surface of the back is masked off, and shellac is sprayed to seal what will be the interior.
Now the back can be glued onto the rim/top assembly.
I wanted to do something a bit different for the label. This is what I settled on.
The current state of my build - The sound box is closed, fretboard made, neck in progress. Next is the binding, then setting the neck.
Ervin had his 80th birthday a couple weeks ago. Louis and I made him a cake. The recipe called for whipping the eggs, but we didn’t have the right machine. So, we had to be a bit creative.
Happy 80th birthday Ervin.
This project’s been my main focus the past few weeks. Here Ervin is excavating for the back of neck inlays.
Then it was passed to me and Louis to fit and install the inlay strips.
This one has a deadline fast approaching, so recently I’ve been spending all my time getting it ready to go off to the finisher.
We had another talk with Ervin about how to top functions. These talks are goldmines of information.
Louis went through the jigs and sorted out the ones which were not used. Here’s that pile, to go into storage.
Here’s another project I’ve been working on. Binding for this 00.
The sides were a bit short, leaving a larger than usual gap over the tail block. I showed it to Ervin, and we had a discussion about options to cover it.
We settled on the idea of making an inlay echoing the rosette.
I made a mosaic piece using buckeye burl and ebony matching the rosette.
Here’s what I ended up with.
Then Ervin took it and added his contribution, the red dot accent. I haven’t had a chance to inlay it yet, as I’ve been busy working on the Espalda guitar. Once that’s out the door I can get back to this.
Here I’m helping Chris Morimoto glue the fretboard on this Somogyi classical. There’s not much open time with hide glue, so having two people helps with getting the clamps on fast.
Day off in San Francisco last weekend.