Sorta Slightly Faster

Hey everyone!

Note: This was originally posted by me to BASIS Tucson North's Senior Project page on March 18th, 2018.

Hello again,

This past week, I made a lot of progress on the build (although it may not seem like much). Everything is finally ready to begin shaping the wood.

On Wednesday, I met with Andrew McGill (onsite advisor) again, after planing (plane-ing, not a typo) the board of maple for about an hour. I had gotten the board down to about 0.8inches thick at that point, and was getting ready to do the other piece of wood that I had bought. The second piece was rosewood, a considerably harder wood than maple, which is already a really hard wood, so he told me that the best thing to do would be to plane it just a tiny bit at a time, and then cut it on the table saw, vertically, the same as how David Lesser (Xerocraft employee) told me to cut it a week ago. Seeing as the both of them gave me the same advice, it seemed like a pretty good plan, but man was it a pain.

Here’s a video of what planing looks like, sped up to 1.5x original speed:

The way that I was instructed to do this was to place the piece of rosewood vertically and clamp it to a piece of MDF board. Andrew said I should do so because MDF is much more resistant to warping than regular wood due to the way it’s made, so MDF is almost always perfectly straight and flat. Then, I was to raise the sawblade to stick out of the surface of the table by about a quarter inch, cut through the center of the width down the length of the board, flip the board, and repeat. After some quick math to figure out the exact center of the width of the board, and accounting for the width of the blade (about 0.1 inch), I was finally ready to cut.

Above is a photo of just before running the board through the saw for a third or fourth pass. As you can see, there is a dark line on the top of the board. That is the channel cut by the saw on a previous pass. Early on in the process, I thought that this would be a very easy process, and wouldn’t take much time at all. Boy, was I wrong.

Here, you can see the centerline that I etched into the side of the board with an x-acto knife, used for lining up the blade just in case. The blade will naturally want to place itself in the divot that is the etching. The same principle applies when using a hand-drill.

The entire cutting process took about 3 hours to complete. Rosewood is an extremely hard wood, so in order to ensure minimal wear on the blade, I could only take out less than 1/4 inch at a time per pass. Any thicker could cause strain on the machine, and possibly break the blade, costing me $100+ to replace it. Another risk with this particular table saw is that it has an electric safety feature that fires a block of aluminum into the blade should something that conducts electricity, i.e. skin, touches anywhere in the red area surrounding the blade. The block of aluminum, the brake, is also expensive, as it is a specially machined cartridge, and can only be used once, as it destroys itself and the blade when it fires, causing a loud bang, and a heart attack in the user. And that’s why I used rubber things to push the board along the non-conducting rail you can see in the pictures. Fun.

About an hour in, and about a third of the way left to go!

In total, I probably made more than 50 passes through the sawblade, raising the blade by less than 1/4 inch after each pair of passes. Andrew would occasionally check up on my progress, give encouraging words (the first day planing, I gave up because it was taking so long), and make sure nothing had gone wrong. When there was about a half inch of thickness left, he told me that I could do one of a couple of things to proceed. I could a) use the band saw to cut the length of the board in one final pass, b) continue making several more passes on the table saw, or c) use a handsaw. I had seldom used the band-saw, and with such a hard wood, I was not comfortable with using it on the board, so he offered to do the final cut for me. He got a couple of inches lengthwise, but then the board started resonating pretty loudly (it is a tone wood for a reason), so he decided not to break the band saw and turned it off. It seemed that the blade that was on it was not good enough for this type of wood. So instead, he handed me an old fashioned hand-saw, and left for a while to attend a meeting.

I started using the hand-saw, but realized after a few minutes that it would take ages, and Xerocraft’s “Open Hack,” the time designated for non-members to use the space for projects, would start soon, so I did another few passes on the table saw. Unfortunately, on my final pass, it left about a 1/16 inch thick length of board holding the two halves together, and then I had to use the hand saw. So then, I placed the board in a vice, and used the saw, which, quite literally, cut through it like butter. It was hilariously cartoon-like with how fast it was, so much so that it was also kind of scary, and I thought I might lose a finger. Well, now I have two thin pieces of rosewood, or about 4 fretboards’ worth of material, and have to plane both of them. On Monday, I will be cutting out the shape of the neck and headstock on the band-saw, route the channel for the truss rod, and get started with cutting out the fret slots, and finally rounding the back of the neck.