Well it's as finished as it can be for now until we apply the lacquer, which sadly we have to wait to do until May! I'm so proud of what i have accomplished in the past 7 weeks. It has truly been a dream for me and the dream will only get better in the coming weeks as i build my custom electric guitar an finally put the lacquer finish on this beautiful acoustic and hear it's sweet tones.

The week was kind of surreal for me as i knew i was nearing the end of the build, but knew it would not really be DONE for another month due to class scheduling. I began work on Tuesday by shaping the neck of my guitar by hand with a rasp. The rasp is a steel file like tool with jagged teeth on its flat and curved surfaces that shred through wood like a hot knife through butter! The neck is clamped in place and i go to work hogging off the square corners of the neck checking with a square, calipers, and feeling for a good hand fit as i go until the desired shape is accomplished. This is actually one of my favorite parts of the build as i seem to have a knack for it. I can see the desired final shape in my head and working the wood into that shape seems to come naturally to me... Perhaps i should try my hand at carving other things!

With the neck shaped and sanded smooth to remove the rasp marks, I made a cap for it's heel out of a piece of tortoise celluloid. I trimmed and filed the cap to just oversize, glued it onto the neck heel, then scraped it flush to give the heel a nice finished look that matches the bindings on the guitar.

 Next I turned my attention to the head stock, which was still very plain and unfinished. I needed to address two issues there. 1) What to cover the exposed truss rod nut and cavity with. and 2) What to do to label the guitar and give it that finished logo'd look.
 I have wanted to keep the guitar very simple and clean looking throughout the build and the head stock area

needed to keep that aesthetic. There was no fancy pearl or abalone any where else on the guitar so I wanted to avoid it on the head stock. My choices were to use tortoise to match the bindings and pick guard that will be installed, cream celluloid to match the cream colored binding and bone nut, saddle, and bridge pins, or mahogany to to bring the lighter body wood into the dark ebony head cap. After much consideration and laying scraps of materials on the ebony for reference, I chose to stay simple ( and cost effective ) and use leftover mahogany from my side wood to make a truss rod cover and logo inlay.
 The truss rod cover was traced from a plastic Epiphone rod cover, cut out, edge beveled, and sanded smooth.

The logo inlay is a design i came up with to represent my custom guitars using my first and middle initials and an L for luthiery. I have been using using the logo to mark all my tools and such and also signed the inside of the guitar with it. It took some work to make it an inlay. I had to draw it in block letter form, trace it a few times to get a nice clean drawing, glue that drawing to a piece of mahogany, and cut it out using a very fine jewelers saw. This part of the process went fairly well compared to the actual inlaying of it onto the head of the guitar. I think this is definitely an art form of its own and i hope to master it in the future, but it is surely not as easy as it looks!

The next step ( the hard part ) was to temporarily glue the inlay onto a piece of spare ebony, scribe around its outline using an xacto knife, remove the inlay and rout a cavity in the outline for the inlay to set into using a dremel tool.

To make this step slightly easier i cut a small ebony piece to fit into the center of the A to save myself from having to rout around it like i did for the P.
Then it was time to repeat these steps on my actual guitar! This is a scary step because the slightest slip or miss calculation when routing can leave you with an pig problem! The routing went okay and I ended up with a decent cavity with only a few gaps around my logo to fill later. The goal is to have a perfect outline in which your inlay fits with minimal or no gaps around the edges. The inlay is then glued into the cavity and sanded flush to the background. Any gaps around the inlay are then filled with super glue and ebony dust ( if the background is ebony ) and it is all sanded flush and smooth. And that's that! Now the head stock  looks like it belongs on the wall of your local guitar shop!

Next item of business is to level, crown, shape, dress and polish the frets. A perfectly dressed fret board is essential to a smooth playing guitar and a clean look and feel. When you see a new guitar with smooth mirror polished frets, it just makes you want to play it. To accomplish this the frets are leveled to each other to give a perfectly flat playing surface to ensure no fret buzzing. Then each fret is individually crowned and shaped back to a consistent round profile, the ends are dressed and slightly beveled for smooth feel, and the frets are polished to shine like diamonds!

With the fret job done all that remained in the build to be completed before finishing was to sand the guitar out to 240 grit to leave a smooth scratch free surface ready for lacquer.  This takes some elbow grease! I sanded starting with 120 grit, then 150, 180, and 240 making sure that each grit removed the scratches from the previous grit. This requires close scrutiny under a raking light, looking at every inch of every surface.  Once I felt it was finished I had to get approval from the highly trained eye of our instructor David Vincent. With his approval the guitar was wiped down, photographed for you pleasure, and placed in its beautiful new case!
 The next & weeks will be spent learning finishing techniques, more guitar repairs, and building an electric solid body guitar. Then in the final weeks of school this acoustic guitar will get is lacquer sprayed on, its bridge, nut and saddle made, and its very first strings and setup!
 Stay tuned for my electric build, finishing and repairs posts! And now for your viewing pleasure..... The mostly finished Aaron Paul Luthiery O.M. 1 Simple Man...... Enjoy, and Thank You!