Another long day of immersion in "mandolinmania"! After a casual breakfast and the normal "... wasn't yesterday great!! ... were you as dog tired as I was when you went to bed last night? ... can you believe how incredible this whole thing is? ..." conversations we got back to the classroom.
Today's lectures covered various glues, adhesives and why we would choose one over another in the construction of acoustic instruments. These included hot hide glue, Titebond Original, Titebond II, Titebond III, "Gorilla Glue" (polyurethane) glues and Fish Glue. Roger had samples of each type for us to dab onto a test board and periodically check their drying properties throughout the day and week. After this presentation I will no longer be using Titebond II but will use either Titebond Original or Fish Glue (sort of a hide glue you don't have to heat).
After some sanding of the now dry gauze reinforcements we each had our F-holes (or in my case Oval soundhole) and scroll cutouts done on the pin router setup ... for a production shop this is clearly the way to get this task done ... for the 'occasional builder' it may or may not be worth the setup ...
After installing the kerf lining for the top plate and sanding the top rim edge totally flat it was time to "GO" as in "Go-bar deck" ... this is a very efficient way to glue the top plate to the rim and is fairly traditional in the construction of acoustic stringed instruments ... a couple of pics of the glue ups in the Go-bar decks ...
While our topside glue ups were drying Roger and Ken did several demonstrations on ways to layout, cutout, and carve top and bottom plates. Roger showed several methods one can use to do this fairly tedious task including simple chisels and planes, a sanding disk on a drill press, routers to hog out the bulk of the waste and so on ... obviously having a CNC machine or a pattern carver is the only way a large production shop can do this efficiently but a small builder or hobbyist may very naturally go the more traditional and laborious route ...
Our next hands on task was to cleanup the glue runout after our top plates came out of the Go-bar decks and start to finish sand the "scroll" on the top plate ... there was significant discussion about exactly how the scroll should flow and then Ken suggested we might want to examine
"the Loar" to settle the matter ... Roger and Ken brought out both the F5L prototype and "the Loar F5" and we all spent some time touching, eyeballing, picture taking of these two masterpieces and then went back to the bench to try our hand at reproducing "the scroll" as it is suppose to be ...
Next it was time to shape and glue in the tone bars (in the F5's ... the cross brace in my F4) ... it takes a little time to get the bars sanded to an exact fit against the carved dome of the soundboard but a little patience and elbow grease gets the job done ...
After yet another wonderful meal it was time for Roger and a few of his friends (and any of the attending campers that chose to join in) to treat us to some fine bluegrass music ... it was great and Roger was playing
Loar's Loar... what a treat ...
Again ... a LONG day ... but we are all looking forward to another one tomorrow!!
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