The Archtop is Getting Close!

Well, the repairs keep piling up at Guru, but I managed to squeezed out a few moments to work on the Archtop this past week. it's getting really close to being finished! I'm down to a bit of fine tuning. I spent most of the time this week, working on all of the appointments.

First up, was the tailpiece. I've been experimenting with a new design a bit. The Idea is that a pin is dovetailed into the end block and the tailpiece clips onto it. the string tension holds it all in place. I really like the look of it! Here's the dovetail cut into the end of the guitar.

And then the pin slides in. The pin is oversized in this picture. I cut it down a bit...

and the tailpiece fits over it! A lot of work goes into building the tailpiece... Unfortunately I forgot to take any pictures. Here's the final product.

With the tailpiece about finished I turned my attention to the pickup. This guitar is really designed to be an acoustic instrument, but so many people like play amplified these days I thought I would include a pickup. Most electric guitar pickups and made of a coil of wire wrapped around a magnet. As the guitar string vibrates, it influences the magnetic field. This interaction creates a small voltage in the coil of wire. This becomes the guitar's signal which is sent to the amplifier. I've been using an old Singer sowing machine to spin the bobbin around while I guide the wire on to it. The wire is very fine, it's about as thin as a hair. It's pretty delicate work. Here's a freshly wound bobbin. This pickup will need two bobbins.

Each bobbin has a slot cut for a magnet to be inserted. Here's the whole assembly with magnets in a wooden cover which I made.

This is the top view.

Now that the pickup is wound I turned my attention to the finger-rest. It's pretty straight forward, but I did need to spend some time figuring out how to attach the pickup and get everything at the correct height.

Here's the result. it looks good...if I do say so myself!

The last thing to make is the bridge and the guitar will be ready for a final sanding and spraying the finish.
it will be a guitar soon!