Welcome back to another entry on the 19th Venezuelan Cuatro made in the workshop. As you might have already noticed, the workshop had been temporarily moved to the garage of the house since the car was out for maintenance. This space is really cool and quite big, the workbench only takes a bit of space and it is also nice since it has a lot of light coming from different angles. This is a great way to think about the configurations of our own workshop once we have the space for it. For now, let's get to work on the heel and sound board of this instrument!
Heel block
We had already created the base of the neck with the cut for the head stock. Now we are adding some of the other parts to the structure to both necks. We are of course talking about the block for the heel. Adding this as one piece makes it easier for us to carve afterwards. You do not need to deal with different directions of the grain while using a chisel. It also makes it faster to get the glue up, adding just one block means we just glue it to the neck without doing the whole job of making the heel block on different pieces and then adding it to the neck.
Once we have worked on both surfaces that will be joined together, we just get some clamps in place so the block does not move up or down, or even to the sides. Then we add the glue and tighten the clamps until we have enough pressure and a good glue spread. We can let this rest to work on something else.
Thicknessing the sound board.
Here is when we start separating both instruments. We start by working on the thickness of the sound board. The idea here is to make it flexible enough to give us enough vibrations to add some bass to the final build. A thicker sound board makes more treble sounds.
We are using the hand plane to remove the uneven spots until we have start using our new electric orbital sander. With this last tool, we can make quick work of the rest of the uneven spots on the rest of the board and also give it a smoother surface.
You can check out how the light reflects from the surface of the sound board on the last photo. It is truly a nice tool. However, I would like to have some thicker sandpaper grits for some heavy duty work. That is an addition to the workshop's buy list.
Sound hole and bars
To finish our tasks for the day, we are going to use the circle cutter to cut the sound hole. We have tried this several times before and it did not work. The missing element was patience on every try. This time, we used the cutter one pass at a time until we were able to cut the circle and get a cut that needed little clean up. So this tool works, but it is a little slow for the job. A better circle cutter for wood needs a thick and sharper blade.
Now we are also cutting the bars to add to the sound board. These are the reinforcements that keep it straight. Without them, the sound board would start to twist along the direction of the grain. That would mean cupping or just twisting in a weird way. We are also using the same type of wood for the reinforcements. This means they have to be higher and thicker since cedar is a light and flexible wood.
Once we have worked both cuts to make them sit flush on the reverse of the sound board, we can finally apply glue and clamp them in place. And with this we can call it a day until the glue dries and we can start doing some other taks.
Thanks a lot for reading! See you next time!
| Entry | Name | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | The 19th Venezuelan Cuatro |
Photos 📷: Redmi Note 13
Thumbnail 🖼️: Canva.
Editing 🎬:Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.
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