Gluing The Back And Adding Bracing: Wood for the back of a guitar is typically some type of quarter sawn exotic wood. For my guitar, the back and sides of the body were made from India Rosewood. Since sheets of exotic wood as wide as the back of a guitar are rare, two pieces are joined together. Thus one of the first things you get to put together in the class is a two piece back, starting with planing the joining surface and then gluing the pieces together. For this class, instead of clamps, we used binding tape. Once the glue sets, the back is thinned to something like 0.090 inches using a drum sander, and bracing applied.

Bending The Sides: Prior to taking the class, I read about bending sides for guitars with a chunk of hot pipe. Sounded like a process with a lot of variability, or in my case, lots of fussing and, well, scrap! I was pleased to learn that we would be using something called a Universal Side Bender that used light-bulbs on a timer for a heat source and a template to bend the sides to the shape you wanted - no guesswork. Plans to build your own Universal Side Bender were supplied in the class, and I have since built my own.

The Back And Sides Assembled: After creating a neck-block, a tail-block, and gluing the sides and blocks together, the back was glued to the sides with binding tape. At this point, I had a sense of making it over a hurdle, as everything had come together without any major hic-ups, and well, it looked really cool!