Curly Wurly

The maple was routed into semi circular shapes (orange segments?) and then routed again to provide a smaller inner radius. The finished parts were C-shaped. The body is going to consist of three of these glued together, but the inner one is going to be strengthened with stainless steel first. To allow space for the steel, the inner C-shape is routed another couple of times until it is in three parts itself. The steel will live in these newly routed channels to form a steel-maple-steel sandwich. This composite approach offers the best strength that I can reasonably knock-up in my garage.



Here my two faithful accomplices demonstrate the wonders of the bending machine. Thanks to Nicky & John showing "after" and "before" and to Chris (not pictured!) who seems to have an endless supply of useful gadgets yet again.

The 20 x 3mm steel bar is fed back & forth through the rollers whilst they are progressively tightened. This gradually bends the steel until it gets to the right radius. What a great gadget!

Here is the sandwich style inner layer layed out to check that it fits. When finished, this will be hidden inside and not seen. The steel bars (two in each channel) will be bolted through to keep the whole assembly rigid. Not quite as good as a box section, but along those lines...



Boring

6mm holes were painfully drilled through the stainless steel. I'm used to drilling through wood, plastic and aluminium and even mild steel on occasions, but drilling stainless is a whole different ball game. The stuff is nearly as hard as the drill bits themselves. I had 4 lengths of 3mm thick stainless - each one has 9 holes - that's 36 in total. I must have got through at least 12 drill bits. Some snapped, but most just lost the will to live and the cutting edges 'dulled'. Officially dull and boring?

 Here's the finished middle section. The M5 button heads can be seen clamping the whole thing together. It seems pleasantly stiff. Maybe that sentence needs work... It weighs a bit, but I like to think that this will transform into a well balanced guitar. I hate it when the neck continually dives for the floor. Most of the excess stainless has been trimmed away, but a couple of short overhangs were left to key into other parts of maple that will be glued on later.

The first layer has been glued together to illustrate the rough shape of the body. The steel reinforced layer will be next. The centre 'blob' doesn't seem quite large enough so that may have to be adapted. Fortunately this one is going to be painted so even if it is all plastic filler & newspaper it won't matter...