With the finish finished, the final steps are bridge, nut, saddle routing, bridge pins, end pin, tuners and strings!  Hoping to get her strung up in the next couple of days, and delivered to her wonderful new home in Olympia.  I’ll be using a custom shop-made Firestripe pickguard courtesy of John Greven; check out his awesome guitars at http://www.grevenguitars.com/

This Brazilian bidge blank has a footprint prepared with a 20′ radius, and is rough cut from the bandsaw.

The finish is cut away, making way for the footprint of the bridge

The bridge gets glued on with hot hide glue, using cauls on both sides of the bridge/bridge plate. I made the bridge plate caul while the top was off the guitar, so the bridge will get some nice full-clamping action.

Bonus Tool Segment:

I wanted to introduce one of my favorite shop setup: the John Sullivan Tool Grinder.  Having acquired a number of tools from the Sullivan Estate, I’ve begun to figure out some of the genius setups that Mr. Sullivan employed to make his fantastic mandolins, guitars, and violins.  One of which is this grinder setup, with uses a thick cutoff wheel for shaping, and a fine wheel for grinding a cutting edge.  With this combo, I can whip out a number of custom scrapers and other edge tools, and have a usable edge in moments.  Lately, I’ve been enjoying these very thick tool steel scraper, made from what appear to be old planer knives.  Thanks, John!

ground at 90 degrees and lapped on either side, you get twice the cutting edges to use before regrinding.