At any rate, over the several weeks since my last post I have accomplished a bit but not had time to post about it. Actually, I also failed to take photos of most of these steps, but fortunately they aren't really visually gripping steps to miss.
What I did over the past few weeks was exactly what I said my next steps would be in the last post. I glued the short braces onto the top and sanded the kerfing to match the radius of curvature of the top. Fortunately the kit builder again thoughtfully configured the sanding stick setup so that the sanding stick, with the additional pad attached, resulted in a radius of the correct curvature. Basically you attach a strip of self-adhesive 80-grit sandpaper to the end of the sanding stick (7" in from the end, actually) and then, keeping the additional pad on the side of the instrument directly across from the area being sanded, you just sand the edges until you have properly contoured and leveled the kerfing. To aid in doing that you scribble with a pencil all over the kerfing. When the pencil lines vanish you have done your job. The key here is to keep moving around the circumference of the edge to ensure that you remove material somewhat evenly.
Here's a photo of the sanding stick setup. See the strip of sandpaper attached to the stick, and the additional pad? This photo was taken after some sanding of the top edge of the sides.
I also glued on the short braces for the top. I can't do any additional gluing of top braces, or really of the bottom brace either, until I get a set of more or less lutherie-dedicated cam clamps, so I'm somewhat stymied at this point. I failed to take a picture of the top with both braces glued-up, but rest assured that the process was identical for both braces and that the top pretty much looks just like this, but with two braces attached. Here is a photo of the brace being glued from the "inside".
And here is a photo of that same gluing operation from the outside, showing a piece cutoff from the top being used as a caul to protect the top. Note that cauls were not used on the braces since they have to be carved and will lose much of the material in the area that the clamp would have been bearing on anyway.
And, finally, here is a photo of the top with one of the two short braces attached.
I also spent some time tuning a bench plane which will be crucial to the shaping of the braces and neck and to the trimming of the top and back to the sides. I never really understood that almost all planes, and other woodworking cutting tools like chisels, require substantial preparation in the shop before they can be used, even if they are purchased brand new. While some of the very high-end planes might come with flat soles and very sharp irons, most do not. On a bench plane you can also spend a considerable amount of time ensuring that the bottom is a true 90 degrees from the side of the plane. Fortunately in my case the sole was very flat when the plane arrived, and the sides were close enough to 90 degrees from the sole to be acceptable for my purposes. I am somewhat surprised by this since because this is just a bench plane and not a high-end plane like a smoothing or jointing plane I bought a Stanley and not a really good plane. But a few minutes of (frankly) significant exertion really got this plane into usable shape. Mostly it was just flattening the sole by polishing it on 80-grit sandpaper adhered to a piece of polished granite I got through my previous employer that is truly flat and very, very stable. I then polished it with ever increasing grits until the sole was flat and mirrorlike. I have yet to sharpen the iron in exactly the same way before being completely pleased with the tool, but it still makes impressive shavings despite the relatively cheap nature of the tool. But this is a bench plane, after all - how accurate are we really expecting it to be?
At some point I will post some details about my sharpening system. Basically it is the Scary Sharp system (link, perhaps not to the originator of the system using that name, to the right), using a Veritas honing guide and several pieces of polished granite with various grits of sandpaper stuck to them. My good friend Joe Barker, who is building a sailboat in a room about 5% larger than the boat and blogs at http://barkerboat.blogspot.com/, uses the same system (I gave him several pieces of the granite, too) and he has more details at his site. Ignore all the Old Style comments over there. He has great taste in beer (and women) - he just wants to feel like a boat builder and you just can't get Narragansett beer in Cincinnati.
