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This build is a Michigan with some uber figured sapele for the back and sides and old growth Red Spruce for the top.

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Jun 20: I sanded the inside of the rims, glued and clamped the tail block. Once dry, I glued in the neck block. While the glue was curing on the neck block, I ran the top and back through the thickness sander to clean them up following glue up. The joints look near invisible. Just the way I like them. I need a good base to glue the top and back to the rims. To provide this base, I glued in mahogany linings around the inside edges of rims.

Jun 19: I am using some old growth red spruce for the top of Travis’ guitar. The set I have has a few knot intrusions, so I used a template to make sure I had a good, clear area for the top. I then cleaned up the two edges to be joined, brushed on some glue, and put the top in my joining jig.

I usually have some neck blocks and tail blocks for each of my models made up. But going through my stock, I had neither for the Michigan, so I had to make some more. I cut out rectangular blocks from mahogany. As the top of the upper bout and bottom of the lower bout are radiused, I needed a matching radius on one face of the blocks. The easiest and most consistent way of doing this is with my CNC. After milling the radius, I cut a 2.1 degree slope in the top of the neck block and glued on piece of mahogany that supports the fingerboard extension under the spruce top. The slope is required to tilt the fingerboard plane slightly back and away from the top to get proper distance between the strings and the frets.

Jun 18: I got Travis’ Michigan started today. Years ago, I purchased a flitch of some of the most gorgeously figured sapele I have ever run across. Travis wants to use a set of this wood for his guitar. I pulled a set from the flitch and ran it through the thickness sander a few times to clean up the surfaces so I could see the grain well. Given the figure, I wanted the two back plates bookmatched perfectly when gluing. Once I determined which edges to join, I ran the joining edges through the table saw to clean them up and used a long sanding bar to sand the facing edges dead flat. I have a jig for joining panels that holds the joining edges down while pushing the joints together. A little glue, and I had the panels joined and sitting in the jig.

The sides were overly thick, so I ran them through the thickness sander to get them down to a bendable thickness. I then hit both the inside and outside faces with the random orbital sander to remove the thickness sander scratches. I spritzed a side with water and dropped it in the bender. After the side had cooled, I clamped it inside the building mold, which helps maintain the shape, and repeated the process with the other side