As with all joints, the more precisely it’s marked out the better the final result. It’s crucial that the stock is sized and squared up accurately. The headstock needs to be 17 or 18mm thick to give a final thickness of 19 or 20mm after application of the veneer. The neck must be rather thicker – at least 24 or 25mm – or there won’t be enough wood at the apex of the male part of the V where it engages with the female cut out part in the headstock. The side view in the drawings of the joint above will show what I’m getting at. (Even 25mm thickness may not be enough for full engagement but I’ll show how I deal with that problem in my next post.)

It’s also important that the end grain edge at the lower end of the headstock is exactly square to the sides and faces. I ensure this with a low angle plane and a shooting board.

To begin the marking out, I scribe a centre line down both faces of the headstock with a marking gauge, being careful to scribe both faces from the same edge.

Then I mark the corners of the V with dividers, placing points 18mm either side of the centre line to form the base of the V, and a single point 42mm up from the base on the centreline to define the apex. In the photograph, the pinpoints are marked with chalk to make them more visible.

A single bevel marking knife is used to mark the sides of the V, keeping the ruler on the outside of the V. I try not to cut beyond the point of the V, particularly on the back of the headstock. It doesn’t matter so much on the front which will be covered with veneer later.

To ensure that the ruler doesn’t slip, it’s helpful to fix a strip of fine sandpaper to its underside with double-sided tape.

Here’s the V marked out on one face of the headstock. This process needs to be repeated on the other face so that both sides of the headstock are marked. I haven’t bothered to illustrate this.

Now it’s time to mark out the male part of the joint on the neck. Again, I start by scribing a centre line down both faces. Then I square a line across the upper face of the neck slightly more than 38mm from the end.

Using a sliding bevel set for the angle that I want the headstock to make with the neck (10º in this case, so the bevel is set to 80º) I scribe both sides of the neck from the line that I’ve just squared across it.

Then I square across the back of the neck at the point where the angled lines on the sides end. Finally, I mark out the V on both faces using dividers set to exactly the same dimensions that I used on the headstock. The only difference is that, when it comes to scribing the lines with the knife, I keep the ruler on the inside of the V.

Here’s the top of the neck marked out…

…and here’s the back. You can see that, on the back, the V is positioned slightly further down the neck than it is on the front.

In the next post, I’ll show how I cut out the joint.

You can see larger versions of the photographs by clicking on the thumbnails below.

Despite the obvious advantages of a scarf joint, the V joint has become something of a fetish among guitar makers. This is easy to defend where historical accuracy is concerned. After all, if you’re attempting a copy of a 19th century guitar, it’s desirable – even obligatory – to imitate the constructional methods of the original maker. But for a modern instrument, why prefer a weaker joint that takes longer to make?

The answer, I guess, is to show that you can. It’s not a million miles away from the Georgian cabinet makers who made the pins of their dovetails so skinny that they almost vanished at the narrow end, as you can see in this photograph of the drawer of the table at which I’m sitting as I write this post.

There’s no practical advantage either in strength or speed of production in cutting dovetails like this. Indeed, the reverse must be true. But they do provide an understated way by which makers can demonstrate that they care about seldom seen details and show off their skill.

I’ve found myself using a V joint for both these reasons. Here’s a copy of a 19th century guitar that I’ve mentioned in previous posts. The V joint in this instrument was present in the original and it seemed right to keep it.

On the other hand, the V joint in the guitar below could perfectly well have been a scarf joint. The guitarist for whom I made the instrument didn’t notice it until I drew it to her attention. Still, I enjoyed making it and, for reasons that I can’t properly explain, felt that it was worth the extra time and trouble.

I’ve just cut a couple more V joints for guitars that I’ve got planned for 2012 and, although instructions for making this joint already exist (see here, for example), I thought it might be useful if I kept a camera handy to document the process. In the next post, I’ll explain how I mark out the joint.

Several pieces that he made are still in the family and among them is this decorative wall bracket. I’m not sure what it was meant for – probably a small clock or an ornament.

Quite apart from the pleasure of owning something made by a woodworking ancestor four generations earlier, I’ve always liked the bracket for its nicely judged proportions.

And I admire his neat solution to the problem of bringing everything to a point at the bottom of the bracket.

Needing a table for a narrow hallway a few years ago, I borrowed his design for a larger version in walnut.

Click on the thumbnails below if you’d like to see larger pictures.

The clever part about Weisshaar’s jig is that one side is free to rotate which means that it can adjust itself to fit bridges of different geometry, holding them all equally tightly. It’s easier to show how it works with a few photographs than it is to describe it.

Extra holes allow the swivelling side to be mounted closer to the fixed side to accommodate three-quarter and half size bridges.

A small block glued to the bottom helps to hold the jig against the edge of the bench or in a vice.

Although the device works well, it’s probably not going to be much use anyone except a violin maker. Still, I thought that the idea of using a freely moving arm or jaw to grasp pieces of wood when the sides aren’t parallel had wider applicability. You might be able to use a scaled up version for planing tapers on table legs, for example. And the accessory jaw for holding tapered shapes in a vice that’s shown on the Tools and Jigs page of this site (scroll down to the second item) draws on the same principle.

Larger versions of these photographs are available by clicking on the thumbnails below.

Mind you, carving lets you do things that wouldn’t be possible on a lathe, as the photograph below shows. It’s taken from David Pye’s book The Nature and Art of Workmanship (ISBN 1-871569-76-1) and the author carved the dish out of the wood of the wild service tree, Sorbus torminalis. Service wood is not a timber that I’ve ever seen, although I understand that it was once sought after for harpsichord jacks.

I wasn’t attempting anything nearly as ambitious as Pye’s dish. What I had in mind was the egg-like form that Barbara Hepworth frequently used in her sculptures – but on a much smaller scale and as a utilitarian object rather than a work of art.

Here’s a photograph of the completed bowl, which has been finished with clear French polish.

To see a larger version of these photographs as a slideshow, click on any of the thumbnails below.

Footnote

1. Thanks to due to the anonymous photographer who posted the picture of Barbara Hepworth’s garden in St Ives, Cornwall on Flickr (http://flic.kr/p/7J4gud).

Previously, I’d used this stand, which is fine for displaying instruments but much less good than the glass method when it comes to photographing them.

Here are a couple of shots of a recent violin. They’re still not very good – the lighting is uneven, shadows are visible on the backdrop and the camera is positioned a little too high – but they’re a substantial improvement on anything I managed before.

The violin is based on an instrument made by Carlo Bergonzi in 1736 but I’ve made it three-quarter size for a violinist who, following an injury to her shoulder, can no longer play a full size fiddle comfortably.

To find out if it worked, I bought a cheap handbag mirror.

First I cut off the hinge and trimmed back the plastic mount along one edge.

Placed next to the drill bit, the mirror showed when the drill was vertical…

… and when it wasn’t.

It’s a simple idea but I was impressed by how well it worked. A problem though, is that the mirror only tells you whether the drill is vertical in one axis. You have to move the mirror around the drill to check whether it’s vertical in the other axis and while you’re doing this, it’s easy to lose the vertical on the first axis.

One solution might be to have an L-shaped mirror or, perhaps better still, a mirror with a hole in its centre. Then, all you’d have to do to check that the drill was truly vertical in both axes would be to move your head.

So I ground a small hole in the centre of the other mirror and tried it out.

This is the view when the drill is vertical.

And when it’s miles off.

Of course, you don’t need a mirror to see when the drill is as far out as that. The benefit is that it makes it easy to spot small deviations from vertical.

Does it work in practice? As a test, I drilled ten 2mm diameter holes at 10mm intervals along a line in a piece of MDF and stuck cocktail sticks into them.

Not perfect – but not bad either. Certainly better than I was able to do in a repeat of the experiment when I used a small try square instead of the mirror as a guide, as you can see below.

Obviously, the best way to drill a truly vertical hole is to use a drill press. But there are occasions when this is impossible because the work piece is too large or too awkwardly shaped. It’s then that this trick with mirrors might come in handy.

Even so, it contained several things to interest woodworkers. Here are three: the first was this enormous wine press which, if the carving on the main beam is to be believed, was built in 1711. Maybe it’s an attraction of opposites but, as an instrument maker who has to fuss about tenths of a millimetre, I couldn’t help thinking what fun it would be to chop out mortices and tenons on this sort of scale.

The second was this fine chest decorated with paint and chip carving. It too, had a date carved in it – 1697, just visible bottom right – which seems plausible enough. But what on earth was it doing in an abbey that had stopped functioning as an institution during the reformation in the early 1500s?

The last was this remarkable repair to the bottom of a pine cupboard. Rot and wood worm must have got into it, but someone thought that that it was worth saving and, perhaps inspired by the Alps which aren’t too far away, scarfed in a new footing. I’d never seen anything like it. Please write if you know of other examples or can explain more about the technique.

Like most of what was being shown in the Biennale, it turned out to be an installation rather than a conventional exhibition but I have to admit that it provided a mildly amusing experience. You walked along corridors with undulating walls, got disorientated by halls of mirrors and nearly lost your balance navigating wonky floors. It was supposed to challenge our notions of stable constructed space and to make us look differently at the world when we leave. There are more photographs (and some pretentious artspeak) here.

Two of the rooms were especially interesting to furniture makers. Chairs and chests of drawers had been made to look as if wood had a melting point and they’d been left too close to the fire. They were still recognisably chairs or drawers, although obviously you couldn’t use them for sitting on or keeping things in. Indeed, part of the point was that they’d be completely useless for any practical purpose.

I shall leave you to decide whether this is a clever way of encouraging us to think in a fresh way about familiar objects or whether Feipel and Bechameil are just playing a prank.

There was however, a wonderful floor in one of the rooms. Not a wonky one to throw you off balance but a laid wooden floor that had been part of the Ca’ Del Duca in its days of glory. It hadn’t been looked after very well and my photograph isn’t very good but I couldn’t help thinking that it was rather more interesting (and enduring) than the chairs.

This splendid photograph was taken by John Runk¹ in Stillwater, Minnesota on an 8 x 10 plate camera in 1912. I came across it in a book, The Photographer’s Eye written by John Szarkowski. Unless the chap in the hat is unusually short, these pine boards must be around 3 feet wide and 15 – 18 feet long. The saw marks run straight across the boards which made me wonder how they had been cut – not with a circular saw obviously. Were large bandsaws in operation at the beginning of the 20th century?

Buying wood a few months ago, I realised that I didn’t know much about modern methods of conversion of timber either. Here are a couple of photographs taken in Andy Fellows’ wood store in Gosport, Hants². He has supplied me with quite a lot of the wood that I’ve used in recent guitars including the Madagascan rosewood for this nylon string guitar and the beautiful walnut for this copy of a 19th century guitar by Panormo. These boards aren’t quite as large as those in Runk’s photograph but they’re still pretty big and I’ve only the vaguest idea of how he goes about transforming them into the book matched guitar sets from which he lets me pick and choose. Next time I visit, I shall try to find out a bit more.

Sometimes, when handing over an completed instrument to its new owner, I catch myself wondering whether they have any idea of the time and trouble that has gone into making it. (Of course, it’s enjoyable time and trouble so I’m not complaining. Even so … ) But I suspect that instrument makers and woodworkers aren’t any better. When we buy wood we’re more likely to whinge about the price than to acknowledge the efforts and skills of the people who selected the log and converted it into sets of conveniently workable dimensions like those below.

1. There’s a brief biography of John Runk here.

2. Andy Fellows also sells wood at his on-line shop, Prime Timbers.