top & back plates and headstock plate

 Today I pulled out the glued up bookmatch for the top plate.  Used a chisel and card scraper to remove any surface squeeze out.  Then headed to my wide drum sander (which I built and is documented way down in this blog, about 15 years ago).  I love the figure in this wood (Australian Sheoak)!

I'm also going to use Sheoak for the headstock plate.  I used a couple smaller cutoffs which were also book matched, jointed and set up to glue them.

Next up is the plates for the front.  I grabbed a couple Cedar plates (WRC?  These weren't labeled so I'll have to dig into my purchase records later.)   These are guitar sized, about 9x23, just barely too narrow to use just one.  So I prepped for the book match glue up.  Just look at that tight grain and quarter sawn!

I used an iron block as a weight on the joint this time as the headstock glue up was using my other weight.

I also printed out a version of the headstock logo I used once before to check for size.  I think I'll need to shrink it a little to fit between tuning machines.  Hopefully I'll be able to inlay it with either maple or ebony, not sure if I want the logo white or black this time.

And what's with that fretboard?  Just something I designed years ago but haven't pulled off yet, but I think this is the build to do it!  It will use a thin 1/16" inlay strip between the 4 string courses and should appear more checkerboard with the frets perpendicular to the inlay.

Brian